Vincent Callebaut Architectures, known for green projects that combine smart building with advanced renewable energy solutions, has officially unveiled Arboricole –
Referred to as a new “biophilic” building that brings agriculture to the urban landscape. Residents of the building can grow food on their own terraces thanks to permaculture, with the building’s curved, sinuous design acting to reduce turbulence and maximize comfort in these elevated gardens.
Arboricole aims to answer a vital question: how can we adapt our European historic cities to climate change and the ensuing phenomena of strong floods, heavy rains, and current heat waves? To help combat these events, the building is covered with endemic plants from the Loire region that act as a “sponge,” limiting its carbon footprint, collecting rainwater, and optimizing the residents’ quality of life.
White tuffeau stone covers the building’s wave-shaped facade. The architects drew inspiration from the agriculture of the Angevin groves, whose undulating plateaus create a visually engaging waterfall effect. Designed for the intersection of Boulevard Ayrault and Quai Gambetta in Angers, France, the building gradually rises to 114 feet (35 meters) and maximizes the amount of sunshine each terrace receives during the day.
Micro-perforated satin aluminum plates serve as false acoustic ceilings for the balconies, absorbing the noise pollution emitted by car traffic and showcasing the plant life climbing Arboricole’s vertical grove. And, not to be outdone, the plants themselves – 20,000 perennials, shrubs, and trees – could absorb up to 50 tons of CO2 in Angers’s atmosphere each year.
Porcelanosa and Italgraniti have created air-purifying and huge-scale innovations in surfacing that they unveiled at Cersaie.
Can surfacing play a more active role in the designed environment? Porcelanosa thinks so. At Cersaie, the company revealed K-Life, a material embedded with technology that makes the solid surfacing capable of eliminating harmful bacteria and gases (such as nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds) as well as any chemicals it comes into contact with, all the while cleaning the surrounding air.
K-Life by Porcelanosa
So what is it? Made with Krion, the brand’s trademarked antibacterial composite of largely natural minerals and a low percentage of high-resistance resins, the material incorporates light-activated agents that turn it into a purifier. It’s 117 per cent more antibacterial than comparable surfacing, and one square metre has been proven to scrub enough air for approximately six people to breathe clean for one year. It packs significant potential for wellness and medical environments, and for high-traffic public areas, but why wouldn’t you want this in your kitchen as well?
Mega by Italgraniti
Redefining what constitutes oversized has become somewhat of a Cersaie tradition. This year, Italgranitiearned top marks in the large-format category with the latest contribution to its Mega series, which measures 320 x 160 cm. The massive porcelain stoneware practically dwarfs its 2016 predecessor (itself an impressive 240 x 120 cm). The appeal of gigantic yet slim slabs (Italgraniti’s an be as lean as 6 mm) hasn’t waned.
The format remains the most efficient and cost-effective way to cover large, high-traffic areas. The extra-extra-large scale means fewer grout seams and joints, and faster installation. And, with bookmatch finishes, big slabs give the impression of continuous panelling. It’s also almost impossible to tell Mega is porcelain; its realistic renderings look just like metal, stone or marble – take your pick.
Porcelanosa’s K-Life is bacteria and pesticide resistant, non-porous and super tough.
In the context of representing the People of Earth, it does not do that. It was created to resolve the issues imagined by the controlling elites to serve their purposes, purposes that are seldom discussed with the people at all, let alone with honesty and candor. While I may call the UN a failure in one regard, it is useful to focus on issues of resources and managing them. Unfortunately, it regards humanity as a natural resource, like the great herds of buffalo that roamed the central plains of North America, it regards the sheer volume of people as a nuisance that needs active control and even culling. I am not making this up. At the time of the formation of the UN it was simultaneous to a meeting by the same people to decide how to control population growth. Kevin Mugur Galilee has devoted much of his life to exposing this, in his The Subversion of Medicine and Public Health by International Security Prerogatives work he demonstrated without a doubt that this is the case.
I consider then, that the United Nations is basically a resource management organization and we are little more than herds roaming the land that the Elite own and control.
The UN does not represent the wishes of the people, far from it. It serves the owners of the land and the owners alone.
The Planet needs a Treaty between Nations for Cities, to create a bicameral approach to issues of global concern that will assure fair and adequate representation of all aspects of our civilization. Think of it as a global alliance of municipal governments representing people and technology to balance the United Nations.
Today we are in the middle of a conflict between the forces of “globalism” and “nationalism”. In reality it is a conflict between ideas about the future of humanity. The globalism idea has been championed by the top down managers who rely on finances to justify all their choices, and they have been working on this for more than two centuries. The globalist managers believe that they can make the best decisions and those being managed should believe that and let them take care of business, and that includes your business as well. You do not have a choice in their schemes, none.
Globalist do not believe in self-government. The only good nation state is a dictatorship of rules issued by them and the roles of politicians is to sell their vision, not have their own or fulfill the dreams of the people. Leaders are a threat to the unelected bureaucrats chosen by the the financial sector. This argument is skewed by the reality that the the real dividing line between populations for control of the future is natural resources versus technological resources. Those whose lives are and always have been tied to natural resources see the future as a steady state equation of the carrying capacity of those resources as opposed to an increase in technological capability to create resources. The real divide is technological versus natural resources.
Our planet is filled with natural resources and dividing these among the ruling class has been the role of the nation states. Those people who live upon the land must create their own resources, and indeed cities are themselves a technological creation upon the land by the people, through this simple analysis we can deduce that the true duality of our civilization is between natural and technological resources and it is this polarity wherein the true politics of the future lie.
So our first order of business is to develop the political will to overcome the limitations imposed upon us, but so far this has proven to be an intractable problem for all the nations on this Earth.
The fault for this situation lies with the relationships that define global cooperation. Agreements between nations on sustainability are like agreements between foxes on how to manage the chickens. The nation states are rooted in the management of natural resource exploitation and they are controlled by the exploiters. Land grants, mining claims, mineral rights, harvesting and grazing rights were the tools used by the nations to drive development of the land and create a tax base with which to support the government. The multi-generational nature of resource ownership and exploitation tends to enable those with these interests to position themselves or their agents throughout the administrative system, allowing them to protect their interests. The evolution of a global, privately owned and controlled currency cartel, owned by this same group has allowed them to manipulate their nation’s business cycle and use control of the currency to consolidate power. The regional controlling interests are all invested in their region’s Central Bank and share in the secret manipulations to gain unjust and socially destructive advantage.
For these reasons the nation states have been slow to make the needed changes. They have become tools of the resource rich, who have assumed political control through the manipulation of the population using rights granted to them by the nation state, control of the media, control of the money supply and control of the US Government to wage war and economic ruin on the middle classes by playing one nation state against the other. For these controllers, death and all the means to help it along are good. Their mantra for three generations has been that the number one problem is that there are too many people, and so their policies all address this negative assumption with negativity.
It would be ignorant for humanity to not address the issue of population growth. Everyone on the planet has an equal share in the consequences of not dealing with it, and a cooperative approach is not only possible, but morally the only choice, and one that this article addresses with a far reaching and innovative plan. In this, the role of technology and innovation is preeminent, in fact it is the basis of this plan, focusing on exploiting our most fundamental social technology, cities. Growing from this insight, the use of special districts within cities as the vehicle to drive the social, technological and political solution forward, is obvious.
