My next full-time project is to develop a collective panning solution for the "City of the Future." What will the city be called? Where will it be located? How will it work?
Rather than trying to answer these important questions as a small group of ordained "planners," my vision is to develop a system that allows anyone and everyone to participate. The greatness of the human condition is not limited to an ordained few, but woven throughout the tapestry of all kinds. So too, I believe that the some of the greatest ideas will come from some of the least expected sources.
Preparation to release the planning system has been completed, but help is needed. On a high level, "the project" (as it is called), has three building blocks:
- Categories: Health, recreation, urban planning, etc. Categories are tags with multiple levels that overlap, and within each category there are domain experts.
- Requirements: "Prevention over cure" may be a requirement for health. Each category has proposed and agreed requirements that define the type of decisions that are made.
- Articles: You contribute your ideas to solve the problems of the world as articles. If the contributors agree that your article meets the requirements, then it is deemed "final" for incorporation into the city plan.
The entire system relies on voting, and your vote REALLY counts in a new form of meritocracy. Each contributor will initially have one vote. As a contributor attracts more votes for their proposed contribution (categories, requirements, or articles), they in turn gain more votes to cast. Eventually, a well-received contributor will become a domain expert. In a perfect world, a classic education in urban planning should help a contributor to be a domain expert in the urban planning category, but not guarantee it. All content, from articles to requirements, will be subject to an ongoing discussion.
The city itself will have a series of general requirements that will drive overall development. Let me outline the four that are on my agenda (up for vote, of course):
- Limit Transportation: No cars; No oil-based vehicles; Heavy use of walking, biking, and light electric vehicles; Implement intelligent zoning and public transportation
- Preserve the Natural Environment: City construction to alter less than 25% of the habitat; Leverage indigenous species for food: Utilize local and renewable resources for all building and packaging materials
- Apply Best Practices from Corporate Governance to Government: All citizens are voting shareholders and owners of the city; Owners are guaranteed housing and services; Award shares and voting rights based on social contribution to the city, including the award of multiple votes per person:
- Education at All Levels is Free and Available at Any Time of Day or Night
The proposed requirements may fail, but I am rallying for your vote even now… Anyone that contributes an final article in the plan should receive citizenship, housing, education, and opportunities free of cost.
If you are interested in the "City of the Future" project, contact me through the comments to this post. Help is needed in multiple different areas just to get the project off the ground. Thanks!
* Limit Transportation: No cars; No oil-based vehicles; Heavy use of walking, biking, and light electric vehicles; Implement intelligent zoning and public transportation
Allow outside vehicles to approach, park, load/unload at the periphery of the city. Bar them from the center and pedestrian areas with signs or portable barriers which can be moved or adjusted according to time and need. For example, outside emergency medical or fire vehicles should be able to access any area at any time.
If no powered vehicles are to be available, then the site will need to be relatively flat.
If the city is to be allowed to grow over time, then radial or rectangular grid patterns should be employed by surveyors to standardize addressing, city planning, lot size, etc.
* Preserve the Natural Environment: City construction to alter less than 25% of the habitat; Leverage indigenous species for food: Utilize local and renewable resources for all building and packaging materials
If the site does not support agriculture, consider hydroponics, aeroponics, factory farming for internal consumption and export. Lettuce, mushrooms, sprouts, microgreens - crops with short growing cycles which can be grown vertically in climate controlled warehouses.
For raw materials export which do not impact the environment, consider: liquid air, dry ice, bottled nitrogen, oxygen, argon; water electrolyzed into hydrogen and oxygen.
For raw materials not indigenous to the site, consider recycling industries which import trash/garbage. Then consume internally and export for sale paper, cardboard, syngas (from plastics broken down under heat and pressure), glass, aluminum, etc.
* Apply Best Practices from Corporate Governance to Government: All citizens are voting shareholders and owners of the city; Owners are guaranteed housing and services; Award shares and voting rights based on social contribution to the city, including the award of multiple votes per person:
Tom Peters wrote of a practice in Telluride, CO at one time - direct representation, where referenda are discussed for a couple weeks and then voted upon by the citizens. The city council and/or manager are limited to executing policies proposed and determined by vote.
* Education at All Levels is Free and Available at Any Time of Day or Night
MIT’s online CourseWare. Project Gutenberg for copyright free books.
Backyard sustainability is a transferable model that produces enough food to feed your family in your backyard (no gas needed). Every home, street, community needs to have “local farmers.”
Government: all local, state, and federal departments now have 12 main “gateway” departments. Each month, a department will post proposed budget and the public will then vote on how to allocate tax $.
