Living with Nature in the Post-Suburbs

MoMA in New York has a new exhibit exploring what can be done with American's only seemingly inexhaustible resource: foreclosed homes and sparsely inhabited suburbs. Nature-City, a proposal by WORKac, turns the cookie-cutter town of Keizer, Oregon into a model city that incorporates just about every on-trend proposition in urban planning. There's farmer's markets, rooftop farms, and fuel cells integrated into the buildings' design.

After this, however, Nature-City has some clever tricks up its sleeves. A water tower housed at the top of an apartment block cascades down as an indoors waterfall. Buildings are equipped with cut-outs and internal parks to encourage animal migration. The strangest structure might be an enormous dome that uses methane from the city's waste to heat public swimming pools. As an update on Ebenezer Howard's Garden City, it's playful, utopian, and probably a nice place to live.

For more photos, visit Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream.