Surroundings, Settings, and Situations
A city is not gauged by its length and width, but by the broadness of its vision and the height of its dreams.
—Herb Caen, columnist and author
Where trade routes met or a body of water was used as a port or a mother lode of something valuable was found, cities inevitably blossomed nearby. Throughout history, cities have been the heart of the social, cultural, and economic development that has made up much of the fabric of civilization. With cities came divisions of labor, which gave people the time to create cultures and which freed them from the grim drudgery of subsistence living.
And as cities prospered, they grew in size as people moved from farms to factories. But just because they were big doesn’t mean they were the best places in which to reside. In fact, a large population base has been both a hindrance and a help when figuring out whether a city is a super place to live.
As a fuel source coal provided a cheap and efficient source of energy for steam engines, furnaces, forges, and homes across the country. It spurred massive economic growth and was considered a boon for cities. Not until recently have we seen the kickback for the overuse of fossil fuels.
Buildings and urban infrastructure account for 40 percent of raw-material use, one-third of energy consumption, and 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, in addition to having ecological footprints several hundred times larger than their actual acreage, according to UN-Habitat.[1]
Problems that are already visible today—land and food shortages, heavy traffic loads, urban and global warming, congestion, and air pollution, to name a few—will worsen in the future. Consequently, scientists and other practitioners have been looking into measures to address these challenges, especially when reenvisioning old and making innovative plans for new buildings. Creators of supercities will have to find answers for how to supply the needs of megapopulations and manage metros of twenty to one hundred million people and all their trappings.[2]
In 1800 about one out of every twenty Americans lived in cities.[3] In 1860 no city in the United States had a million inhabitants.[4] By 1890 New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia had passed the million mark, and by 1900 New York had 3.5 million people (then the second-largest city in the world).[5]
Around 1790, spurred by the onset of the Industrial Revolution, country folks started to feel the pull of the city, because new and better-paying jobs were far superior to farm labor and subsistence living. At the dawn of the 1800s, on average only about one out of every twenty Americans lived in cities, but one hundred years later many cities had grown by about 35 percent.[6] Cities were becoming fashionable in addition to offering preferable employment.
Between 1880 and 1890 almost 40 percent of the townships in the country lost population because of migration to cities.[7] The development of multistory buildings and public transportation made it easier for people to find places to live that were more accessible to their employment.
Since then the population of cities has more than doubled. People were drawn to cities because of employment opportunities that made their labor more valuable due to division of labor. When on the farm, people had to work for everything. They grew their own food, made their own clothes with materials garnered from animals they raised, built their own shelters, had only a modest choice of goods—nothing as exotic as wine or spices—and had little time for recreation. It was a hand-to-mouth existence.[8]
At the turn of the nineteenth century, about three out of ten people populated US cities. The proportion changed dramatically by 1920 to about one out of two, then two out of three in the 1960s. By the end of this century, about 80 to 90 percent of US residents will live in cities.[9]
After WWII the “American Dream” was life outside the city, complete with a car, white picket fence, 2.4 children, 1.0 dog or cat, a little green grass, a backyard barbeque, and maybe even a pool.[10] Fleeing the hordes in the city, “suburbanites” coveted their single-family dwellings, improved schools and parks, shopping centers, commuting in their own cars, drive-through living, and a sense of the peace, privacy, and comfort living in the “country.” They wanted upward mobility and clean, safe places to live. The luxuries of suburbia beckoned—but not for everyone.
Until the Fair Housing Act was enacted in 1968, government-sponsored home loans could be granted based on the color of one’s skin—Caucasian was “get-ahead green” and red was everything else. Fully 98 percent of home loans were granted to white folks; the process of excluding all others was called redlining.[11] Ever wonder why the majority of people living in suburbia look the same even now? According to Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for the New York Times specializing in civil property–related racism, even though redlining is illegal, every year four million people of color face rejection of their loan and insurance applications.[12]
At the pace humankind is reproducing, we will reach a population of 9.7 billion within the next thirty years. Every day another 250,000 humans are born.[13] The population of the United States will pass a half billion by 2050, and when the earliest baby boomers reach the age of eighty, they will have witnessed the population of the world triple.
