Very Large Structure is a proposal by Manuel Domínguez for a mobile land management mega-machine for Castile and León in Spain. It's a walking city, for want of a better term, though rather than conceived as a global wanderer perpetually moving on to greener pastures, the VLS remains in basically the same place to tend to and improve the pastures that it's got.

To save me the time of summarizing the project, which is impressively researched and fleshed out, I'll direct you to his entire PowerPoint presentation being hosted at Taller al Cubo.


(Image by Manuel Domínguez.)

Before you head out to download the file, I want to quickly invoke the opening line of Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines, the first in a quartet of novels about walking cities (on tracts, like the VLS) in a resource-depleted future preying on smaller walking cities and their supplies, literally swallowing them whole when caught —

It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.

— and hope that that should cue a parallel world Dakar Rally in which walking cities race against each other. On the dried-out bed of the Mississippi River, Chicago compete against Manhattan once every four years down towards the Gulf of Mexico, and the winner not only will enlarge their hunting ground but also represent North America in the world championship held in the silted expanse of the former South China Sea.


(Image by Manuel Domínguez.)

And then there's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

(Via @sevensixfive.)