Smart City: An Autonomous Urban Cell That Quarantines a Neighborhood, Not an Apartment

Every lockdown drew the same line: the front door. On one side sat the household, sealed in; on the other sat the city, emptied out. This project moves that line. Instead of isolating each person in a room, it asks what happens if the boundary of quarantine is drawn around a whole piece of the city, one large enough to hold work, play, care and open sky, so that life inside it carries on while the edges close.

Smart City is the work of Tanya Prevezentseva of the studio SBI (State Budgetaru Institution) «GlavAPU», set in the United States. The project was Shortlisted at New Dencities, a competition entry that treats density as an asset in a pandemic, rather than as the problem.

Drawing the Quarantine Line Around a Cell, Not a Door

The proposal starts from a single unit of urban fabric: an autonomous cell. In the project's own framing, the cluster "contains all the necessary components of the urban space," and its main quality in a pandemic is the ability to isolate an entire cell with its people inside, rather than every person in their apartment. It is a quiet but radical shift in scale. Isolation stops being a private condition and becomes a civic one, shared by neighbors who can still meet, walk and gather.

The section makes the idea legible at once. A slender tower punches up through a low, broad podium whose roof rolls like a hillside, planted and dotted with trees. Beneath that landscaped lid sits a band of deep floor plates, the program that keeps a cell running. Pale balloons drift over the roof and a huge moon hangs in a hazy sky: the drawing reads less like a technical cut than a portrait of a self-contained world tucked into the skyline.

A Rolling Green Roof as the Cell's Common Ground

If the cell must hold people for weeks, it needs somewhere to breathe, and the green roof does that work. At dusk, a paved promenade fills with crowds, families with strollers and couples looking out toward the water. The grass climbs into a curving mound beside them, its glazed underbelly hinting at the program below. The rendering carries the project's thesis in its own lettering: "the sustainable model for an autonomous cluster of a post-pandemic world."

What matters spatially is that this public ground sits inside the boundary of the cell. A sealed cluster here does not mean a sealed corridor. The roof becomes the place where a quarantined community still has a horizon, a sunset and a crowd, even if that crowd is limited to the people sharing the cell.

Copper Bridges and Picnic Lawns Between the Towers

The towers are not isolated objects either. A copper-edged stair bridge spans between two of them, framing a view down onto the landscaped hill roof, its sunken courts, a white dome and the waterfront beyond. Movement between the vertical and horizontal parts of the cell happens above ground, through air and light, turning circulation into another kind of open space.

At ground level, the mood turns domestic. Children ride small quad bikes across the lawn, a family spreads a blanket under a flowering tree, and a glass tower rises at the edge of the frame. Overhead, a plane tows a banner reading "Postpandemic City." It is a playful touch, but it names the aspiration directly: ordinary leisure, sustained within the walls of the cluster.

A Hospital Ward Beneath a Lattice Dome

An autonomous cell has to care for its own sick, and the interior views show where that happens. Staff in protective suits work at curved desks while beds line the far side of a ward, all beneath a lattice-patterned dome that throws dappled light across the floor. A looping ring light hangs at the center. The space is clinical in function yet generous in volume, closer to a pavilion than a sealed corridor.

Placing care inside the cluster completes the logic of the proposal. If a cell can treat its own residents, it does not need to export infection to the rest of the city or depend on overstretched facilities outside. The dome becomes the cell's safeguard, as essential to its autonomy as the lawns are to its morale.

Why This Project Matters

Smart City reframes the central spatial question of the pandemic. Rather than asking how small a unit of isolation can be, it asks how large and complete one can become while still being closable. That move turns quarantine from a condition of loneliness into one of shared neighborhood life, with parks, bridges and a ward all held within a single boundary.

The project also offers a useful lesson for anyone thinking about density. Tanya Prevezentseva's cells suggest that a city built from complete, self-sufficient pieces can be more resilient than one spread thin, because each piece can protect itself without shutting everything down. Whether or not the next crisis is medical, the idea of a cell that can close, care for itself and keep living deserves a place in how we plan dense cities.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designer: Tanya PrevezentsevaStudio: SBI (State Budgetaru Institution) «GlavAPU»

Competition and award

Shortlisted, New Dencities

Location

United States

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