[Wildwell]

Imagining what our cities will look like in the future has long been a favourite pastime of the Hollywood movie industry.

Many of world's big cities are surrounded by shanty towns. On the whole we are presented with striking images of glass and metallic towering structures, flying cars and technologically smart everything.

Ask a gathering of leading thinkers in the worlds of architecture and design, and you get a rather different picture

Some 70 million people a year migrate from the country to cities. That is about 130 a minute, says Robert Neuwirth, author of Shadow Cities.

Many of these set up home in squats, put together from scarce materials, if put together at all. There are a billion squatters in 2005. By 2050, that figure will reach three billion.

At this rate, our future cities may turn out to be quasi-temporary, low-tech shacks, missing the basics of human life, such as water and electricity, still belching out the waste of fuels that warm the globe.

Globalisation has done its best to push constant migration deeper into the urban from the rural with the promise of work.

Internationally renowned designer, sustainability architect and author of Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough, argues that we can only think of our future cities if we think about what our intention is as a species.

The question for designers of what is dubbed the Next City is how to love all species all the time.

Mr McDonough's ideas for the Next City are about to be played out in China where his company has been charged with building seven entirely new cities.

"In the 70s we saw the hegemony of fossil fuels. So what would be the next design philosophy we would want to work with?"

He looks at the Next Cities as objects of human artifice. They can grow, they can breath, and they can be ecologically sound, just as trees, forests, and gardens are.

They can use energy, expel waste, and reproduce in ways that nature intended without destroying everything else around them.

"In biology, growth is good. If we could do something where growth is good, that would be a way of thinking of a good operating system for design," he says.

"We lay the city out so everyone can move in parks without crossing traffic, the buildings have daylight lighting, the university is at the centre, and with hi-tech connectivity."

The buildings and all around it work like biological, growing beings, photosynthesising and producing and re-using their own energy.

Waste is energy in Mr McDonough's Next City vision; methane is used to cook food. A quarter of the city's cooking will be done with gas from sewerage.

"The energy systems will be solar energy. China will be largest solar manufacturer in the world," says McDonough.

To top the Next City in McDonough's thinking, the soil will be moved onto the roofs. The city will be inhabited by species and the top of the city will be green.

His approach to city design may be the stuff of some people's eco-science fiction novel. But it shows that cities can change - humans can change the way they do things.

But, he says, the Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.


In the UK, the Spread of out-of-town superstores halted.

Outlining the latest survey on shopping trends at a London conference organised by the Town and Country Planning Association, John Prescott, the deputy prime minister, said "big box" retailers, such as the Swedish furniture chain Ikea, were changing course and considering smaller town centre outlets.

Article continues

"They've joined Asda and Tesco and Sainsbury's, and the housebuilders and the office developers, and realised that we mean it when we say we want stores in town and not out on the bypass," he said.

Recalling that the number of out-of-town stores had risen from just 150 in 1979 to more than 1,000 in 1997, Mr Prescott said there was now clear evidence of trends reversing.

However, he acknowledged concern that locally owned shops could be put out of business by the big supermarkets.

"I know that the big retailers can put pressure on local stores, and we have to be aware of this, but which is worse: the major retailers leaving the towns completely or having the big retailers trading downtown, bringing in more money and more people into the town centre as a whole?"

Planning policy, which had put few obstacles in the way of out-of-town shopping, was reversed by John Gummer, the former Tory environment secretary, more than 10 years ago. But the trend continued because many big projects, such as the Bluewater centre near Dartford in Kent, were already in the pipeline after being approved by local councils.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/stor ... 75,00.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4682011.stm

[novaz04]

Quote: "At this rate, our future cities may turn out to be quasi-temporary, low-tech shacks, missing the basics of human life, such as water and electricity, still belching out the waste of fuels that warm the globe."

A very large proportion of cities are already like that, which is very obvious in the developing world. For example, in Lagos, Nigeria, Africa's second largest city, the vastmajority of the population live in slums .I'm talking 70% plus. And this city may have as much as 16 million people residing in it. This city is also growing very quickly, and you can bet that almost all of the immigrants are poor and will also set up slums, as your article indicates.

[pea-jay]

I am sure if we really tried, we could develop a sustainable city from scratch that would exist off of locally available resources without depleting them and all kinds of synergistic relations set up.