The idea of a global standard urban form has interesting possibilities. The thought of a single set of standardized systems to deal with his density architecture and urban design is a workable strategy to create a global alliance of Municipal governments. Unlike the United Nations, it would not focus on governing, but organizing. Instead of politics, administration would be the main effort, but instead of the approach of the European Union, it would be voluntary and apply only to those who chose to participate with their local special district. The overall goal is to create a better way by adoption over time because of the superior results.
A good strategic plan will give power to everyday people by providing a positive vision of the future, a blueprint for global change through local action, one that includes their city and their lives. A vast majority of people will agree with the goals when stretched over a forty year planning cycle.
There is plenty of money to do this. Consider that everything in the built environment will be depreciated and reinvested during the next twenty to forty years. Everything. If the past is any indication, we will invest an equal amount in new built systems during the same period. If we focus that investment in sustainable systems we can achieve a sustainable society by mid-century.
The nation states might abhor the notion of centrally planned economies, but the cities’ use of zoning is well established and amounts to far more control than national planners would dream about. The only addition enabled by global organization is standardization sufficient to create mass markets and related economies of scale for infrastructure systems and programs.
The dilemma of this and the many other plans to create a sustainable society is that everyone involved, particularly those without a sustainable orientation, also has a plan for the future.
Summary of The METACity Concept
The META City Concept is an outline of a information-technology rich society that has reorganized itself to make the best use of information and communications. The model suggests a global civil government of cities overlaying the existing structures. The city units are designed to facilitate sustainable high growth rates within their boundaries.The non-urban region surrounding the city is supported with a Bioregional Protectorate,a basic policy effort to have each META City take responsibility for the environment around it. Environmental restoration and rehabilitation are emphasized, directing resources and expertise to planting and reintroduction within a riparian wild lands model.
One of the ways to envision our time is to consider the simple sine wave used to illustrate all cyclic processes. We can imagine innumerable sizes all weaving along a single center line, but no matter how many variations we choose, at some point they will all converge at a single moment of time. This is our time, a time when one great system of being ends and another begins.
Building a global political consensus is the problem and the opportunity.
Municipalities Electronic Trade Agreement
Implementation of any form of globally standardized urban infrastructure will require A Treaty Between Nations driven by the self-interest of urban populations.
A treaty, the Municipalities Electronic Trade Agreement, can be created through a public process and presented to the Congress of the United States of America that will establish a program for any city, in participating countries, to form a special district that models the rules and procedures needed for a self-governing space-based society. Most commentators say that the long- term growth of humanity means that space colonization and exploitation are necessary parts of any serious plan. Solving the political and cultural problems required to live in space can be used as a foundation for the earth-based META City d\Special Districts. It can address many of the social, legal and economic problems on Earth that stand between us and success in any effort to colonize space. The rules for the META City district can be the same as those required for a space colony.
The Municipalities Electronic Trade Agreement is an alternate strategy to achieve global cooperation for the peaceful development of human civilization. A META Treaty proposal would create:
The Municipalities Electronic Trade Agreement will structure the political relationship between the META City and the city, state, nation and META System. The Agreement should create treaty “zones” within each city that joins.
The META will implement standardized high density urban infrastructure design and acquisition systems with full three-dimensional modeling and simulation for META City designers and planners. The development structure revolves around the establishment of a standardized Request for Proposal format addressing new urban infrastructure. Suppliers worldwide would participate in all stages of the process using a Internet-based portal, while the urban planning community focuses on defining what a standardized high density urban district should be. Higher densities, and shared support system going beyond plumbing, energy and transportation would be the main topics.
Standardized bid proposals would be broken down into global volumes of each part that would be automatically total items shared by all bids. The resulting sub-component bidding is live worldwide. Ordered parts will be shipped according to instructions negotiated during the purchase.
Tremendous productivity increases can be produced by global standardization of urban infrastructure technology and systems, enough to pay for a space development effort and to restore the Earth’s biosphere. Cities are the source of wealth and when they work well can generate far more capital than required to maintain them.
The process of developing a self governing space-based culture should not wait until the opportunity exists, because it may never come to a fearful and ignorant society. We can and should envision a form of city government suitable for operating a space colony. Moreover, we should see this as an opportunity to galvanize public thinking about the role of our technological islands on Earth and how they can lead society into space development.
META Social Services Infrastructure Merit-based META citizenship with vested rights to housing, health care, education and communications services. One approach that can be included is an internship period that exchanges time in service for lifetime entitlements or access to them within the special district on a merit or vestment basis. New approaches to retirement, health and long term care can be integrated into this system since the people will begin participation at a young age and will have many years of productivity before needing any assistance. This investment of time and energy by the young can create a capital advantage for the META Cities
The Municipalities Electronic Trade Agreement will aid Space Development. The process of developing a self governing space-based culture should not wait until the opportunity exists, because it may never come to a fearful and ignorant society. We can and should envision a form of city government suitable for operating a space colony. Moreover, we should see this as an opportunity to galvanize public thinking about the role of our technological islands on Earth and how they can lead society into space development.In theory, all space colonies will be technological islands in space, whether on the surface of large body or floating in a LaGrange point. Those that live there will be dependent on each other and the complex of support systems that spawned their colony. Essentially, they will be cities in space existing in a resource region governed by a larger governmental entity, much as nations define land, as in the US, for resource management purposes. This idea is self evident. During the first stage of growth into space a coalition of space faring nations (probably the US and its client states, but maybe the UN) will appoint themselves arbiters of resources and wield power as they do on Earth. Current information is that such a coalition already exists in the form of the Secret Space Program and its investor administrative organizations, the Corporation is organized to allow every nations elite to buy in and have a share of the organization. Once the administrative infrastructure to insure the continuing authority of the coalition is in place, an emphasis will be put on resource exploitation and colonization. The existing group is more like the United Nations, with the owners controlling everything, than what the META would evolve into that it would assure a means to give people representation too.Projecting civilian communities into space complements current military strategies by making them a supporting function of a social expansion. The advantages for individuals are enormous. A clear vision of each person’s interest and benefit from the development of space is possible with this program, since the move into space will be perceived as the cumulative outcome of participation and development at the local level.
The United Nations must cooperate with the META Cities. A global body of META Cities will be needed, and should position itself as the representative of the urban populations and the technology sector worldwide.
Representative government has long relied upon the use of two competing bodies of interest for the resolution of problems, but the global arena lacks this provision, and global politics are dominated by big money natural resource interests without adequate input from the citizenry. The United Nations is an extension of the same conflicts of interests that render the nations unable to change the direction of their environmental destruction.
The META , second political mechanism for global governance that is designed to balance the exploitive nature of the nation states, can be established. It should be a mechanism that will serve as the economic engine for a sustainable society. Â The new global alliance of cities can focus on defining standards for technology and focus the growth of the built environment to make it truly sustainable.
Evolution of the practical means of change: The Metapallet
When I entered college I wanted to be a designer, but the practical necessities pushed me into business and a furniture design business, but during that time I continued to think of everything as a design problem and the Club of Rome Report stimulated within me the solution I present here. It is heavily influenced by the macro design thought and the role of entrepreneurial motivation of the productive members of humanity.
