Renewable Cities On
a Viable Planet
Cities are like living beings. They eat, breathe, spend energy, and make "waste". To the extent the processes of a city do not destroy its supporting systems, it is sustainable. However, ultimate sustainability depends on more factors than the kind of viability keeping a clean "ship" provides.
Cities are linked to a web of life of planetary proportions. Cities and farms that encourage excessive growth erode the sustainability of ecological systems comprising this "life web", by causing loss of biodiversity and habitat. Is there a critical amount of wilderness surface that must remain intact, - and viable, for us to avoid cataclysmic natural disasters? How big a role does the biota of Earth play in the stabilization of weather patterns?
Climate greatly influences the growth of cities. What if the climate changes? What if the growth of cities and farms everywhere cause destabilization of weather patterns to the extent that few places on Earth have climate? What does lack of climate do to the flora and fauna of wilderness areas? How will farmers know what plants to grow if the weather for their part of the earth becomes more severe and unpredictable?
Although supercomputers may be necessary to handle the massive amounts of data that must be processed to make our most wise decisions on these issues, there is an intuitive approach that may help us get some grasp of these problems.
Synthetic Surfaces
Sunlight is one of the most powerful of all the forces that determine weather. When we build farms and cities that respond differently to sunlight than the permanent ground cover of wilderness vegetation, we create a "synthetic" surface that causes changes in the weather. As the size of this surface grows, the effect it has on weather increases.
How large can these synthetic surfaces become before their effect upon planetary weather becomes disastrous? Since weather is a result of many kinds of powerful forces interacting in a state of dynamic equilibrium, this growth threshold is elusive and variable. If we build cities and farms that have minimal surface per capita, more of the Earth can be restored to a wilderness condition, which, in turn, may have a stabilizing influence on weather patterns. It is better to risk having too much wilderness than to have too little.
How can we shrink our cities and farms to allow more wilderness? How can we do this in ways that prepare us to live in a future lacking cheap oil products? At some time in the future, natural products will be needed to replace the fibers, oils, plastics, paints, detergents, and legion other products now coming from the petroleum industry. Can we build urban environments that require much less of these kinds of resources? If we cannot, we will need much more farm land to supply these needs.
Proximity Power
Proximity Power is part of the answer for these problems. We need to miniaturize our cities toward their most workable form. Complex architecture that takes greater advantage of the vertical dimension can allow us to thrive with a minimum of energy because we live closer to everything we are trying to do. Since we cannot use energy without creating heat, noise, or chemical pollution ( the law of entropy ), complex designs also allow us to minimize environmental pollution.
Coupled with a high degree of local self reliance, complex cities of the future may evolve toward greater sustainability because tight recycling loops will cause an increasing appropriateness of fit between real needs and the ability of suppliers to meet those needs. Stated more simply, we may find it easier to do more with less in future cities.
Proximity Power is the effect compact and complex cities generate because of the ways their essential elements are connected. Proximity Power is a synergistic effect resulting from structural and temporal components. It is a power that results from living closer to our lives. We spend less of our life getting to our life.
Linear distribution networks have a minimum of complications due to cross traffic or congestion. They also contribute to the benefits Proximity Power gives us. These networks allow transportation of products and people along parallel paths. As more of these paths are created in the vertical dimension, the “foot print” of the network decreases. When businesses along the path ship their products a minimum distance to their consumers, the traffic congestion along the paths decreases. This leads us to the concept of Efficient Sequencing.
Efficient Sequencing
Efficient sequencing of businesses allows back scratching businesses to live close to each other. The "waste" from one business becomes the resource for another. Also, the various businesses involved in the complete manufacture of a complex product can happen sequentially along the distribution lines. This assembly line approach to building cities may help us lower the cost of living the same way assembly lines lowered the cost of making automobiles and refrigerators.
Local self reliance, in a city having linear distribution networks, reduces congestion along its roads and corridors. Proximal access to resources for local consumption makes this possible. Food, more than any other resource, should be minimally packaged, processed, transported, warehoused, and handled. A long line of commercial food production greenhouses and fields running parallel the length of the city can greatly lower the energy, space, and chemical costs of delivering food to urbanites. In this future, most people will know who grows their food.
The synergistic effect of a city comprised of mutually supporting elements may become very efficient without becoming reasonably workable unless the city satisfies enough of the needs of the people it serves. How can we help a maximum of urban dwellers come to a realistic belief that they are living in a great city that provides quality of life for everyone at minimum expense to all other life on Earth? This' is a Utopian and noble goal to strive for in our efforts to improve cities.
Cities are like elephants. The bigger they grow, the more they eat. Larger herds require more land. Obviously, infinite growth cannot occur on a finite surface. Therefore, like elephant herds, cities must achieve a dynamic stasis of population growth in order to have long range sustainability for any given design. This may be easier to achieve in cities with a better standard of living.
Sustainable Cities
Sustainable cities continually strive for an ever more appropriate fit between the availability of renewable resources and the populations those resources serve. This can be accomplished with more efficient patterns of urban design and architecture that allow minimization of energy costs while maximizing nurturing ability.
Sustainable designs have durable quality. These systems have a long, useful life per unit energy cost and the energy base that supports them is renewable.
Diverse energy resources, like, solar, wind, geothermal, gravity, hydro-electric, animal, and human power, and last but certainly not least, cogeneration, supply these complex life support systems.
Organisms that live efficiently and effectively, occupy a niche that provides them with adequate support. The waste products these organisms make do not destroy their niche. Cities, too, should survive in niches surrounded by ecosystems that support the niche. These ecosystems provide food and resources which the city pays for with its "waste" products. Ultimately viable cities will live well within the carrying capacity of their life support systems. (Think of the city as though it is a living organism ).
How long can we continue building systems that deplete atmospheric oxygen while destroying systems that replenish atmospheric oxygen?
Eliminating the need for personal automobiles in the city solves many problems plaguing modern cities. Energy required to build and maintain systems that support cars in the city can be diverted into making higher quality housing and work places. Instead of cars, many kinds of public transportation systems can be put on line that make cities more accessible for all people.
Let's build cities that make walking and bicycle riding the preferred choice of transportation for most healthy people! This is just one of the ways we can greatly reduce the amount of machinery we live with.
Greenhouse-Powerhouses
Greenhouse-powerhouses may be one of the most important of the structural elements a city can add that will help it evolve toward greater sustainability. High-rise greenhouses supported by cogeneration electric power may be integrated with retail and food processing systems. In a Linear City, these complex systems can form visually exciting patterns from an aerial perspective as well as from the viewpoint of the pedestrian.
Sustainable cities optimize their necessary elements in ways that let us thrive in adaptive harmony with the nature of the Earth —— instead of in contest with it. *****
We may be seeing ever more need for disaster relief for large populations in the future. Many people have been made suddenly homeless by natural disasters and human caused problems. Tower Towns can be a way of helping people made homeless have a place to live.
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Welcome to Imagine City Audio Topics Global Renaissance
Moving Fast Empower City Renewable Cities Connect City
Human Scale Cities Super City Tower Towns Design Considerations
Restructuring for Activists Sustainability Indicators Subsidy by Design
Linear City Concepts Network Megalopolis Urban Agriculture
High Rise Greenhouses Magnetic Levitation Trains City Links
