Summary: The METACity Concept
The META City Concept is an outline of an 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 formed by established cities as special districts within their high density urban cores. They are designed to facilitate permanent 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 Nationsdriven 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 Agreementwill 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 infrastructuredesign 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 volumesof 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 standardizationof 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 Programand its investor administrative organizations, the Corporationis 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.