It is obvious that a drive to change our way of life to allow continued population growth will need a substantial shift in our way of doing things. It was 1977 and we were in the midst of the greatest shift in human history, the Information revolution was pressing the limits of all economic activity, and its ability to double in power and halve in cost every two years meant that all the knowledge in libraries and all that was being created would be available to address our every problem, be it social, economic or technological. In my analysis I concluded that cities were the first information revolution, how much more important could it be to know what was happening that could affect you than to be within earshot of the most current information. Proximity is the first tool of information sharing.
Clearly the driver of economic growth was access to information, and the rise of information technology that made the entire world within your proximity. Networking, data transfer and storage took years to implement before the eventual digital convergence we have now emerged as the standard. At the time I began to consider this as a design problem, the pattern in front of me was that it would be implemented piecemeal, every job that existed would get smarter and faster, but what I felt would be needed can only be described as full redesign of our social economy around total information availability everywhere at all times.
In 2018, this is the actual case. Thanks to digital convergence and Internet, information is truly ubiquitous.
In 1977 the issue was not if this would happen, but how could we use this to redesign the economy to make everyone’s life fully optimized, and to eliminate the need for an underclass. In this quest the most basic needs underlying daily life, the ones that required the most physical effort and affected everyone was highest on the list.
A short time researching and the answer became clear, logistics, the management if material for uses like living and working would be the most impacted. Access to realtime information by people doing things would save time and eliminate waste. Now the issue was to find a way to improve the way people moved material and managed it.
Containerization came to the public mind only twenty years earlier and was the driving force of commerce world wide. The containers were massive, replacing the forty foot truck trailer with a solid steel enclosure of the same size. With this bulk the containers were stackable and easily handled with cranes moving them from ship to rail or trucks. It was a brilliant innovation that swept global commerce and now characterized our entire global culture. Deadhead containers were being converted into storage solutions and even functioning as buildings, homes, offices and workspaces. The impact of the adoption of containerization impressed me, but the ocean shipping containers were too bulky to be functional as a uniting element for the logistics of daily living.
The answer was to find a new containerization platform, one between the ocean shipping container and the pallets that were used to fill them with cargo. Although some shippers hand packed their containers the idea of using a new standard to mechanically load the containers appealed to me. This was the jumping off point for what became a lifetime preoccupation: the metapallet.
Dr Al Globus, a contractor for the Nasa Ames Research Centre in California, says humanity could soon begin to build space settlements. A space settlement would be a large structure like a town or city that would house hundreds or thousands of people.
Popular concepts for them involve large rotating structures
These would have artificial gravity on the parts that are rotating
Dr Globus tells MailOnline such a structure could feasible be built by the end of the century, if major national disasters are avoided
But he explains how a number of key steps need to be achieved first before large orbiting cities can be built
And he envisages that once we have colonised Earth orbit, it will not be too long before we explore the solar system and beyond as well
Humans are now spread across all corners of the globe, but what’s the next step?
According to Dr Al Globus, a Nasa contractor and space settlement expert, he says the next logical move is to colonise Earth orbit.
And, he says barring any major national disasters, we could soon have huge habitats floating around the planet by the end of the century.
Dr Al Globus, a contractor for the Nasa Ames Research Centre in California, says humanity could soon begin to build space settlements. A space settlement (artist’s illustration) would be a large structure like a town or city that would house hundreds or thousands of people
Dr Globus is a contract scientist at Nasa Ames research centre and over the years has worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, the ISS, the Space Shuttle and much more.
But a few decades ago his interest was piqued by the possibility of space settlements, leading to him setting up Nasa’s annual Space Settlement Contest, which challenges students to come up with designs for space colonies.
Now he’s a major proponent for living in space, and believes that it won’t be long before people are visiting cities in Earth orbit as readily as they travel from London to New York.
WHAT IS A SPACE SETTLEMENT?
A space settlement would be a large structure, comparable in size to a town or small city, built in Earth orbit. It would have similar amenities and services to towns and cities on Earth, and would enable people to live in space The ISS currently houses six astronauts at a time, but a space settlement would have hundreds or thousands of people on board. Future space settlements may also have artificial gravity by rotating around an axis. Whether [space settlements] will happen or not is really hard to say. Whether it can happen, absolutely.” Dr Globus tells MailOnline.
“If we as a people decide to do it, we can do it. We have the scientific capability, financial capability, there is simply no question we can do it. If no major disaster strikes in the next few centuries, I would be astounded if we didn’t do it.” He explains how our technological know-how it only going to increase barring an enormous catastrophe like a nuclear war. “We could have the first space settlement in decades, certainly less than a century.”
Dr Globus (pictured) is a contract scientist at Nasa Ames research centre and over the years has worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, the ISS, the Space Shuttle and much more. He now also runs an annual competition called the Space Settlement Contest
Dr Globus is a proponent of orbiting colonies, while he adds that others like SpaceX CEO Elon Musk are envisaging a future where humans live on Mars.
As to the actual purpose of a space settlement Dr Globus says it could be just like a town or city on Earth while also providing a way for humans to expand and survive off Earth.
It would be ‘a place to live, raise your kids, where your friends and family have Thanksgiving dinner and celebrate Christmas, and visit Earth on vacation,’ explains Dr Globus.
“It’s the same purpose as any town or settlement or city has. The way species get endangered and wiped out is by being dependent on a limited environment. Humanity started in East Africa and now live on literally every continent – even Antarctica – albeit for a small time. We live in snow, jungle, deserts, savannahas, forests; we have spread out about as far as we can spread out, and the next step is to move to space.”
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk (left) has been building and launching rockets with the goal of making access to space easier. He hopes that one day humans may be able to colonise Mars (right). Dr Globus says such a goal is achievable, after perhaps building a colony in Earth orbit
But what would that first space settlement look like? Many designs rely upon a central cylinder around which is a rotating habitat. In the rotating section the force of rotation provides artificial gravity for the inhabitants, letting the move around like they would on Earth.
‘That means your children will grow up with strong muscles.” explains Dr Globus, so even if they spend a prolonged time in space they could still travel to Earth and cope with its gravity.
At the centre of the structure though there would be zero-gravity, as there would be no rotation here. This, explains Dr Globus, could be used for recreation or even to film movies. Elsewhere on the station would be agriculture, while the outer hull would need to be partially covered in solar cells.
But what would that first space settlement look like? Many designs rely upon a central cylinder around which is a rotating habitat (artist’s illustration shown). In the rotating section the force of rotation provides artificial gravity for the inhabitants, letting the move around like they would on Earth
But Dr Globus admits that such an undertaking is something that just isn’t financially feasible – for now.
THE CHALLENGES OF BUILDING A SPACE SETTLEMENT
According to Dr Globus there are a number of obstacles that must be overcome before humans can live in space.
The first is that the cost of getting to space via rockets must decrease.
Next is life support; a future space colony will need to be almost self-sufficient, using indoor farms and solar energy. A colony will also need radiation shielding to protect it from harmful cosmic and solar rays, although recent research says this may not be a big issue.
“If you have to ask [how much it would cost], you can’t afford it. There is one circumstance we could easily afford it, and that’s if the people of Earth decided to stop killing each other and spend all that time and money on space settlements.’