The problem is retrofitting our less than perfect cities while dealing with the vageries of ownership, compensation, legal rights of property owners, building industry hostility and politician indifference. Even if it all worked out, redesigning the globe in just a few years is a pretty tall order. Maybe if we started a few decades ago, but now its too late to savem all.

[JohnDenver]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pea-jay', 'E')ven if it all worked out, redesigning the globe in just a few years is a pretty tall order. Maybe if we started a few decades ago, but now its too late to savem all.

[dinopello]

I came across this guy recently that has some ideas on these types of topics. Don't know enough about him/it to advocate it yet, but it looks interesting:

http://www.restorationeconomy.com/

Links at the bottom to more stuff.


Also, found this paper from the same guy for ICMA that has a graph that looks a lot like a peak energy curve

http://www1.icma.org/pm/8507/Cunningham.htm

[Ludi]

Neat, but I'm more interested in ideas to retrofit existing structures/systems, rather than rebuilding from scratch which is too energy intensive and time consuming.

[jaws]

Cities are naturally the most efficient form of human habitat. The classical city could house several thousands of people within a few blocks and leave plenty of open land for farming and natural recycling habitats. The City of the Future isn't some cornucopian technopark, it's the good old city.

[jaws]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', 'N')eat, but I'm more interested in ideas to retrofit existing structures/systems, rather than rebuilding from scratch which is too energy intensive and time consuming.

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jaws', 'C')ities are naturally the most efficient form of human habitat. The classical city could house several thousands of people within a few blocks and leave plenty of open land for farming and natural recycling habitats. The City of the Future isn't some cornucopian technopark, it's the good old city.

[dinopello]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jaws', 'C')ities are naturally the most efficient form of human habitat. The classical city could house several thousands of people within a few blocks and leave plenty of open land for farming and natural recycling habitats. The City of the Future isn't some cornucopian technopark, it's the good old city.

[pea-jay]

Large cities are only economically efficient. THey're terrible in terms of energy efficiency. Scattered rural residences are not that much better, especially if none are engaged in farming or food production. Everything must be transported.

The only form of settlement that makes energetic sense is one that can be fed, supplied and cleansed (waste removal) without any fossil fuel inputs or need to transport large distances.

[Peepers]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'P')ea-Jay is so correct. There isn't the money or the time to retrofit this country. We have paved and housed over rail corridors inside and between the cities with suburbia. Sure we might be able to place light-rail on highway medium strips to create very limited city feeder lines. But no way in hell are we ever going to run high-speed intercity bullet trains through our congested sprawl. We'd never find a straighaway. No way are we going to install trolleys in suburbia--the streets are too windy and the density too low.

[IanC]

I've gotta give a plug for my hometown on this thread. Portland, Oregon, USA is crawling with planners from all over the world coming to see how we keep a limit on growth. Although we live in the great western US where there is definitley room to expand and sprawl, we have managed to grow in an organized fashion. Ever year, our planners (Metro, the regional government) have to allocate so much land for future growth rather than letting the market decide where growth should occur. A clear line, known as the Urban Growth Boundary (UGB), separates the city from the farmland. This, of course, leads to all sorts of political battles over how much land, where it will be, etc. with the usual hacks from both sides of the growth debate battling it out.

The result might be as close as you can get to an ideal post-Peak Oil city. Inner Portland is dense. Due to the pressure on growth from the UGB, there are lots of "in-fill" projects to convert small and non-ideal lots into dwellings and live/work buildings. There are farms right outside of the city which will hopefully be able to feed us when transportation gets to expensive. We have 3 long light rail lines for commuters and a central city streetcar/trolley for getting around downtown. We've won the accolade of the best bike city in the US. Our CO2 emmissions are down 11% from 1991 levels (That's far beyond what Kyoto would mandate).

We still have our share of unsustainable suburbs, but Portland can be seen as an example of how good planning and political will can reconstruct a city and metro region. Come visit me and bring your bike!

-Ian C

[Peepers]

You should give your hometown a plug. If every city in the U.S. were planned and developed like Portland, I doubt we'd be talking about PO, at least not for a long, long time.

[Peepers]

I just realized from my prior message.....
PO = peak oil; not PO = Portland, Oregon.

Maybe the city could use their initials in some sort of marketing program for prospective residents and businesses in the coming year!

"PO, Portland Oregon -- the antidote to PO, peak oil."

Nah, it'll never work...