Cities may be much smaller in size because of the ability to get education, services, advice, support over the networks. They therefore can be leaner, much easier on their environment, much better integrated in their landscape, much more liveable. They can be specialised, value - oriented, allowing people to fully benefit from their physical proximity.
Good ideas can be shared over the net, so that each city is becoming a living laboratory for others. They may differ in many points: diversity is the mother of evolution.
Its more fun to live in a global community of ecocities - ir as I call them Global Villages - than just in a single one….
Practical Futurist available for hire. I’ve already built infrastructure for, or visited similar places (Europe & Asia) with parts of what you describe collecting to create the City-2.0
Write me before you’re ready to pour concrete.
Like yourself I’ve followed the Arcology principle since it’s inception. Where Arcosanti failed was merely in location.
If Paolo had planted it within Phoenix city limits, it would be thriving today, even while surrounded by suburban sprawl.
The three cardinal rules of Real Estate are:
1. Location
2. Location
3. Location
With that in mind I suggest you modify your 2nd City-2.0 rule to include: “…Or reduce urban sprawl building density by %75 to RESTORE local natural environment, converting depreciated inner urban or industrial space into smaller, more concentrated mixed-use commercial & wide open living space.”
Thus City-2.0 will be leaving refreshed areas for gardening & or small agricultural production.
Residents will want a ‘back yard’ for the kids’, and a pleasant ‘front porch’ vista for local adult residents. Every city should have abundant clean oxygen-producing plants we all need gardens & parks for community vistas, as well as the option of open space for renewable agriculture growth.
Colossal firestorms in urban California should show you that converting wilderness, while nice for individuals, is not a smart growth strategy for communities.
City 2.0 should reshape existing urban sprawl into intelligent design, giving both access to urban amenities, like major transportation hubs & industrial centers, as well as important life-style enhancements of theatre & other high-density society cultural events, which can only be had by close proximity to existing cities.
It’s been done in Europe, where MOST towns have every convenience within walking distance of home or work, and land between towns & cities are either agricultural, parks, or natural reserves.
Now let’s see about taking American cities to the next level.
Much more where that came from.
I left you a post elsewhere on this blog, but I wanted to leave a comment here as well. There an important consideration that I often see overlooked, and yet I believe sit at the foundation of a strong organizational culture: awareness of self.
I’m in the infant stages of a personal project related to self awareness, and I think many of the concepts are very relevant and important to not overlook when piling a lot of different people from different places, cultures, religions and value systems into one location. More than just an effective government system, we need tools for communication that enable us to work together and avoid the subversive effects of personal ‘baggage’ that each person may subconsciously bring into the mix. There are a great deal of socially-conscious organizations that have fragmented due to the strain of inter-personal relations, without having effective moderation tools in place to ensure we are the combination of our strengths and common interest.
Essentially, I’m speaking of the concept of self-actualization (see Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs) but on a collective-consciousness level, reflected in the entity we form/create as a group. As individuals, I believe we reach the greatest levels of potential through self-actualization, and I expect that this is equally true with the collective. I’d just like to ensure that in considering something of this magnitude, that we consider more than just the ‘Body’ of the city, but also its ‘Mind’ and ‘Soul’.
My two cents that I’d love to continue discussing sometime soon…
OK… Um, how about Internet based interpersonnal communications?
For instance: Adeo, have you set up a website for City2.0? …Would you like help with such a project?
Just bloggin here might push City2.0 ahead of your other projects.
Mark, cities range from thousands to millions of residents, so sometimes communication takes a back seat to structure, function, safety, or comfort. After infrastructure, then Neighborhoods & Villages are created with good interpersonal communication, and cities are stregnthened by groups of them.
Build it, and they will come… However; you can lead a person to water, but you cannot make them drink it.
First let’s create a structure that can be ecological, residential, commercial, economically sustainable, and attractive enough to draw city-sized populations away from wasteful modern urban sprawl.
From that point we can encourage the desire to communicate. Would the suggestion of free Wi-Fi, or maybe a locally City-2.0 Project owned Internet Provider help?
A distributed, scaleable power system based on renewable sources (solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, wind, biomass driving sterling engines) which co-generate electricity from rooftops, wells, and basement furnaces.
Excess electricity from these varied and inconsistent sources is stored as hydrogen, in deep cycle batteries, buried flywheels, supercapacitors, or water pumped to a higher elevation for hydroelectric conversion later.
i, too, am an arcosanti grad circa 1970.
then stanford, then harvard (architecture),
then SF,then NYC, then Rome Prize 1990, then back to nyc.
It’s always about making many small, smart decisons rather than a few large ones. A narrative also helps..to flesh out the “movie”.
how does one move through a day, a night, a season, a year? 10 years?