Within thirty-five years more than one hundred cities will have populations larger than 5.5 million people,[14] including twenty-seven supercities with ten million and close to twenty megacities with approximately thirty million inhabitants.
This puts an incredible strain on dwindling resources. The effects of overpopulation are becoming more radical: increasing global surface temperatures, depletion and pollution of the biosphere’s resources, waste of water, species extinction, and deforestation. These conditions have been around for many years, but their growth is becoming more swift and alarming.
We have to think about and plan for not only where we are going to put all these people but also how to do it economically, swiftly, sustainably, and humanely. At present the world’s cities occupy only about 2 percent of the earth’s surface but house almost 60 percent of its population.[15] And as cities grow, they also seem to become outrageously expensive; the two most expensive places to live in the United States are San Francisco and New York.
According to the US Census Bureau, 80 percent of the population were already living in urban areas in 2010.[16] More than 95 percent of the country’s most populous state, California, live in metro areas,[17] and that number is projected to grow. Many cities are building “up” because they have no room in any other direction. San Francisco and New York are good examples. The total area covered by the world’s cities is set to triple in the next forty years. This will make inner-city property the next to be gentrified.[18] This rush to cities is exacerbating already monumental problems of traffic congestion, air pollution, lack of dependable power, lack of public transportation, larger parking lots, and flawed overbuilding.
Over the years a subtle shift had taken place. Younger people seeking more affordable, more fashionable, or newer housing were moving from older suburbs to exurbs—rural areas surrounding suburbs—resulting in the decline of the suburban nation.
In the past couple of decades, there’s been a “great inversion.”[19] For the first time in nearly a hundred years, the rate of urban population growth has outpaced suburban growth. This is going to cause problems in that cities are already crowded, expensive, sometimes dangerous, and, with ever-decreasing land to build on, lacking places to put people. We are long overdue for beginning to plan for contemporary megametro locations to ensure they’re healthy, self-contained, sustainable, and economic to build, operate, and occupy.
The children of baby boomers have eschewed the lifestyle of backyards, burbs, and barbeques. Millennials haven’t experienced a baby boom of their own and are also delaying the launching of one. At present, the nation’s birthrate is going down, and there are more baby boomers and seniors in many suburbs than there are families with young children.[20] The taxpayer base in suburbs is increasingly made up of older folks, as millennials are choosing to settle in urban areas, leading to the decay of suburbia. Aging boomers don’t care about schools, more parks, or recreation; they want the support services they’ll need as they age.[21]
Millennials and Gen Xers are not buying single-family dwellings; instead, they’re renting, and some are still living with their parents or grandparents, in part because of hefty student debt, tight mortgage-lending standards, and the heavy buy-in price and extra cost of the traditional suburban lifestyle. Homeownership levels among heads of households thirty-five years or younger was at 36 percent in 2015, the lowest figure since the Department of Commerce started tracking that data quarterly in 1994.[22]
Millennials no longer desire—nor can they afford to buy—supersized suburban McMansions (homes built between 2001 and 2007 and having between three thousand and five thousand square feet of space).[23] Even more modest homes are being priced out of reach. Construction of single-family homes fell by about one-third between 2005 and 2015, and construction of apartments and condos is at the highest level in forty years.[24] Malls used to be a big draw in the suburbs, but now anchor stores like Macy’s, Sears, and JCPenney are closing by the hundreds, and other chains are moving from suburban areas back to cities.
Millennials are getting older, and studies show they want to live where they can walk for recreation, services, and shopping—whether that’s in or outside of a city. More than 60 percent of millennials have chosen to rent over buying a home.[25] They are the country’s biggest migrators, representing 43 percent of the United States’ most restive population, despite making up only 23 percent of the total population.[26]
Millennials and even some baby boomers are ditching the suburbs for major metros everywhere. And regardless of age, urban dwellers see eye to eye on their vision for the future. They want city life punctuated by parks and playgrounds, an increased ability to bike or walk around their neighborhoods, but also a “bright lights, big city” atmosphere.
