Transition towards a greener future

10 weeks | Duo | 2019 | | Husqvarna Group

Project

Visionary and Sustainable product solutions in urban green and grey spaces for the year 2030. With this topic Thomas Müller and I started off our 3rd term project. With the focus on the UN sustainability development goals we worked on a concept that focusses on the transition of a city from gray to green in a more sustainable way.

Under guidance of Felix Heibeck, Philip Sauer and Victor Johansson from Above.se we got a crash course in sustainability for product design and future scenario brainstorming using several techniques.

Note: This is a student concept project done in collaboration with Husqvarna Group.

Challenge

In 2030 more than 60% of the world population will be living in urban areas, making space a scarcity. Nature and parks can’t expand the way they should for a healthy environment.

Most cities are designed around cars and specially in crowded areas citizens are facing health problems, getting disconnected from nature and the animal life suffers as well. But there is hope as more and more cities are banning cars from their city centers. This allows for a transformation of street space. Our vision for the cities of tomorrow is to reintroduce nature by partly repurposing asphalt streets into green space.

Result

Husqvarna ATR is an Automated Tarmac Removal system consisting of a Tarmac cutter (TC30) and a Tarmac lifter (TL30) to prepare the site for the installment of the Gardena green modules to bring back green into the city in an efficient and most sustainable way possible.

By lowering its body to the ground the TC30 seals itself while using a water preasure cutter to create tiles of tarmac ready for the TL30 to be picked up and ordened for easy and quick removal from the construction site.

The Gardena green modules are offsite pre-planted modules that are optimized for the targeted city area to meet the local needs (Air quality, Biodiversity, etc).

The question

“How might we bring back nature in the most sustainable way?”

In 2030 more than 60% of the world population will live in urban areas. Most cities are build around cars and nature can’t expand the way it should to provide a healty living environment. This results in a decrease in live quality and decline of the biodiversity.

There is hope as more and more cities start to ban cars from their city centers. This brings the opportunity of transforming parts of the asphalt streets.

Transforming parts of the asphalt streets into green space allows to improve life quality and support the development of biodiversity.

This doesn’t come without challenges. As these transformations require large scale contruction sites they bring lots of negative side effects such as noise and dust polution as well as major energy consumptions and road blocks.

Mission statement

“It does not only matter how our future looks like but also how we get there.”

– Thomas Mueller & Ricardo Verheul

course of action

Identifying opportunities

Husqvarna ATR

The Automated Tarmac Removal System

The Cutting unit – TC30

Lowering the body to the ground it seals itself while using a water yet cutter to create tiles from the asphalt and thereby minimizes unnessesary side effects.

The Lifting unit – TL30

Once the asphalt is cut into tiles the lifting unit is activated to grab the tiles by using its lifting mechanism and stacks the tiles at the edge of the work site for easy pickup and transport. This will result in minimal road blocks.

The green modules

Once the asphalt is removed it is time for the green modules. This is a modular system to allow for a flexibility in size depending on the designated area. Depending on the local needs and wishes, citizens and municipality can choose from several different types of green modules. Each created with their own purpose and tailored to the location. These modules are pre-planted offsite to lower the installation time and unnessesary road blocks in the city trough pick and place. Resulting in both a sustainable work site as well as result.