Project Overview

Road transport accounts for a significant portion of global emissions. Globally, it is an area in that many countries are directing many of their green development investments. Specifically, electrification and public transport are both areas that have shown significant potential for carbon-emission reduction. The investments are well justified since every 5 liters of gasoline sold adds 11 kg of CO2 to the atmosphere. Over the last decades, our urban landscapes have been designed around the automobile. One key feature that marks this fossil-fuel based transport landscape is the gas station. The gas station, as a typology, emerged in the 20th century as a retail network for petroleum products, especially benzene.

Today, many cities in the US and Europe have restricted the construction of new gas stations. Others have banned their construction and started decommissioning them. In the US, there has been a yearly decline of about %8 in the number of gas stations, and in Europe, the rate of decline exceeds %20 per year. The closures of these structures have resulted in the emergence of many adaptive reuse projects that aim to use the strategic locations of these gas stations to serve communities and offer new services that are more in demand. The US has even created a guideline for preserving historic stations for their cultural value.

These trends are not surprising due to the falling interest in car ownership and the fact that electric vehicles most often do not require stations to charge since they can be plugged in at home, work, or off the street. We see an opposite trend in Egypt, with an exponential increase in gas stations in all major cities (Cairo, Giza, and Alexandria). Located in strategic locations, these stations are expected to shed their fossil-fuel components in the next 20 years.

However, limited information is known on their short- and long term environmental impact assessments, specifically the impacts on human health and the ecological context such as the pollution of the underground water streams.

This leaves us to think, what can be done with these soon-obsolete structures?

The Design Challenge: Reimaging Gas stations as Resilience Hubs responding to climate change

Students were invited to think about how urban gas stations can be reimagined as resilience hubs for the neighborhoods they serve. They were expected to imagine and create a design situation in 2050 and respond with a design that utilizes the strategic location of one urban gas station of your choice to provide socio-economic, cultural and resilience functions.

Thirty years from today, it is safe to assume that private gas fueled cars no longer occupy our roads. Instead, citizens commute primarily via clean public transit or electric vehicles (both require no, or minimum services at your gas stations).

In this future time, and even if we have done significant environmental action, some major climate changes would have already taken place: such as extreme heat events, floods, rain and droughts, and clean water shortages, to mention a few. The student’s design should aim to promote architecture that adapts to the dynamic changes in the environment and energy sources. Their design plan should strongly emphasize cutting emissions and moving away from fossil fuel-centric design thinking by proposing a pathway to a completely sustainable energy supply. Each student’s design was expected to propose a new form of sustainable repurposing of gas stations. When utilizing the existing structure, no parts were to be wasted, but the students had the option to dismantle parts and reuse them in their projects.

The students had to provide spaces that serve social or economic functions (socio-economic function). These could include commerce, community gardening, town halls, sports spaces, family support services (nurseries, playgrounds, etc), or library-like spaces. The proposal also had to offer the community defense against the localized risks from climate change (resilience function). This could be in the form of a flood or rain shelter, a water reservoir for drought situations, a food reserve space, or a passively cooled space for extreme heat waves. Also, their project had to use technology and passive techniques to generate and conserve energy to reach a close energy building (energy function). Given the program and function change for their stations, the students were asked to add a new building to their site, which would serve a cultural function.

The aim of that added space is to raise awareness about climate change and sustainability through a museological component that supports their vision of a healthy, sustainable, and resilient city. These could include galleries, permanent collections, workshop spaces, as well as digital, augmented, and virtual reality spaces.

The students' design proposals provided examples of this future reliance architecture, addressing the human, economic, energy, and environmental concerns that are expected to be present at their chosen sites in 2050. Their proposals represent the future imaginaries of a more sustainable future. A series of themes emerged in the students’ responses to the brief. This booklet aims to present these main themes and illustrate them through the students’ work.