It behooves us to remind ourselves of the potential population bomb—humans aren’t just prolific and the apex species on earth. Humans make up the only species capable of radically expanding its population, changing the face of the earth; the singular species that can increase its life span, and force other species into extinction through pollution, tampering with the environment, greed and appetite; and the only species capable of causing its own demise in more ways than one.
The question is not really which is fading but how things are changing. In gentrified areas the best and most expensive real estate—whether in a city or a town—is occupied by the well-to-do, either from being there first or by seeking out the best parts of a city to gentrify. But whether their inhabitants are wealthy or not, cities of tomorrow have to be elderly-friendly, color-blind, and age-neutral.
Cities and suburbs alike started to suffer when major manufacturing markets pulled up stakes and moved because of economic conditions, costing people their jobs. Property values plummeted in places where manufacturing was key, and the cities fell into decay. Suburbs started to languish because young people either couldn’t afford the price tag or didn’t care for their parents’ lifestyle. Tax bases began to stagnate, and “anchor stores” in towns and malls started to shut their doors.
In the suburbs cars became a necessity for getting anywhere—one result of suburban sprawl and some pollution. Goods and services in low-density neighborhoods are farther away, and walking to get anywhere can be difficult. Many places in the burbs are unsafe due to traffic, especially for children. Autos create four times the carbon footprint of higher-density neighborhoods and require roads, parking, and auto support systems. Chauffeuring is required to and from children’s playdates and activities, as well as for doctor’s appointments, requiring more time and miles logged by those who are already driving to work. This is also increasingly a problem for boomers who are partially responsible for their parents’ financial, physical, and emotional care as well.[27]
The compulsory commute junket is expensive, for both one’s wallet and well-being. According to Ivica Marc, a personal trainer at Exceed Physical Culture in New York City, “If you are sitting in a car, train, or bus for long periods of time every workday, you are putting yourself at risk for heart disease, diabetes, and premature death.”[28] And commuting to and from work harms our psychological health and social lives; it can be even more exhausting than the work itself.[29]
Research has been mounting that establishes a link between the sprawl of our living spaces and the rise of obesity, blood sugar, blood pressure, body weight, and metabolic risks—even a rise in divorce.[30] In the burbs, even the fairly useless grass is imported, fertilized, doused with herbicides, and protected by neighborhood landscaping codes in many places.
When one’s kids are young, living outside the city might feel safer, but when one’s parents get older, suburbia can become a prison, because older folks need to be driven everywhere and looked after. It may turn out that staying in the burbs will be less healthy or safe and provide less opportunity for independence.
A disturbing trend is the demise of the mainstay sport of suburbia: golf. More than eight hundred courses have closed their clubhouse doors in the past decade. The Sports and Fitness Industry Association claims that millennials between the ages of eighteen and thirty agree with Mark Twain, who supposedly said that golf is a good walk ruined, or they just can’t afford the previous generation’s country club lifestyle.[31]
In high-density cities you can walk just about everywhere. City residents now prefer to drive a mile or two instead of ten or twenty, and they own one car instead of two. The mantra “Location, location, location” is being replaced by “Access, access, access.” Cities are starting to go country as they value walking and biking, green surroundings, contact with cultural interests, and living within their means. Urban planners are taking notice all over the country. It may seem counterintuitive, but in denser cities ten times more tax money per acre is generated than by their country cousins.[32]
Like middle-age spread, urban bottoming-out is due to poor planning, overexploitation of resources, greed building over green building, poor public transportation, and overreliance on cars.
City populations have suffered from a concentration of inequalities, including poor housing, low-quality education, unemployment, and difficulty or inability to access certain public services, such as health care, welfare, and green spaces, in addition to the decay of high-density neighborhoods into ghettos.
