Modular-Land: A prefabricated planter that spans over highways. The planter, and its contents of this product, is site-specific. This is land-creation, where each application can be adapted for use as farmland and natural preserve. Even further development by humans, if desired.

"Human beings are a disease, a cancer on this planet." hissed by Agent Smith, The Matrix. Nature has been sliced and hacked apart and scarred by our highway systems. It's time to put the car and the highway in its place. It is time for a band aid to start healing. 

Boston's Big Dig will "... enhance the urban environment rather than degrade it." This was the guarantee by Fred Salvucci, Big Dig project inventor and 1970's Massachusetts Transportation Secretary. The Big Dig restores the urban fabric and keeps the highway. Before highways, in mid nineteenth-century Chicago, railroads were built on lake shore to join its harbors. With his big-business peers, architect and planner Daniel Burnham realized that enhancing their City was not only good for looks but good for business. In his 1909 Plan of Chicago, he pushed for "the Improvement of the Lake Front". Chicago's 2004 Millennium Park continues Burnham's vision. In these two wonders of the modern world, both cities initiated the healing of their wounded urban fabrics. Both projects were big and notorious for being mismanaged. The vision behind my land-modules follows the vision of these two Grand Projects, but with a prefab twist. Also, the existing infrastructure will remain. The way these modules are made will make them more feasible to cities, communities and owners. The building process is streamlined, but the gains will remain the same. Life is created where there was once none.

As stated by Richard Register in his 2006 edition of Ecocities "Cars are the dinosaurs of our time. They are destroying the reasonable and happy structure of cities, towns, and villages. Once communities have been shaped for cars, they remain dependent upon them." Cars need highways. And as the network of highways increases, so does our sprawl. More and more natural habitats are being bulldozed. We as a species must make the responsible decision to restore the habitats and lands we have taken. We must control or even roll back our own sprawl. Physically restoring land and habitats is at the core of these land-modules. We can and must bury our highways. The idea is at the conceptual stage. Each module is adaptable depending on its application.

Using the technology of prefabrication, namely and the concept of "grand blocks", these modules will be designed and made in an indoor controlled environment, delivered to the site, and installed. "The construction process is no longer linear and it no longer proceeds from the bottom up." (from Refabricating Architecture, Kieran/Timberlake, 2004). Prefab means more efficient and less wasteful building, directly benefitting the environment. More manufacturing jobs help the economy. The retooling of factories will provide much needed change and growth of prefab technology with certain offshoot benefits to related trades and disciplines. As prefab develops, populations will learn to see they will benefit from prefab. This strategy is an evolution of a way of making that started when mass-production stepped on this planet. Prefab is a preferred state model for all the reasons mentioned above. The factory has become a libratory, a Petri-dish where building technology can be hypothesized, tested and developed.

The start of the implementation of this plan is two-fold: 1) garner public support and 2) design-build a prototype of the land module. Depending on the most appropriate structure determined for the module, partnering with a prefabrication design-builder is required. With the fuel of public support, funding would materialize for this process. A design-build firm for these modules will be founded. This first step and its sub-goals can be completed in one year. For year two a community needs to step up and install these modules. This is where the community relationship-building in step one will come in handy. By the end of year three, the design-build company that was founded in the first year will be able to provide its services.

This idea for green-roofing our highways has been an obsession of mine for the better part of a decade. Since then Chicago's Millennium Park has been built, Boston's Big Dig is now reality and green roofs are being built all over the world, making our planet more like Tolkien's Hobbiton every day. I cannot say this idea is solely mine as I do not live in a vacuum. Rather I join others in a vision of a planet that is easier to breathe in and will, again, breathe on its own. Implementing this idea will need good soil as described above.

Public opposition would be the first obstacle in realizing a plan to green-roof our highways. I plan on working with the local community/neighborhood groups, aldermanic districts, mayors and so on to garner support behind the vision. Once there is community support, local governing structures must be brought in to nurture and support the initiative. With both of these in place, demand for the land modules has been created. Businesses, other economic players, consultants and engineers, and industry will then step up to the plate to make these land modules a reality.

During the first year the design-build process would need to be funded. For a full-time designer and assistant and consultants.  Garnering community support would be mostly volunteer time. Funding would result from a grant or business loan. With government backing and incentives, the project would be encouraged and sustained.