The Territorial City: Edge of the Megalopolis

Every foreground has a background. In California, our background is the Central Valley. Coastal California adorns an image of scenic landscape, progressive environmental movements, liberal culture, and density, while inland California is characterized by resource harvesting and extraction, conservative values, and a deficiency in social infrastructure. Separated by topography, wealth, race, climate, and pollution, these two Californias are emblematic of the increasing divide between the realities of resource consumption and the exploitation of land and communities to extract these resources. While these two Californias have remained distinct, the construction of high-speed rail infrastructure will produce a spatial collapse between these two worlds, and create a new world of its own—a territorial city. This creates a new form of territorial urbanization that has been termed the megaregion, which is a continuous map of urbanization connected by infrastructure. This studio will examine the design, impact, and opportunities of the high-speed rail in California both at a territorial and architectural scales. While these infrastructures are large-scaled collective constructions, it provides a venue to empower new agents—human and non-human—into this once top-down system.