Making cities green and healthy for everyone goes far beyond simply reducing greenhouse gases and planting turf or a tree here and there. A holistic and healthy approach to the environment and resources has to be adopted. For example, suburban redevelopment and rapid transit in Atlanta were planned around downtown areas, including twenty-two miles of parks and developments, in a loop around—not through—city neighborhoods.[33]
According to John Wilmoth, director of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, “Managing urban areas has become one of the most important development challenges of the 21st century. Our success or failure in building sustainable cities will be a major factor in the success of a United Nations development agenda.”[34] Neighborhoods have to be inclusive and open, protected by proactive choices, making funding more equitable and ensuring that no neighborhood is forgotten in urban planning.
In New York City the record-breaking 432 Park Avenue is taking housing to new heights—1,396 feet to be exact, standing as the tallest residential building in the world and the second-tallest building in New York City.[35] It’s also taking shots from detractors who are saying that it’s too skinny and too rich. In fact, it has come to light that many of the most luxurious residential projects are also conspicuous consumers of energy and that they create a chasm of lost sunlight in the “street canyons” below.
Many people are suggesting that urban building and zoning codes have to be changed or at least relaxed. Some urban planners want to bring back a disappearing concept called “the missing middle,” complexes of small condos or individual units with shared outdoor space. It’s the happy medium between a single-family, detached home and a ten-plus–unit apartment. Think of them as more practical urban models of tiny homes, which are becoming chic for some folks but unrealistic for a lot of lifestyles and city codes.
City planners, designers, and forward-looking thinkers are pushing the limits of creative thinking to envision future cities of all types. From super-skyscrapers soaring many thousands of feet upward, cities floating on or under water, burrowing underground, in orbit, or creating skylines on other planets—the only limit is imagination. Cities of the future will include
floating sea cities
high-rise or rooftop farms
3D-printed homes
buildings with their own microclimates
huge bridges that span entire cities
spaceports with easy access to the moon and Mars
superhigh buildings
underwater and underground cities
collapsible and stackable living pods[36]
Getting around in the United States is becoming a huge hassle. Our roads, highways, and bridges are desperately in need of repair. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gives the United States a D for its roads and a C for its bridges—which is generous grading.[37] The US Department of Transportation estimates that almost $1 trillion is needed to revamp the current interstate and highway system in the country.[38] Unfortunately, there won’t be many highways improved or bridges repaired because we can’t afford to maintain what we already have. And research shows that reducing highway congestion by adding more lanes—a phenomenon called “induced demand”—is counterproductive as it ultimately just adds more wheels on the pavement.
“Traffic jams are getting worse, queues longer and transport networks more prone to delays, power outages more common.” The United States is a backward country when it comes to passenger trains. As anyone who has visited Europe, Japan, or Shanghai knows, trains that travel at 200+ mph have become everyday modes of transportation.[39]
It’s time we design a future where driverless cars, aerodrones, and new-age subways zip around, under, or over skyscrapers, and vertical gardens are in hyperconnected, energy-efficient “smart cities.” The alternative is being trapped in endless traffic jams while infrastructure crumbles and pollution overwhelms the remaining declining green spaces.
Several cities are starting to ban one of our most cherished personal possessions—the car. And it may be one of the safest and healthiest things to do. In 1900 nobody was killed by cars in the United States because they were few and far between. Just twenty years later, as Peter Norton, a professor at the University of Virginia, wrote in his book Fighting Traffic, more than two hundred thousand people were killed by cars. In 1925 alone, cars killed about six thousand children.[40] And with small, self-driving electric vehicles (EVs), skyports, drone delivery service, and mass transit, there will be less need for autos and trucks, parking, driveways, and pavement and more room for playgrounds, parks, and housing. Cities have become far too car-centric; autos and trucks are far too much a part of people’s lifestyle; and vehicles make city walking more like a bullfight than a stroll. The car, Norton points out, is the lowest-density means of transportation—and most expensive mode of transportation. In the United States more than 90 percent of all trips were taken by car; too few people are moved in a single vehicle and too much fossil fuel is used moving them.[41]
Walk Friendly Communities is a national recognition program developed to encourage towns and cities across the country to make safer walking environments, and in 2011 the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center announced the selection of eleven Walk Friendly Communities across the country.[42] Cities such as Los Angeles (no kidding) and Seattle aim to reduce parking spaces and convert some roads and bridges for use by pedestrians and bikes. A good model for them may be Las Ramblas in Barcelona, Spain—a tree-lined thoroughfare.