However starting to build a space settlement now is not a good idea, he says, as technology and infrastructure are not yet sufficient. He says we need to progress through several hoops before settling in space can become a viable option. One of these is space tourism. Several private companies such as Boeing and SpaceX are busy building manned spacecraft, while others like Bigelow Aerospace are planning to build ‘space hotels’ in orbit. These orbiting habitats, while much smaller than the large space settlements envisaged by Dr Globus, would allow people to pay for trips to space.
Dr Globus even says these could be used to raise money by hosting what he calls a ‘Space Olympics’ in orbit.
By sending the world’s top athletes to space and having the compete, people would tune in to watch them compete in a variety of micro-gravity sports.
‘You could get Usain Bolt, a soccer star, a basketball star and so on,’ he says.
‘It would be a level playing field because no one knows how to do sports in microgravity. So that would totally be entertaining.’
Dr Globus says we need to progress through several hoops before settling in space can really be a viable option. One of these is space tourism. Several private companies such as Boeing and SpaceX are busy building manned spacecraft, while others like Bigelow Aerospace are planning to build ‘space hotels’ (concepts shown)
The timeline for all this is of course up for debate, but Dr Globus is confident it will happen sooner or later.
‘In two or three decades we might have a couple of small hotels [in orbit], and people moving in on a regular basis,’ he says.
‘Then at some point somebody will notice if you are old and infirm you might like to live on a space hotel, because you wouldn’t be subjected to a 1G hotel and you wouldn’t need a walker or wheelchair.
‘I can foresee someone building a retirement home in low gravity; after a couple of years you won’t be able to come back, but if you’re facing 15 years of sitting in a wheelchair you might not want to do that anyway.
‘And once that step is done, people living in space permanently, then it’s not a big step to build a space settlement in orbit.
‘All that is on a time scale measured in decades, or in the worst case centuries.’
And living in space doesn’t need to stop there. Once a large, floating colony has been built, Dr Globus explains that other locations in the solar system can be explored.
Perhaps, using asteroids for additional material, a space settlement could be placed around the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos.
Once humans have settled in Earth orbit, Dr Globus says it is not a huge leap to imagine they will want to eventually travel further. This could begin with the solar system in a few millennia and, ultimately, expand further into the Milky Way
‘I can imagine within a few centuries that the first settlement will be co-orbiting an asteroid,’ says Dr Globus.
‘To really settle the solar system will take millennia, maybe longer.’
And once that goal has achieved, Dr Globus says there is not much to stop us expanding into the rest of galaxy.
‘Imagine you have been living on orbital space settlements for 10,000 years,’ he says.
‘In your settlement there might be 100,000 people or even millions.
‘If people decided to go to Alpha Centauri, even thought it may take a century to get there, it doesn’t matter, because you’ve been living in this settlement for thousands of years anyway.
‘In terms of living situations, does it really matter if you circle Earth or Alpha Centauri? Not really.’
It’s a hell of a town … an artistic rendering by Rick Guidice of a toroidal space colony studied by Nasa in the 1970s. Illustration: Nasa Ames Research Center. Now after swinging budget cuts at Nasa, a loose agglomeration of private companies – including Elon Musk’s SpaceX – have revived the dormant dream of colonising other worlds
Science fiction has delivered on many of its promises. Star Trek videophones have become Skype, the Jetsons’ food-on-demand is materialising through 3-D printing, and we have done Jules Verne one better and explored mid-ocean trenches at crushing depths. But the central promise of golden age sci-fi has not yet been kept. Humans have not colonised space.
For a brief moment in the 1970s, the grandeur of the night sky felt interactive. It seemed only decades away that more humans would live off the Earth than on it; in fact, the Space Shuttle was so named because it was intended to make 50 round trips per year. There were active plans for expanding civilisation into space, and any number of serious designs for building entire cities on the moon, Mars and beyond.
The space age proved to be a false dawn, of course. After a sobering interlude, children who had sat rapt at the sight of the moon landings grew up, and accepted that terraforming space – once briefly assumed to be easy – was actually really, really hard. Intense cold war motivation flagged, and the Challenger and Columbia disasters taught us humility. Nasa budgets sagged from 5% of the US federal budget to less than 0.5%. People even began to doubt that we’d ever set foot on the moon: in a 2006 poll, more than one in four Americans between 18 and 25 said they suspected the moon landing was a hoax.
But now a countercurrent has surfaced. The children of Apollo, educated and entrepreneurial, are making real headway on some of the biggest difficulties. Large-scale settlement, as opposed to drab old scientific exploration, is back on the menu.
Space cities come in three basic models. The classic one is to terraform a nearby Earth-like object, by using massive geo-engineering projects or bio-domes to create a lunar or Martian metropolis. The second is the low-Earth orbit model: this expands upon the currently inhabited region of space. Think of the International Space Station as a government fort, around which commercial trading posts, homesteads and finally urban areas develop. Then there is the free space model, basically floating cylinders with artificial gravity, surviving by digesting the natural resources of outer space. As the saying goes in the space community: once you’re out of Earth’s gravity well, you’re halfway to anywhere.
In the 1970s, Princeton physicist Gerald K O’Neill envisioned 100,000-person colonies, stationed at what is known as the fifth Lagrangian libration point (L5) in the moon’s orbit – like a gravitational eddy where things stay put by themselves. Encouraged by fellow physicists Freeman Dyson and Richard Feynman, he posited a “planar cluster” housing four billion people across 30,000km of space. “It is orthodox to believe that Earth is the only practical habitat for Man,” he wrote in Physics Today in 1974, but we can “build new habitats far more comfortable, productive and attractive than is most of Earth.” O’Neill called the classic model of colonising planets proper a “mental hang-up”, and suggested it lacked imagination for the possibilities of open space.
In O’Neill’s vision, cable cars would connect communities spaced at 200km intervals. Single-family spacecraft – the minivans of the sky – would act as recreational vehicles. On the inner surface of what would be rotating habitats, strips of land would alternate with windows to let in sunlight. That same sun would provide all of our energy needs (a much bolder statement in the 70s than it is now), while the moon would be mined for aluminum and titanium to use in habitat construction. Asteroids, containing water and other material, could be towed along behind the city in the vacuum. His idea to build such cities in the moon’s L5 orbital point inspired the influential L5 Society, which aimed to realise his vision by 1995. Their motto: L5 in ’95!
O’Neill’s dream did not come to pass – not because it was inherently flawed, but because it was an idea before its time. Spaceflight infrastructure was in its infancy, and costs were prohibitive. We simply didn’t know enough of the basics to jump straight into urban design.
The central challenge to building a city in space is to create a closed system that can sustain itself for the long haul. Urban areas on Earth survive only by relying on a much larger footprint than their metropolitan boundaries. The more isolated a space city is – the farther from external resupply resources – the more closed its oxygen, food and water loops must be. The ISS, for example, has about 40% efficiency in its oxygen recycling, and even so its ambient CO2 levels are perpetually high. (Nasa is working on how to convert that CO2 directly into oxygen.) As for food, any space-based urban plan would require rolling out high-yield agriculture on an unprecedented scale – though 3D printers could, given some fresh ingredients, print a pizza.
