The Urban Building of the Future: Prefabbed, Modular, Green and Recyclable
The urban buildings of the near-future will be tall, smart, adaptable, responsive, honest, modular, recyclable, clean, and deeply embedded into the systems of their host cities, if an imaginative vision from Arup’s Foresight team is anything to judge by. In its evocatively titled It’s Alive, Arup (the firm responsible for the structural design of the iconic Sydney Opera House) asks if we can imagine the urban building of the future while simultaneously presenting its take on the matter. The report contains plenty of ideas, albeit briefly stated, so I thought it would be fun to identify some of today’s science and technology that has made it into Arup’s skyscraper of tomorrow and discuss whether Arup’s vision is more grounded in fact or fiction.
(via Envisioning the urban skyscraper of 2050 | Ars Technica)
A road map for urban agriculture in NYC
Although there are 700 urban farms and gardens spread throughout New York City’s five boroughs, urban farming there still feels ad-hoc, somewhat tacked-on in many places. The gains have been slow and future progress isn’t guaranteed.
To boost the long-term prospects of urban farming in the U.S.’s biggest city, theDesign Trust for Public Space and its partner, the Red Hook-based nonprofit Added Value, just launched a new report some three years in the making called “Five Borough Farm: Seeding the Future of Urban Agriculture,” along with a companion website. The project seeks to create a comprehensive “road map” with the goal of helping stakeholders — policymakers, community groups, farmers, and designers — “understand and weigh the benefits” of urban agriculture, while making a compelling case for significantly ramping up local government support for this growing field. Basically, if you’ve been looking for a thorough examination of all the policy aspects of urban farming, this is it.
The idea is that by harvesting the incredible amount of data “exhaust” that every one of us generates as we traverse a city, planners can optimize services in the city to make them more efficient, cleaner and cheaper.
But there is a fear that such top-down programs may threaten the very vitality that attracts people to cities in the first place …
According to Carlo Ratti of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology SENSEable City Lab, cities occupy just 2% of the world’s surface, but house 50% of the population, consume 70% of the world’s energy and are responsible for 80% of the world’s carbon.
PlanIT is a €10 billion, four-year project to build a new smart city in Portugal to house some 225,000 people. With sensors built into every building it presents itself as an urban utopia where smart buildings can sense our presence and anticipate our needs.
Can Urban Farming Go Corporate?
Farms have sprouted in cities across the country over the past several years as activists and idealists pour their sweat into gritty soil. Now Paul Lightfoot wants to take urban agriculture beyond the dirt-under-your-nails labor of love. He wants to take it corporate.
In June, Lightfoot’s company,BrightFarms, announced a deal with The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co., or A&P, to provide New York City-grown vegetables to the local chain’s supermarkets year-round. The goods will grow in what the company says will be the country’s largest rooftop greenhouse farm, a high-tech hydroponic operation that will boost yields, allowing the company to face-off with organic vegetables trucked from California, cutting thousands of miles from the supply chain while aiming to provide a fresher product at a competitive price.
ht smarterplanet:
![What Exactly Is A Smart City?: A New Model Proposed
[T]he smart-cities movement is being held back by a lack of clarity and consensus around what a smart city is and what the components of a smart city actually are.
While some people continue to take a narrow view of smart cities by seeing them as places that make better use of information and communication technology (ICT), the cities [Boyd Cohen works] with all view smart cities as a broad, integrated approach to improving the efficiency of city operations, the quality of life for its citizens, and growing the local economy…
Most cities can agree that there is real value in having a smart economy, smart environmental practices, smart governance, smart living, smart mobility, and smart people. Within each of these aspirational goals, [Cohen has] included three key drivers to achieving the goal. There are over 100 indicators to help cities track their performance with specific actions developed for specific needs.
(ht smartercities)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_manlzhd2vc1qzlda3o1_500.jpg)
What Exactly Is A Smart City?: A New Model Proposed
[T]he smart-cities movement is being held back by a lack of clarity and consensus around what a smart city is and what the components of a smart city actually are.
While some people continue to take a narrow view of smart cities by seeing them as places that make better use of information and communication technology (ICT), the cities [Boyd Cohen works] with all view smart cities as a broad, integrated approach to improving the efficiency of city operations, the quality of life for its citizens, and growing the local economy…
Most cities can agree that there is real value in having a smart economy, smart environmental practices, smart governance, smart living, smart mobility, and smart people. Within each of these aspirational goals, [Cohen has] included three key drivers to achieving the goal. There are over 100 indicators to help cities track their performance with specific actions developed for specific needs.
(ht smartercities)
![Study: World’s Urban Areas to Grow 2-3x by 2030
More than half of the world’s expected nine billion people will live in giant urban expanses by 2030 as cities and their hinterlands occupy an additional 1.2 million square kilometers, thereby tripling in size.
That’s an additional 1.35 billion people living in cities, suggesting that urban areas that currently occupy roughly 3 percent of the planet’s surface will continue to expand. By comparison, urban areas increased by just 58,000 square kilometers between 1970 and 2000.
[Researchers] divided the global land area into discrete parcels and, using predicted gross domestic product growth, population growth and urban land area cover in 2000, they projected which parcels had a high or low probability of succumbing to citification over the next few decades.
Using that model, 1.2 million square kilometers of land have probabilities higher than 75 percent of becoming citified and nearly six million square kilometers have some probability of going urban.
“More than half of the urban land cover on the planet by 2030 has yet to be built,” Seto explains. “The expansion of urban areas will have a direct impact on biodiversity hot spots.”
Fifty-five percent of that expansion would come from massive urbanization in India and China… For example, a megalopolis similar to the urban corridor between Boston and Washington, D.C., in the U.S. is likely to form between Hangzhou and Shenyang in China.
