Students: Thomas Huber, Sebastian Pater
Location: Group work in Basel
Date: January, 2007
Type: Research project, student work, infrastructure

Can we imagine a six-lane motorway cutting through this landscape? A combination with S-Bahn, bicycle paths and other modes of transport. Can we imagine a complete ring of infrastructure around the perimeters of the MetroBasel region? What benefit would it bring, and what problems? Can we harmonize, or even bring into mutual dependency, nature, wilderness, protected fauna and flora, with efficient infrastructure and high amount of traffic? Can we spoil this beautiful landscape? Is this a wickedness beyond imagination, a sin like rape or the defilement of purity? Or can we integrate traffic into one of the most cultured, cultivated, morphed and man-made landscapes in Europe?
The region of MetroBasel has many examples of high density and proximity of wild nature, simulated nature, pure man-made artifice, the most industrious and productive just next to the (seemingly) undisturbed and disorderly, the raw and the cooked. Is this a leitmotiv that can lead a amalgamation of the ‚natural‘ with the ‚artificial‘. Does the natural maybe even require the proximity to the urban and the busy to survive and develop?
How will we integrate the need for traffic, transport and communication with the precariousness of the regional landscape, and its ‚natural‘ services to the population at large? Will this band of infrastructure become the next ‚hot-spot‘ of urban development? What are the political, economical and ecological implications of such a grand move, and which changes on a administrative and organizational level are required? Should we not actively shape this development in a way that WE imagine the future to be, rather than leave such a pending development to the work of city administrators and bureaucratical urban planners?