The other big problem for a space city is how humans would function physiologically. The neighborhood gym would be a popular destination: though the human species is ill-suited for some aspects of deep space, 14 years of continuous presence on the ISS have advanced our understanding of how to adapt physically for a lifetime among the stars. Early astronauts paid for this knowledge the hard way, as it were, with their bone density. Today’s ISS crew train for 2.5 hours a day on a jury-rigged zero-gravity exercise contraption in order to keep their bone density at normal levels. Still, with longer stays in zero gravity, new problems seem to crop up. For example, your cerebrospinal fluid – the clear liquid found in the brain and spine – drifts upward, where it engorges your retina and flattens your eyeball. “I lost two diopters in my eyes,” recalls former astronaut Michael López-Alegría, who spent 215 consecutive days on the ISS. “It’s also pretty easy to get something in your eye up there. You just walk into something.”
City walls would be required to shield space citizens from the brutal radiation bombardment of deep space. “Aluminum shielding can actually be part of the problem,” says Vince Michaud, Nasa’s deputy chief health and medical officer. “Radiation that makes it through takes some of the aluminum with it.” Nasa spends $28m every year in radiation research alone, including pharmaceutical and nutriceutical countermeasures and magnetic shielding. Bill Paloski, director of Nasa’s Space Life and Physical Sciences division, believes that by 2024 his team will be able to mitigate the health risks of space.
As for actually getting people to the space cities in the first place, it won’t be using rockets – basic physics doesn’t cooperate. Rather, space elevators, or “beanstalks”, promise to close that gap. Vehicles would climb out of the gravity well along a cable anchored to the equator and held under tension by centrifugal force on a counterweight tens of thousands of kilometers high. Until now, materials science hadn’t produced the kind of tensile strength required for a space elevator cable – even carbon nanotubes are too weak by themselves – but in 2010 the Nobel prize in physics was awarded for experiments on graphene. A one-atom sheet of pure carbon that is 100 times stronger than steel, graphene is a promising candidate for space elevator cable material.
“We can colonise the moon, Mars … wherever people want, really,” SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk (of Tesla Motors fame) told documentary-makers on the film Orphans of Apollo. “I think Mars is the logical place to go.” Musk’s company, specialists in space transport, are one of the most serious around; none of this conversation would be happening without SpaceX, and Musk is not alone in thinking of colonising Mars first. But though it may be easier to generate excitement around the Red Planet, insofar as the moon feels like an achievement already under our belts, several characteristics make Mars harder to colonise.
Martian gravity is three-eighths that of Earth, making landings more hazardous than in the moon’s one-sixth gravity. On the Apollo missions, lunar dust got everywhere – the crews inhaled it and got it in their eyes, and it wreaked mechanical havoc – and on Mars the dust is even more problematic, because it is highly oxidised, chemically reactive, electrically charged and windblown. Mars’s chlorinated soils would be toxic, for example, to the human thyroid gland.
There was some early speculation that a space city could be buried under the Martian surface to protect its inhabitants from radiation. Pamela Conrad, an astrobiologist with Mars Science Laboratory, contends that we would be digging from a rock into a hard place. “Trying to drill down to shield from ionising radiation might be okay for bacteria, but materials in the core are radiating, too,” she warns.
A lunar city, on the other hand, has the advantage of being up to a thousand times closer – practically next door – and as such could participate in Earth’s economy to some extent. Possible anchor industries could include space tourism and titanium mining, as well as pharmaceutical factories that require microgravity. The moonis also rich in helium 3, which is rare on Earth and thought to be a potential fuel source for future fusion reactors.
And industry is very much at the top of the agenda. Today the biggest space operation in the world is neither Nasa’s nor that of the US defense department, but DirecTV, valued at more than $48bn. Low-Earth orbit is quickly becoming the realm of the private sector – including the loose agglomeration of companies known collectively as NewSpace, which have shaken human spaceflight progress out of a sluggish period. Using the window created by the withdrawal of public funds from space programmes, NewSpace has fostered trust with government and increasingly enjoys the blessing of the US State Department, which controls export permits for objects being launched into orbit. Public sector clients like Nasa and the Air Force Space Command purchase equipment and supplies, and depend on the ingenuity and dexterity of the market. Indeed, Nasa has an $800m program to develop the commercial space market. Costs have come down dramatically as a result.
One figure in NewSpace taking advantage of this new flexibility is hotel tycoon Robert Bigelow. In 2015, the owner of Budget Suites of America will use a SpaceX rocket to send one of his inflatable space habitat modules up for testing at the ISS. These ingenious blow-up houses are capable of operating independently as space stations, and Bigelow wants to lease them as hotel suites (no surprise there), laboratories or for whatever else you might want. Nasa, having no current plans of their own for a moon mission, have given their blessing to Bigelow to use similar inflatable modules to build a lunar base.
Inflatable space habitats made by Bigelow Aerospace, whose founder owns the Budget Suites of America hotel chain. Photograph: Nasa/Bill Ingalls/Getty
If he doesn’t get there soon, the Chinese may beat him to it. Whereas Russia has been integrated into the global space community fairly effectively since the end of the cold war, China does not partner with the other big players. Instead, it plays its own game: in December of last year, as part of the country’s 12th Five-Year Plan, China’s lunar rover Chang’e 3 made the first soft landing the moon has seen since 1976. China is somewhat secretive about its space progress, but among its stated goals is to establish a crewed lunar base.
Rick Tumlinson is head of the asteroid mining company Deep Space Industries, which aims to be the gas station, building-supply centre and the air-and-water provider for space settlements. In the 1970s, a young Tumlinson worked at the Princeton Space Studies Institute, where he came under the influence of Gerard O’Neill and science fiction author Arthur C Clark (known to them as “Uncle Arthur”). He even led the New York chapter of the L5 Society. Deep Space is playing the long game out of a commitment he says he made in 1986 with several NewSpace entrepreneurs. According to Tumlinson, they pledged their lives and fortunes to “making the human breakout into space happen in our lifetimes”.
Tumlinson was one of a group that leased the Mir Space Station commercially from the Russian government for a few months in 1999. Calling it MirCorp, they gave their venture a countercultural, tongue-in-cheek personality, and sent up a Jolly Roger flag with the first commercial cosmonauts. Nasa and the State Department were not amused. They placed heavy pressure on the Russians to de-orbit Mir in order to focus on the ISS, then under construction. The current crop of space entrepreneurs, like Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, watched Mir’s firey re-entry and breakup in 2001. They have learned from this and dedicate a lot of effort toward diplomacy and government cooperation.
Speaking at the Humans to Mars conference in Washington last month, Nasa chief Charles Bolden laid out a vision for bringing the US space programme out of its first stage, exploration, and into pioneering, even homesteading. “We are, right now, an Earth-reliant species,” he said. “But only multi-planet species survive for a long period of time.” Nasa plans to start with an asteroid capture and redirect by 2025, then pick up skills in the proving ground near Earth before venturing to a destination a thousand times farther than the moon. When humans get to Mars in the 2030s (the much-mocked Mars One group aims for the rather optimistic goal of a proper human settlement by 2024, or 10 years from now), the implication is that we will be there to stay.
If large-scale space settlement still sounds a little crazy, consider that from the passing of the Space Settlement Act 1988 until its quiet demise in the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, establishing extraterrestrial civilisation was the official goal of the US in space. The Space Settlement and Development Act of 2015, currently under draft, would promote economic development in space and work to reverse current strictures against property ownership in space.