But the fastest urbanization is predicted to occur in newly developing regions in Africa, such as the coast of west Africa along the Gulf of Guinea and the shores of Lake Victoria farther south, encompassing Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda, among other regions.
(via Gigalopolises: Urban Land Area May Triple by 2030: Scientific American)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_maloafIU4T1qgpcs1o1_400.jpg)
Study: World’s Urban Areas to Grow 2-3x by 2030
More than half of the world’s expected nine billion people will live in giant urban expanses by 2030 as cities and their hinterlands occupy an additional 1.2 million square kilometers, thereby tripling in size.
That’s an additional 1.35 billion people living in cities, suggesting that urban areas that currently occupy roughly 3 percent of the planet’s surface will continue to expand. By comparison, urban areas increased by just 58,000 square kilometers between 1970 and 2000.
[Researchers] divided the global land area into discrete parcels and, using predicted gross domestic product growth, population growth and urban land area cover in 2000, they projected which parcels had a high or low probability of succumbing to citification over the next few decades.
Using that model, 1.2 million square kilometers of land have probabilities higher than 75 percent of becoming citified and nearly six million square kilometers have some probability of going urban.
“More than half of the urban land cover on the planet by 2030 has yet to be built,” Seto explains. “The expansion of urban areas will have a direct impact on biodiversity hot spots.”
Fifty-five percent of that expansion would come from massive urbanization in India and China… For example, a megalopolis similar to the urban corridor between Boston and Washington, D.C., in the U.S. is likely to form between Hangzhou and Shenyang in China.
But the fastest urbanization is predicted to occur in newly developing regions in Africa, such as the coast of west Africa along the Gulf of Guinea and the shores of Lake Victoria farther south, encompassing Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda, among other regions.
(via Gigalopolises: Urban Land Area May Triple by 2030: Scientific American)
The Stadium of the Future Is a Modular Barge, Configurable to Whichever Sport Is To Be Played
Almost as soon as RFK Stadium opened in 1961, it became clear that the stadium was a dud. Football fans complained that the low seating made it difficult to see the entire field. Baseball fans complained that they had to twist in their seats to see the action at home plate. By trying to accommodate two sports, the stadium failed at both.
All dozen of the combination football-baseball stadiums built in the U.S. since then have garnered similar complaints. The only one still in use as a dual-sport venue, the Oakland Coliseum, consistently ranks among fans as one of the worst sports arenas on the continent. Yet despite this dismal record, some architects are considering multi-sport venues again.
PopSci asked Greg Sherlock, an architect at Kansas City–based Populous, the world’s leading stadium-design firm, to give us a look at the future. His concept: a truly transformable stadium, whose modular parts snap together like Legos in custom configurations.
Tata Commercializing City Car That Runs on Compressed Air
The Tata AirPod is a city car running on compressed air (as well as a battery-powered electric motor). The ease of converting air into an energy source using simple compressors means charging stations can be placed anywhere, and they require no provisioning — no trucks delivering gas, ethanol, or hydrogen — and they produce no emissions, just discharge of the air.
The AirPod can run 125mi (200k) at a top speed between 28 to 43mph (45 to 70kph). The car is intended for a single rider, and has a small cargo area in the back.
This is breakthrough design: it undercuts most of the negatives of the system it is designed to replace. And unlike other alternatives to traditional cars, it does not require an entire supply chain to exist before becoming practical in a single location. A city like New York could roll out a citywide fleet of AirPods Just like it is rolling out a bike sharing program (although the city’s bike share program has been delayed). It doesn’t need to build nuclear reactors, or deal with some hard-to-transport alternative fuel. In fact, New York City could simply repurpose existing gas stations or parking lots with compressors, and card readers.
Totally awesome. Here’s the future. There Just need to make them stackable, like this:
- Tata commercializing an air-powered car (reviews.cnet.com)
- Tata Brings Air Powered Car to India, Calls it AirPod (Video) (onlygizmos.com)
- Are Air Cars Really An Option, Or The Next Alt-Fuel Joke? (greencarreports.com)
(ht stoweboyd)
What socially beneficial uses can you think of for a billion loosely coupled, low power microprocessors and their associated sensors? Because in 20 years time, buying and deploying such a network will be cheap enough for city planners to consider it routine.
The logical end-point of Moore’s Law and Koomey’s Law is a computer for every square metre of land area on this planet — within our lifetimes. And, speaking as a science fiction writer, trying to get my head around the implications of this technology for our lives is giving me a headache.
We’ve lived through the personal computing revolution, and the internet, and now the advent of convergent wireless devices — smartphones and tablets. Ubiquitous programmable sensors will, I think, be the next big step, and I wouldn’t be surprised if their impact is as big as all the earlier computing technologies combined.
A Design-Based Approach to Living With Climate Change
The world’s population will top nine billion by 2060. Because of climate-change-induced environmental degradation, scientists project that tens of millions of people will move into today’s small and medium-size cities.
To prepare for the influx, says Dennis Frenchman, an architect and professor of urban planning at MIT, city designers must make decisions today to mitigate the migration of tomorrow. And those decisions should focus on making systems more efficient.
Transportation networks need to be rethought to limit congestion. Politicians should offer incentives to manufacturing firms to relocate to city centers to decrease the number of commuters.
Power generation and food production should become local, too; reducing transmission and transportation costs would keep prices lower. Further, Frenchman says, single-purpose-use spaces like shopping centers and housing developments should be swapped for mixed-use neighborhoods that contain homes, medical offices, stores, schools and offices. With essential services packed into one relatively small area, even the densest city would feel more like a small town.
(via Strategies for a Changing Planet: Shelter | Popular Science)
