How to Death-Proof a City
Cities are not static objects to be feared or admired, but are instead a living process that residents are changing all the time. Given how much bigger and more common cities are likely to become over the next century, we’ll need to change them even further.
Using predictive models from engineering and public health, designers will plan safer, healthier cities that could allow us to survive natural disasters, pandemics and even a radiation calamity that drives us underground.
But there is an even more radical way we’ll transform our cities. Over the next two centuries, we’ll probably convert urban spaces into biological organisms. By doing this, we will make ourselves ready to prevent two of the biggest threats to human existence: starvation and environmental destruction. . . .
Feed a Hungry City
In his book The Vertical Farm, Columbia environmental health professor Dickson Despommier argues that cities of the future might feed themselves by creating farms inside enormous, glass-walled skyscrapers where every floor is a solar-powered greenhouse. All the water in these skyscraper farms would be recycled, and the structures themselves would be designed to be carbon neutral. . . .
http://discovermagazine.com/2013/june/16-how-to-death-proof-the-cities-of-the-future#.UmWknflwpRQ
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Almost all of these types of exciting intelligent articles about future urban technology are as if written by the same person, who dwells in a larger bubble of either ignorance, naivete or denial.
We are going to engineer ever more healthy cities as they continue to become ever more overpopulated? Really?
Comically, we typically see such articles that are so fashionably environmentally concerned, and yet turn out to be totally lacking in basic ecological knowledge, completely forgetting that resources are not infinite. Just on the most basic level, what would all of this cost? Where would these staggering sums come from?
The extent of the denial, or whatever you want to call it, is clearly demonstrated by there being no real discussion of overpopulation. It is just that people are 'on the move.' What a wonderfully convenient gloss.
What do we suppose is driving these countless millions to move? Greater urban opportunities? Like not wanting to starve? Because of urban social programs--which will continue staggering forward forever?
Then there is the big 'must': We constantly read in these types of exciting futuristic predictions that people will be living merrily underground or in a single mega-skyscraper that will house hundreds of thousands of people, etc, all because we 'must' accommodate ever more future population swellings. But 'must' we?
Few would advocate that governments starve their people, but this 'must' mindset assumes that the world's ever mushrooming population growth is an absolute given and there is nothing that can be done about it. When in fact it is a result of pro-overpopulation policies all over the world, most notably and virulently on the part of Western nations that are throwing open their borders to the Third World, giving the impression that there is no real danger of massive population growth slamming up against environmental resource and social limitations, and that Western civilization itself is expendable, as the overlords of Western nations volunteer their land and their people to act as third-world overpopulation catch basins.
Several paragraphs are devoted to the vibrant future of an environmentally re-engineered London, which will only happen in the sense that London is already becoming demographically and socially re-engineered into a third-world Muslim 'Londonistan,' and so will not be enjoying such a science fiction makeover, as imagined mostly by today's Western head-in-the-clouds futurologists and the head-in-the-clouds reporters covering them.
But, okay, let's say that we and our science and our creativity somehow manage to scramble ahead of global overpopulation growth for another 100 years, resulting in no overly massive population crashes, but with even more dysfunctions than we have today, and a continuation of rampant species extinctions and resource wars. To quote the late ecologist Garrett Harden--'And then what?' We redouble our efforts so that the Earth's population can redouble again? As with open borders, who ever got to vote on this? Why should your highest goal, whether you are a cheap-labor corporation or an environmental planner, be to see how many more humans you can jam-pack onto the planet? What is the purpose? Where is the sanity? What is the purpose?
All of these good intentions--not so good on the part of some--simply tethers vastly more numbers of people ever farther out from basic sustainability, so that when the final population crash comes, it will be all the more devastating.
Another factor is that the human bounce-back after such a horrendous crash of civilization will be greatly complicated by the fact that when today's civilizations were built, natural resources were much more abundant There were pools of surface oil, etc. It is only very wealthy, technologically advanced and socially coherent nations that can be doing things like extreme slant drilling or harvesting resources from space. By definition, such nations will not exist after a global population crash.
In any case, most of this will be academic on our part, since the West will not be able to help itself or others because it will be demographically gone.
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