Which brings us to what might be the biggest obstacle close to being hurdled: who would move to a city on Mars? Well, lots of people claim to be interested, signing up to Mars One’s non-binding longlist of candidates to emigrate to the Red Planet. But López-Alegría, the former ISS resident, says that while he could imagine our space presence being scalable, he wouldn’t volunteer to live permanently in a space city. “The experience of being in space is magnificent,” he says, “but only in the context of being an Earthling and knowing that you’re coming back to Earth.”
The US has a plan for Americans to live in space. In 2012, the National Research Council was commissioned by Congress to roadmap the future of human space exploration. Last June, the team published its findings in a massive report, which called for several action steps to be taken immediately. One year later, are we on track?
One of the report’s authors was designer and Spacehack founder Ariel Waldman, who works on ways to make technical concepts around space colonization more accessible to the public. In 2008 Waldman took a job at NASA to coordinate its CoLab initiative, which allowed NASA scientists to collaborate with outside communities through open-source projects.
The overall response to the report (which you can read in its entirety here) was good, says Waldman. “When the report came out, a lot of different parts surprisingly resonated well with Congress,” she told Gizmodo. In the year since, Waldman has witnessed some encouraging feedback—but also plenty of disheartening trends that are keeping the roadmap stalled.
Of course there are plenty of tech advancements that need to be made to get humans living in space—gotta figure out that radiation protection!—but those challenges aren’t the biggest things holding the US back. There are much bigger political, perceptual, and yes, economic shifts that need to occur to get us thinking about living off-Earth.
Start Cooperating Globally
Statistically, China’s space program is a few decades behind the US, but consider these facts: In a span of ten years the country sent ten people into space. In 2013 they landed a rover on the Moon. The agency is currently working on a mission to Mars and a proposal for its own space station, which is planned for sometime in the 2020s. Soon, China will undoubtably surpass the US in its efforts for space colonization.
Thanks to a 2011 Congressional act that bars the US from collaborating with China’s space program, NASA is not allowed to work directly with the most quickly accelerating efforts to get humans into space. This is a huge problem. “There are only two places that are going into space,” says Waldman, referring to current crewed missions by Russia and China. “We’re not one of them, and we’re not in collaboration with the other one of them.”
Even more frustrating is the fact that certain politicians who are otherwise zealous about human spaceflight are voicing support for the China ban. Take Representative John Culberson, a Texas Republican who has been evangelistic about a mission to Europa. Since this Jupiter moon is thought to have liquid water and a climate which might support life, it’s currently second in priority in the roadmap, and NASA will soon need to make a critical decision about funding it. (Update: As of today, it’s moving forward.) But he has also been vocal about not working with the Chinese.
Many other political figures point to China’s human rights violations as a reason not to align with the country. Yet they seem to overlook the many human rights concerns when it comes to collaborating with Russia.
What could it take to change the US’s policy on going into space with China? A presidential order would help, but that doesn’t seem likely. What’s more plausible are some workarounds that may allow for indirect collaboration without bilateral cooperation. Our existing alliance with the ESA and Russian programs, which have been separately planning a Mars mission with China, might allow some American science to tag along somehow. But competition here is not the way forward. This isn’t a Cold War-era USSR-USA space race, this is all the world’s major space programs except ours working together.
Stop Saying It’s About Saving Humanity
When the roadmap named a human landing on Mars as the first priority for space colonization, the internet got excited. But a lot of the reasoning for going to Mars has been hyperfocused on a single issue: We must find a place to live when Earth no longer lets us live here.
Thanks to a few very strong voices like Musk, the argument to ensure the survival of the human race has become the most-repeated reason for going to Mars. But it’s not a very good one, says Waldman: It’s not evidence-based. We have no idea if living on Mars is feasible, let alone a place where we should be relocating our entire civilization. And that shouldn’t be the motivation behind investing billions of dollars and potentially sacrificing human lives.
“There’s a lot of talk about why we’re going to Mars from the blogosphere, which is a really good thing,” says Waldman. “But no single rationale alone argues for a continuation of human spaceflight.” In fact, the report gives a long list of reasons, which the team was able to track across demographic groups. Of course certain reasons will resonate more with certain people, but the overall answer is more nuanced. Just saying that we need to decamp to Mars as part of some kind of Noah’s Arkscenario isn’t the best one.
Forget the Flag Planting
So much of what seems to motivate any space exploration is the concept of flag planting, which the US pretty much invented: I HEREBY CLAIM THIS MOON FOR AMERICA. Take away these imperialistic aspirations and the goals of human spaceflight become unmeshed with these ideas of nation-building—and a lot more pragmatic.
This is the largest task we’ve undertaken as human race and it requires wider democratization, says Waldman. “If we want to make things like landing humans on Mars happen we will need more collaboration from more people, from more disciplines, from more countries than we currently have.”
What’s incredibly exciting right now is how many developing nations have access to space thanks to swiftly changing technology. It’s not just China’s speedy space timeline that’s an indicator of this. Five years ago India sent a mission to the Moon and now has a spacecraft orbiting Mars. This is not just a pursuit of the wealthy superpowers anymore. More than 70 countries now have space programs—the science that will get us to another solar system could come from any of them.
Just like “saving humanity” is not a good reason to go to Mars, this is not a pursuit to “discover” another planet—and we’re not taking our geopolitical baggage with us. Scientists need to work towards including more voices in these efforts without countries getting all wrapped up in the possibility of laying first claim to Martian mining rights.
Yes, Okay, We Need Money
The roadmap’s pathway to Mars, showing NASA’s budget flat and adjusted for inflation
One of the largest criticisms of the NASA budget that it currently is not adjusted to keep pace with inflation, which is the most often-reported challenge in getting Americans onto other planets. As the report outlined in a series of charts, if the budget is even slightly adjusted for inflation each year, a pathway to Mars becomes much more feasible and much less risky.
In the past year, the Obama administration has championed a “re-energized space program” that has certainly achieved some notable milestones—like a test flight of the Mars-worthy Orion spacecraft and the development of the Space Launch System (SLS) to get it there, as well as several studies to see what happens to humans when they leave Earth for that long. Where the extra funding will come from in the next decade, though, is up to Congress. If the budget doesn’t increase, we’re not going anywhere.
What about corporations like Space X or Virgin Galactic? Commercial ventures might help in the sense that private companies might finance the spacecrafts themselves, says Waldman, but the programs themselves still require funding—and vision. “You’re still talking about hundreds of billions across decades even if it takes zero dollars to build.” And who knows, even companies backed by Elon Musk and Richard Branson could go bankrupt.
Other groups are trying to put numbers together to figure out how to get humans to Mars. Last month, Bill Nye presented a JPL-developed proposal for an orbital settlement around Mars at the Planetary Society’s Humans to Mars summit. Astronauts would leave in 2033 for a one-year stay in Martian orbit (the timing would coincide with the optimal Earth-Mars alignment every 26 months which makes the trip shortest), setting the stage for a landing mission in 2039 or later.
Nye’s full report will be issued later this year, but a proposed budget claims that it can be done using the funds from the human exploration program at NASA (as long as it is adjusted for inflation), if NASA stops investing in the ISS (which is already planned in 2024). One problem with this plan, however, is that it assumes the US will be working independently, not collaborating with other nations, which, as Waldman and others keep pointing out, is really the only way to make sure the US can mount a properly financed, sustained effort to live in space.
