Energetic Community: a bio-cultural organism for Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Energetic Community proposes a design strategy to remediate a 50 acre post-automobile manufacturing brownfield while also generating renewable energy. While the site is cleaned through passive phytoremediation techniques, small vertical wind turbines provide a decentralized energy source for the community. Once the site is cleaned, the design explores how potential programs for community activities could be arranged on flexible platforms throughout the site.

Milwaukee’s manufacturing sector has been rapidly declining over the past 20 years, leaving the city with vast open brownfields of unutilized space. Energetic Community creates a landscape strategy for these brownfields, turning them into a holding ground of community parks that also generate distributed renewable energy.

While most of Milwaukee’s economic sectors are experiencing minimal or negative growth, the regional electricity industry is an exception, growing steadily at 3% per year. The State of Wisconsin has recently proposed to expand power generation by investing $10 billion in additional production capacity. Approximately 2% of this new investment is to be dedicated to the development of renewable energy sources. This project proposes the development of city brownfields into landscaped renewable energy areas to spur economic development. The site design serves the following functions:

1. On horizontal surfaces, the site is cleaned through switchgrass phytoremediation, providing habitat for migrating species, and the preparing the site for future, more intense uses if market demand eventually arises
2. Recreational opportunities & cultural amenities are provided for neighborhood residents when switchgrass fields are converted to alternate uses.
3. Renewable distributed energy is generated to reduce community reliance on the centralized electric grid and fossil fuels

Vertical wind turbines producing local power for neighborhood homes are proposed jointly with switchgrass biomass production to cleanse the neighborhood brownfield sites through phytoremediation & toxin uptake. Milwaukee’s location on the edge of the Great Lakes is ideal for wind energy generation and the smaller 80’ ht. scale of vertical turbines could create a sculptural identity for Milwaukee’s currently abandoned areas

The project establishes a successful replicable mechanism for small-scale decentralized wind power generation as a form of pre-electrification for social and economic development.