ADASTRA FUTURE CITY

Ad Astra Future City

There have been many ideas tossed around about what constitutes the perfect city. For myself, I really do not have a desire to live in a 20th century city. It’s not that I don’t like to be around people; it’s that I don’t like to feel crowded. That is why I live in a rural area. I like the proximity to wildness. I like grass and trees and open quiet vistas. Where I live it is as if with a few steps, I could be away from the things of man. Sometimes I think about the ancient cities of Mesoamerica set right up against the jungle. Those people seem never to have lost their appreciation of the natural world. I have a tendency to look at the past with a certain sense of nostalgia. Unfortunately, the truth is that they too forgot how important wildness is to the spirit of man. Recent discoveries show that the Maya cleared and cultivated vast areas around their cities. So much land was cleared and cultivated that the character of the land and climate changed. Drought, famine, and war followed. The survivors abandoned their lavish cities and their civilization crumbled. This happened before Europeans made contact. We cannot look to the past for a way foreword. If I were designing a city from scratch, I would put it in a wild place or at lease in the countryside.

To make a city succeed next to a wild space you need to plan for everything. If you do not, the wild space will be destroyed. Cities that evolve are not planned. Having zoning is not a plan. That is one reason cities spread out, consuming more and more land. If you think of the city as a living thing than it would be appropriate to have a plan that would be analogous to the genetic blueprint for a living organism. Two factors need to be considered when preparing this plan. As with any organism, we need to consider growth and differentiation. If you use this analogy of a biological organism, there is a perfectly planned progression from seed to adult plant. Every step is planned. The final form is planned and the final size is planned. There are no happy surprises here. If you do not get what you expected it is because something went wrong. So, from the beginning before a single spade of dirt is turned, there must be a plan.

The plan needs to be agreed upon by everyone involved. Consensus is the key to guaranteeing that the plan is followed from start to finish. Commitment to the plan needs to be part of the selection process for everyone involved. If everyone makes a financial commitment to the project and sees from the beginning the final form of the city, then everyone who participates will own the plan from the beginning. One thing that needs to be agreed upon is that the city will be build upon self-sustaining technologies. Renewable energy sources and use of durable construction materials will be important considerations. What I’m talking about is not simply based on conservation. Restrictions arise from limits and limits set the stage for what some have referred to as the zero-sum game. What I’m talking about are not reasonable limits such as setting the size of a city but restriction based on arbitrary rules. Limits on the use of spaces for only one purpose, is what I mean. Technology allows us to remove those limits and restrictions by shot-circuiting the zero-sum game.

Some people believe that technology is inherently evil. I don’t believe that. Technology can provide solutions. Some technologies bring benefits to society, but some have side effects. The automobile is a perfect example. Everyone loves the personal freedom offered by the gasoline powered car. No one likes the pollution, congested highways, and death and destruction that they offer. How much concrete used for streets and highways would be better put to use in constructing durable buildings. What are the alternatives? 20th century design has dictated that cities be planned around the automobile. I just cannot personally make the commitment of time to walk the six miles to my work. Getting there and back would take at least one-hundred-and-eighty minutes. I work with the public and I probably wouldn’t smell very good with the temperature near 100 deg. F outside. Many coworkers where I work have to travel more than fifty miles each day to work and back. I think you get my point.

The city of the present is designed for the automobile. We used to have cities designed so that walking was convenient. Electric trolleys provided public transportation. I’m not advocating that we go back to those days. There are viable technologies available today that provide personal transportation within a city without automobiles. We need to design our city with the use of such technologies built in. By providing for most of the transportation needs of our city through such technologies as personal rapid transport we can make our city more compact. Walking, riding a bike, or using small electric vehicles would be more reasonable and safer. My design plans for nearly fifty-thousand people in one square mile with only the adjacent eight square miles of surrounding land used for city services and intensive sustainable agriculture. There would be no developments, no suburbs, no roads or bridges. No cars and no trucks. In their place, there would be green space.

Incorporating agriculture within the city and planning for every structure to have a green space is an important objective. A first step on the way to doing that is with green roofs. Although viewed by some today as a radical solution, I view it as only a modest improvement that is forced by our reliance on cliff-like city buildings we think we need to build into our cities called skyscrapers and other tall buildings. Rather than a vertical cliff-like design, a terraced structure allows the topology of the land to be molded to accommodate green spaces and modest buildings with a high structural density; especially if you remove the roads and replace them with broad pedestrian malls with bicycle paths and elevated personal transports. Light materials can be transported in automated micro-container personal transports. Heavier materials can be transported in an automated subterranean electric container-based railway system. More later…
-cmm