Remember, The Golden Age of Space Travel Is Still Coming
There’s one final plea from Waldman, which I found myself thinking about quite a bit after our conversation. Many Americans like to believe that the 1960s were some kind of heyday for human spaceflight—we look back at this period and bemoan the fact that the space program will never be as exciting again.
Waldman says this is kind of a greater delusion that we’ve convinced ourselves of as a culture. Actually, NASA was very low priority for federal spending at the time and there was a lot of pessimism about it in general. In fact, we can only seem to get excited about the idea of human spaceflight when it’s wrapped up in nostalgia. The report compared contemporary public opinion polls about the space program with polls during the Apollo mission. “When asked if Apollo missions were worth the money, during that time people said no,” she says. “The only upticks are when we’re looking back.”
This is not bad news, says Waldman, and I agree. It means that the actions taken in the very near future will be able to change the way people think about going to space. Whether or not we land a human on Mars in our lifetimes, this Golden Age of space exploration is still to come—once we’ve decided as a civilization that we’re committed to making it happen.
[Note] This article by Matt Jone is from 2009, but like much writing about the nature of cities, has a timeless quality. Cities are like timewarps, each street seeming to hold on to its heyday regardless of when it was. I was drawn to it because it explores the image of the city of the future as presented in science fiction, a realm of mind unrestrained by urban design and necessarily reflecting an imagined culture derived from circumstances of that authors’s time- their very own timewarp. It is an interesting take of the City of the Future.
The architecture of science fiction has profoundly changed urban design. When building cities of the future, our best guides may be places like comic book megalopolises Mega-City-1 or Transmet.
In February of this year I gave a talk at webstock in New Zealand, entitled “The Demon-Haunted World” – which investigated past visions of future cities in order to reflect upon work being done currently in the field of ‘urban computing’.
In particular I examined the radical work of influential 60’s architecture collective Archigram, who I found through my research had coined the term ‘social software’ back in 1972, 30 years before it was on the lips of Clay Shirky and other internet gurus.
Rather than building, Archigram were perhaps proto-bloggers – publishing a sought-after ‘magazine’ of images, collage, essays and provocations regularly through the 60s which had an enormous impact on architecture and design around the world, right through to the present day. Archigram have featured before on io9, and I’m sure they will again.
They referenced comics – American superhero aesthetics but also the stiff-upper-lips and cut-away precision engineering of Frank Hampson’s Dan Dare and Eagle, alongside pop-music, psychedelia, computing and pulp sci-fi and put it in a blender with a healthy dollop of Brit-eccentricity. They are perhaps most familiar from science-fictional images like their Walking City project, but at the centre of their work was a concern with cities as systems, reflecting the contemporary vogue for cybernetics and belief in automation.
Although Archigram didn’t build their visions, other architects brought aspects of them into the world. Echoes of their “Plug-in city” can undoubtedly be seen in Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’ Pompidou Centre in Paris. Much of the ‘hi-tech’ style of architecture (chiefly executed by British architects such as Rogers, Norman Foster and Nicholas Grimshaw) popular for corporate HQs and arts centers through the 80s and 90s can be traced back to, if not Archigram, then the same set of pop sci-fi influences that a generation of british schoolboys grew up with – into world-class architects.
Lord Rogers, as he now is, has made a second career of writing and lobbying about the future of cities worldwide. His books “Cities for a small planet” and “Cities for a small country” were based on work his architecture and urban-design practice did during the 80s and 90s, consulting on citymaking and redevelopment with national and regional governments. His work for Shanghai is heavily featured in ‘small planet’ – a plan that proposed the creation of an ecotopian mega city. This was thwarted, but he continues to campaign for renewed approaches to urban living.
Last year I saw him give a talk in London where he described the near-future of cities as one increasingly influenced by telecommunications and technology. He stated that “our cities are increasingly linked and learning” – this seemed to me a recapitulation of Archigram’s strategies, playing out not through giant walking cities but smaller, bottom-up technological interventions. The infrastructures we assemble and carry with us through the city – mobile phones, wireless nodes, computing power, sensor platforms are changing how we interact with it and how it interacts with other places on the planet. After all it was Archigram who said “people are walking architecture.”Dan Hill (a consultant on how digital technology is changing cities for global engineering group Arup) in his epic blog post “The Street as Platform” says, “…the way the street feels may soon be defined by what cannot be seen by the naked eye.”
He goes on to explain:
We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street.
Adam Greenfield, a design director at Nokia, wrote one of the defining texts on the design and use of ubiquitous computing or ‘ubicomp’ called “Everyware” and is about to release a follow-up on urban environments and technology called “The city is here for you to use”. In a recent talk he framed a number of ways in which the access to data about your surroundings that Hill describes will change our attitude towards the city. He posits that we will move from a city we browser and wander to a ‘searchable, query-able’ city that we can not only read, but write-to as a medium.
He states:
The bottom-line is a city that responds to the behaviour of its users in something close to real-time, and in turn begins to shape that behaviour.
Again, we’re not so far away from what Archigram were examining in the 60’s. Behaviour and information as the raw material to design cities with as much as steel, glass and concrete.
The city of the future increases its role as an actor in our lives, affecting our lives. This of course, is a recurrent theme in science-fiction and fantasy. In movies, it’s hard to get past the paradigm-defining dystopic backdrop of the city in Bladerunner, or the fin-de-siècle late-capitalism cage of the nameless, anonymous, bounded city of the Matrix. Perhaps more resonant of the future described by Greenfield is the ever-changing stage-set of Alex Proyas’ Dark City.
For some of the greatest-city-as-actor stories though, it’s perhaps no suprise that we have to turn to comics as Archigram did – and the eponymous city of Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s Transmetropolitan as documented and half-destroyed by gonzo future journalist-messiah Spider Jerusalem.
Transmet’s city binds together perfectly a number of future-city fiction’s favourite themes: overwhelming size (reminiscent of the BAMA, or “Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis from William Gibson’s “Sprawl” trilogy), patchworks of ‘cultural reservations’ (Stephenson’s Snowcrashwith it’s three-ring-binder-governed, franchise-run-statelets) and a constant unrelenting future-shock as everyday as the weather… For which we can look to the comics-futrue-city grand-daddy of them all: Mega-City-1.
Ah – The Big Meg, where at any moment on the mile-high Zipstrips you might be flattened by a rogue Boinger, set-upon by a Futsie and thrown down onto the skedways far below, offered an illicit bag of umpty-candy or stookie-glands and find yourself instantly at the mercy of the Judges. If you grew up on 2000AD like me, then your mind is probably now filled with a vivid picture of the biggest, toughest, weirdest future city there’s ever been.
This is a future city that has been lovingly-detailed, weekly, for over three decades years, as artist Matt Brooker (who goes by the psuedonym D’Israeli) points out:
Working on Lowlife, with its Mega-City One setting freed from the presence of Judge Dredd, I found myself thinking about the city and its place in the Dredd/2000AD franchise. And it occurred to me that, really, the city is the actual star of Judge Dredd. I mean, Dredd himself is a man of limited attributes and predictable reactions. His value is giving us a fixed point, a window through which to explore the endless fountain of new phenomena that is the Mega-City. It’s the Mega-City that powers Judge Dredd, and Judge Dredd that has powered 2000AD for the last 30 years.
Brooker, from his keen-eyed-viewpoint as someone currently illustrating MC-1, examines the differing visions that artists like Carlos Ezquerra and Mike McMahon have brought to the city over the years in a wonderful blog post which I heartily recommend you read.
Were Mega-City One’s creators influenced by Archigram or other radical architects?
I’d venture a “yes” on that. Mike McMahon, seen to many including Brooker and myself, as one of the definitive portrayals of The Big Meg renders the giant, town-within-a-city Blocks as “pepperpots” organic forms reminiscent of Ken Yeang (pictured below), or (former Rogers-collaborator) Renzo Piano’s “green skyscrapers”.
While I’m unsure of the claim that MC-1 can trace it’s lineage back to radical 60’s architecture, it seems that the influence flowing the other direction, from comicbook to architect, is far clearer. Here in the UK, the Architect’s Journal went as far as to name it the number one comic book city.
Echoing Brooker’s thoughts, they exclaim:
Mega City One is the ultimate comic book city: bigger, badder, and more spectacular than its rivals. It’s underlying design principle is simple – exaggeration – which actually lends it a coherence and character unlike any other. While Batman’s Gotham City and Superman’s Metropolis largely reflect the character of the superheroes who inhabit them (Gotham is grim, Metropolis shines) Mega City One presents an exuberant, absurd foil to Dredd’s rigid, monotonous outlook.
Back in our world, the exaggerated mega-city is going through a bit of bad patch. The bling’d up ultraskyscraping and bespoke island-terraforming of Dubai is on hold until capitalism reboots, and changes in political fortune have nixed the futuristic, ubicomp’d-up Arup-designed ecotopia of Dongtan in China.
But, these are but speedbumps on the road to the future city.
There are still ongoing efforts to create planned, model future cities such as one that Nick Durrant of design consultancy Plot is working on in Abu Dhabi: Masdar City. It’s designed by another alumni of the British Hi-tech school – Sir Norman Foster. “Zero waste, carbon neutral, car free” is the slogan, and a close eye is being kept on it as a test-bed for clean-tech in cities.
We are now a predominantly urban species, with over 50% of humanity living in a city. The overwhelming majority of these are not old post-industrial world cities such as London or New York, but large chaotic sprawls of the industrialising world such as the “maximum cities” of Mumbai or Guangzhou. Here the infrastructures are layered, ad-hoc, adaptive and personal – people there really are walking architecture, as Archigram said.
Hacking post-industrial cities is becoming a necessity also. The “shrinking cities” project is monitoring the trend in the west toward dwindling futures for cities such as Detroit and Liverpool.
They claim:
In the 21st century, the historically unique epoch of growth that began with industrialization 200 years ago will come to an end. In particular, climate change, dwindling fossil sources of energy, demographic aging, and rationalization in the service industry will lead to new forms of urban shrinking and a marked increase in the number of shrinking cities.
This scene, though not pretending to show that a perfect world is possible nevertheless indicates that tomorrow’s town could be pleasant places to live, work and play in. 1 Electric monorail train provides an effective though not especially elegant solution to the problem of hight speed travel 2 below the line runs a pipe network throudht which most bulk cargo (such as fuel, water,grain) is piped, silently and efficiently. 3 The city is green all over, the result of a massive tree planting scheme stated in the 1950s. It is estimated by present day researchers that every man woman and child on Earth meeds to plant tree a day in order to keep a balance with those that are removed or kill. The worlds main oxygen producing area is, at present, the Brazilian rain forest. This is being chopped down slowly but surely. A balance must be kept 4 Non-polluting yet lowered by hydrogen fuel whose wasted is water flies quietly across the sky 5 Fumeless electric vehicles weed for local travel, Trucks are only needed for short distance hauls as pipe system carry most cargo 6 The worst excesses of mid 20th century ‘brutalist’ architecture are camouflaged with flowering vines 7 Bicycles provide the basic means of transport for people to bet about over short distances. Special bikeways like this keep cyclist apart from truck and cars.
However, I’m optimistic about the future of cities. I’d contend cities are not just engines of invention in stories, they themselves are powerful engines of culture and re-invention.
David Byrne in the WSJ, as quoted by entrepreneur and co-founder of Flickr Caterina Fake, on her blog recently:
A city can’t be too small. Size guarantees anonymity-if you make an embarrassing mistake in a large city, and it’s not on the cover of the Post, you can probably try again. The generous attitude towards failure that big cities afford is invaluable-it’s how things get created. In a small town everyone knows about your failures, so you are more careful about what you might attempt.
Patron saint of cities, Jane Jacobs, in her book “The Economy of Cities” put forward the ‘engines of invention’ argument in her theory of ‘import replacement’:
…when a city begins to locally produce goods which it formerly imported, e.g., Tokyo bicycle factories replacing Tokyo bicycle importers in the 1800s.
Jacobs claims that import replacement builds up local infrastructure, skills, and production. Jacobs also claims that the increased produce is exported to other cities, giving those other cities a new opportunity to engage in import replacement, thus producing a positive cycle of growth.
Urban computing and gaming specialist, founder of Area/Code and ITP professor Kevin Slavin showed me a presentation by architect Dan Pitera about the scale and future of Detroit, and associated scenarios by city planners that would see the shrinking city deliberately intensify – creating urban farming zones from derelict areas so that it can feed itself locally. Import replacement writ large.
He also told me that 400 cities worldwide independently of their ‘host country’ agreed to follow the Kyoto protocol. Cities are entities that network outside of nations as their wealth often exceeds that of the rest of the nation put together – it’s natural they solve transnational, global problems.
Which leads me back to science-fiction. Warren Ellis created a character called Jack Hawksmoor in his superhero comic series The Authority.
The surname is a nice nod toward psychogeography and city-fans: Hawksmoor was an architect and progeny of Sir Christopher Wren, fictionalised into a murderous semi-mystical figure who shaped the city into a giant magical apparatus by Peter Ackroyd in an eponymous novel.
Ellis’ Hawksmoor, however, was abducted multiple times, seemingly by aliens, and surgically adapted to be ultimately suited to live in cities – they speak to him and he gains nourishment from them. If you’ll excuse the spoiler, the zenith of Hawksmoor’s adventures with cities come when he finds the purpose behind the modifications – he was not altered by aliens but by future humans in order to defend the early 21st century against a time-travelling 73rd century Cleveland gone berserk. Hawksmoor defeats the giant, monstrous sentient city by wrapping himself in Tokyo to form a massive concrete battlesuit.
Cities are the best battlesuits we have.
It seem to me that as we better learn how to design, use and live in cities – we all have a future.
Matt Jones is design director at Berg in London. He has worked as a designer for the BBC and Nokia. He began his career studying architecture, and writes a blog called Magical Nihilism.
Arboricole aims to answer a vital question: how can we adapt our European historic cities to climate change and the ensuing phenomena of strong floods, heavy rains, and current heat waves? To help combat these events, the building is covered with endemic plants from the Loire region that act as a “sponge,” limiting its carbon footprint, collecting rainwater, and optimizing the residents’ quality of life.