Making a place that has authentic reasons for exisiting and in fact is based on PLACE.
Authenticity happens over time not as a branding idea. I will continue to follow this thread..instaresting!
Kevin: Cities certainly grow to that size, but you set the tone for any project from the start, rather than letting the old patterns of communication and cultural stratification set in. Having spent over 10 years in community development, I often see these sorts of considerations coming to the forefront late in projects as reactive afterthoughts, rather than a proactive systemic approach to the issue.
Ironically enough, this has a lot similarities to Massive Multiplayer Online Games - if you build a cool gathering place with all the bells and whistles, but don’t considering how to guide the experience in a positive fashion, large groups of people often lose their way and fall back to disruptive patterns of communication.
My main point is that many people are very excited to build the ‘ultimate machine’ without considering how to build a an effective inter-personal system to guide that machine. Most people who have built a company (or organization) from the ground up will recognize the importance of ‘company culture’. While it is an organic process of discovery, it also requires conscious involvement from the leaders or vision-keepers. As the number of vision-keepers increases, effective tools for moderation are essential to help keep egos in check and keeping political fragmentation from creating stagnation, like we see so frequently in so many aspects of our society.
Mark, communications tools exist already. Your suggestion is to choose an effective one. Do you have a specific solution?
The trick with communications, like having too many meetings in any corporation, is to be able to exchange information without pausing (or halting) the primary mission.
Before one can have that ‘town-hall’ meeting, the first brick must be placed in mortar.
Check out pg. 64 of Wired, Feb. 2008: “Linked Hybrid”, a city within a city. The description is similar to the definition of an arcopolis, where residents may not have to leave the towers for work. Water-recycling, geothermal-power, stores, skywalks, and apartments.
Mark, laying a good communications ‘foundation’ is a reasonable goal. What do you propose? From your suggestions one could infer anything from ‘barn raising’ block parties; to plant vegetable gardens, or build playgrounds for children at the foot of the Arcology, or a multi-user virtual town hall, where avatars can meet, discuss & vote on important issues for the growing City 2.0.
That is a wide range of choices, with a lot of room for variations in between. Since I’m new to this sort of community building, would you please provide a specific example (or more) of how to implement ‘company culture’ or branding for City 2.0?
While I’m a Telecommunications & IT engineer, so reliable communications is my speciality, brick & mortar (&copper & fiber) are more my forte’. Today I was figuring out how to garage & power up Adeo’s Tesla, without negatively impacting the ’streetless’ feel of City 2.0s’ Arcology.
Adeo,
For some nice ‘bling’ check out SolFocus CPV (Concentrated Photovotaic technology). Any large office, home, or apartment complex would shine day & night with arrays of these lensed CPV panels arrainged on every (otherwise unused) vertical or horizontal southern exposure.
If you’re checking out Teslas, you might want to take a drive over to their Mountain View headquarters, it’s right there in the south bay Valley.
I want to live in a such city, too.
I have read about this project in Business Week and posted an article in my blog which is in Turkish.
FYI: I found a few related Arcology/Eco-city sites, one right in your neighborhood:
Treasure Island restoration & eco-project
http://www.arup.com/americas/project.cfm?pageid=9639
Accross the ‘pond’ a new Eco-city, designed for half a million residents; Dongtan:
http://www.arup.com/arup/feature.cfm?pageid=9872
A badly mismanaged, but good concept was & remains the New Jersey Co-Op City:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-op_City,_Bronx
With room for 40,000 residents, in 15,000 apartments of various size, Co-Op City is probably closest to what you were proposing with the City 2.0 concept. Built in a swamp by corrupt unions, and partly mismanaged by corrupt officials over 30 years, it still comes closest to the owner-controlled community you envisioned.
Add better & more modern Power, transportation and Recycling, and this is a very simple upgrade to a real living Arcology.
With just slightly better Architecture, with unified pedestrian walkways, covered multi-story parking garages, and sloping terraced condominiums, like at Alt-Erlaa and City 2.0 could be an easy sell.
Add a few big-box stores to anchor the shopping malls, and start your own Telsa Taxi service, and everything pays for itself quickly.
Also note that Co-Op City only uses %20 of it’s available land. This fits nicely with your vision of City 2.0
I have lived in more than a dozen places in US, China and Europe. One place is a city built by R. E. Simon and so he gave the place his own name Reston. A doctor tried to build a utopian community here before but he died of a disease. Mr. Simon is a success. On one Earth day, I had the opportunity to listen to Mr. Simon about his 7 principles for the new town concept. Today about 65,000 people live and work here. This could be a useful example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reston,_Virginia).
According to my observations, the two most important factors for a better city are:1)the people,what they do for a living, and its culture, and 2)the transportation.
The diversity of the working and recreational activities of citizens suggests that personal transportation system is the most effective way. For a moment, please forget car. Or for that matter, forget about technology limitations. Just wish you have a magic vehicle to move you around, like Aladdin’s flying carpet. Most of the time you need a personal transportation. Examples of existing personal transportation include walking, bike, motorcycle, and car.
The right question is to design a better personal transportation. I have invented one called Autoway Personal automated transportation system. (http://www.acroscape.com/transportation.html). It uses electricity and has a fuel efficiency of 500 miles/gallon. I need $10 million to build a fully functional test system. Just need $120,000 to build the vehicle in my garage.
With this, we can build the garden city of tommorrow(http://www.acroscape.com/garden.pdf). The city will have three networks of transportation: Autoway, road, and trail. Notice the separation of street from road. Street is no longer a complete network, but only exists near buildings and is primarily for walking. Occasionally, ambulance, fire trucks, buses, and shipping trucks may get into a street.
This concept can be used to build a new city or convert existing cities into more livable urban villages.
Of course, the technology is in the development stage. There will be evolutions. The main idea will stay.
I am currently working with a group of Kenyans to develop a Utopian community in the village of Maardani just outside of Mombasa. This is something I would be very interested in working with, and would like some information about it.
I am very supportive of the corporate voting system and absence of internal combustion engines
Hengning Wu has wonderful ideas. In spite of the rosy picture he paints of Reston, I have personally sat in ‘Rush-Hour’ gridlock, commuting between Reston & McClean, Crystal City, or to anywhere in Maryland, and the greater Washington D.C. suburbs.
I very specifically left contracting around the Beltway(as the greater metropolitan Washington D.C. region is designated) due to over a decade of experiencing gridlocked commutes. Few working for the government or it’s commerce can predict commute ‘windows’ less than 45 minutes, or all-too-often greater than 3 hours long, along the same routes!
Hengning Wu’s Autoway reads like a fantastic solution to the troubled traffic currently & daily along Route7 (the main drag through most of Reston).
Please don’t wait until City 2.0 to apply the Autoway solution, if it can be built around northern Virginia & WDC.
How do you plan to get subscribers to pay fares on this system? Would you use an extension of the current Metro-pass (part of the greater metropolitan WDC light-rail & subway system)?
How would the Autoway be integrated into (or replace?) the current transportation grid?
How do you propose financing construction of the Autoway? That region is already deluged with N.VA bonds, and very costly motorways like the Dulles Toll Road.
Dr. Gridlock would love to know, I’m quite sure.
Could you please send to me the contacts of developer of your site? It looks so damn good!
Thanks for sharing
Animal traction as a practical solution for the input/output balance of farming.
http://www.smallfarmersjournal.com is only a pale electronic shadow of the vibrant, rowdy, passionate, rebellious, disciplined, dedicated community that makes up the community of practical horse powered farming.
Farming is not so much science as art with an overlay of craft.
Our industrial system of food production will not stand. It was temporary. And toxic.
PS Arcosanti’s peach orchard looks ok, better than the last time I saw it.
Dear Adeo, I recently organized a nonprofit corporation to formalize years of work and move forward the concepts of the Transitional Urban Village. Such villages will facilitate the transition from car-dependent to car-free living as well as provide affordable and low environmental impact living. In a follow-up, the Holigent Solution would introduce a hybrid local economy that would provide economic security, social harmony and high quality of life even during economic hard times.
To emphasize urgency, I am presenting our project as The Transition Race to Peace and Sustainability and proposing a demonstration project in Los Angeles to coincide with the Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan approved by LA City Council in 2007.
In a 3-minute video I give a brief introduction: http://www.holigent.org/Site/The_LA_P%26S_Project.html
You are welcome to go from there to explore the concept of the Transitional Urban Village and the Holigent Solution on the other pages of our website.
I will be glad to contribute constructive ideas to the “City of the Future†Project. If you have an interest to discuss these ideas further please contact me.
[…] is a working prototype of the software for planning the City of the Future (COTF) written in Ruby on Rails. However, given the fact the design goal is a repository of […]
A new energy company is about to be formed by myself and a few other eco minded folks in Bend, OR that could drasticallly change your entire approach. This approach may stem from a recent development that allows extracting oil from a particular plant thus allowing use of every americans most important material item… the car.
As a builder and conservationist I agree with most all of your principles regarding eco sustainability but I have to drive to go see you.
I commend your approach and look forward to hearing from you all.