Project envisions post oil Vegas

February 2, 2009 by Yamini Piplani 

Architecture students help further dialogue on local visibility

The demands of a changing environment are being met by the innovative students in the school of architecture.

The department for landscape agriculture and planning hosted an event envisioning a post peak oil Las Vegas along with Cal Poly-Pomona, Jan. 30 in the architecture library. The event furthered a much needed dialogue on local sustainability.

The goal was to address social, economic and environmental problems in Las Vegas and answer how they can be addressed for the year 2016 when the global supply of oil will be steadily declining. Lee-Anne Milburn, an associate professor at UNLV explained that “the whole idea was that [the groups] had to look out to 2016 when we are running out of oil…They [were] supposed to figure out how we need to redesign Las Vegas to deal with the fact that we’re going to have less oil, less ability to drive.”

The project involved 80 students from both universities who were divided into five groups. Milburn explained, “each team [was] led by faculty members. Two teams [were] led by faculty members from UNLV and three teams by [faculty from] Pomona.”

“The project [was] a transect that we took of Las Vegas all the way from Red Rock Canyon all the way over to the desert wetlands conservation park,” Milburn said. “It [was] a 20-mile transect along Tropicana Avenue and we went half a mile north of Tropicana and a half-mile south of Tropicana– from Harmon to Hacienda; and we divided that [area] into the five groups so each group got a chunk of that transect. Each group then had to deal with the issues in that part of the city.”

The groups had less than five days to complete their designs. They started Monday morning at 9 a.m. and gave their presentations Friday.

Each group was assigned four miles of the street and was asked to redesign their section to make it as sustainable as possible considering any potential problems.

Milburn said she hoped the project would help promote the UNLV architecture program. “We are looking to benefit our students from having exposure to other faculty and other programs. [This project] gives them a very particular type of learning experience. It is a very intensive, focused experience where you get to focus on a very specific issue. It is a very different type of opportunity.”

The project was not for any specific class. “It [was] for the whole school,” Milburn said. “It included seniors, juniors, sophomores and freshmen.”

There was no competition and students chose to participate to gain experience in this intensive exercise.

Students liked the structure of their groups, which combined UNLV and Cal Poly-Pomona participants.

“I like how the two schools that are coming from a different type of teaching are collaborating together,” said landscape architecture major Mandeep Dhillon, 22. “It makes the field stronger because we learn from each other. We [were taught] from different professors and being able to tie those ideas together is good.”

Andrew Morris’s group focused on housing problems in 2016. They proposed “high-rise, high-density housing… with sustainable green walls, water appropriation systems and natural energy sources like solar and wind energy” for the area near Decatur Boulevard.

Other groups focused on the transportation and infrastructure issues, like Cal Poly-Pomona students Carmela Aguilar’s group. “We found many problems for pedestrians with transportation and there was lots of open space,” she said.

Agular’s group focused on Tropicana Avenue between Mountain Vista Drive and Maryland Parkway. Irene Lopez, another member, explained, “we have three different lines of transportation,” highlighting their plans for “hydroelectric taxi cabs and cable cars which run down the center of the strip.”

“We converted all the strip malls into open spaces for agriculture for bio-fueling,” Lopez added. She stated a shared goal among the five groups, saying, “we are building up instead of building out.”