Architizer showcases this awesome engineering and architectural project: a roaming city that would will actually work if someone builds it. In the past, some people have imagined roaming cities but nobody got to turn these pipe dreams into functional projects. This is the first one that actually makes sense.


British architect Ron Herron first proposed such an idea in the 1960s, but it has taken five decades for someone to actually make a full project that takes into consideration every aspect needed to make it work—from the structural and power requirements to the social aspects of a life in a city on the move.


It really looks awesome, like a city-sized Jawa Sandcrawler (see the tongue-in-cheek Death Star in the image above) or titanic NASA crawler-transporter, both of which inspired the caterpillar system of this Very Large Structure designed by Spanish architect Manuel Domínguez for his final thesis.

The resources required to build this aren't crazy. Look at the size comparison between the moving city and some of the largest buildings in the world.


These are some of the extremely detailed plans, which include different types of housing, industrial, power generation, airport, and entertainment structures.



Here you can see the calculation of energy and structural requirements. It's in Spanish, but you can read the math (click on expand to see it big):




Manuel Domínguez's acknowledges that, while this can actually be constructed, it is an utopian idea right now. However, given the failure of many static cities, perhaps this type of city makes sense as a solution to some of our social and economic development problems. In fact, those were some of the reasons that made Manuel embark in this project. As Architizer puts it:

Although almost 50 years have passed since a moving city was first proposed, when one considers how many western cities are currently experiencing devastating slowdowns, both economically and in terms of their population, Manuel Dominguez's intriguing, fantastical proposal begins to seem far less absurd – and far more relevant – than it may at first seem.


I can perfectly imagine them being deployed by human explorers once Humanity starts interplanetary travel—nomadic cities moving in the search of resources, full of workers who will start static cities as we colonize moons and planets across the solar system.