A megacity generally has a population of around ten million. In the future, supercities might top out at one hundred million or more.[43] It’s been estimated that by 2100 we can anticipate cities of 140 million people—picture Tokyo, Mexico City, New York, São Paulo, Mumbai, New Delhi, and Shanghai all rolled into one.[44]
A supercity can be humankind’s dream place. It is a self-contained, quality living organism where there is enough affordable housing that is close to healthy outdoors experiences; the air is refreshing; the water is pure; energy is clean, ample, and inexpensive; food is grown, raised, or produced within one hundred miles of the consumer; building materials are recycled sustainable, and green; transportation is easy and affordable; and all the necessities and luxuries of life are nearby and do not require an oil tycoon’s bank account.
The problems and challenges supercities will face include the issues of carbon-neutral environments, how to control urban sprawl and traffic congestion, how to solve the predicament of the homeless, and how to organize, be administered, and be operated sustainably. Adoption of widescale use of renewable energy will be embraced, waste management will become a major industry, and biodiversity will enhance the natural environment. Green transport systems, innovative materials, and construction methods will be utilized; and a diverse population will enjoy a healthy outdoor environment. Some of these enhancements are already being applied or experimented with today, and some are in various stages of planning for use tomorrow.
As more people flood cities, straining already bulging budgets, stretching resources, and staggering city services, some suggestions and solutions will sound reasonable and practical, while others will be the stuff of both science and fiction.
San Francisco and Manhattan are good examples of city price-out and bound-up boundaries—they have no room to build, save straight up. Following the collapse of the housing market in 2007, the median price of a home was around $700,000 in San Francisco, compared to today’s whopping $1.25 million plus, and some rents increased in 88 percent of the nation’s biggest cities.[45] When a city begins to run out of horizontal space, it only has a few choices—go vertical, go radical, or go to hell.
Middle-class employees such as teachers, office workers, city workers, and retail workers have been priced out of cities. And don’t look to the suburbs for relief—they are bursting their borders too. In places where there were pasturelands a couple of years ago, there are now hundreds of houses, condos, and apartment buildings. And the cost, whether buying or renting, is an unbelievable and unrelenting upward arrow, creating a population of “haves”—and saying to hell with the “have-nots.”
Creating or maintaining a city’s “greenprint” is a tough goal while controlling a rapidly expanding city. And while managing sustainable energy, water, and waste, as well as fostering sensible growth, leaders must keep a green city economically viable and sustainable for the long haul.
Cities of the future will strive to be carbon-neutral—that means they will run entirely on renewable energy, with little or no carbon footprint. Masdar, in Abu Dhabi, might be the first carbon-neutral city in the world, which is ironic since it is being built through the sale of the country’s rich oil reserves. At present no carbon-free cities are being planned in the United States.[46]
As we move farther away from the natural world, contact with it becomes more valuable: Urban designers now recognize that access to green space is an important part of people’s quality of life. From New York to Singapore, the world’s great cities are now placing heightened importance on new and existing green spaces with sustainable urban planning, with the hope of protecting their futures, for both physiological and psychological well-being.[47]
The answer to the question of how smart building can be may lie with big data and the so-called internet of things (IoT), where objects previously dumb are made smart by being connected to one other. One way to accomplish this is to plant sensors throughout a city’s lands (or in its buildings) to make up a city dashboard, which takes the pulse of the city. This will allow multiple systems to be joined and ultimately work more efficiently to monitor everything from energy use to water and waste, city temperature, traffic patterns, and security. When systems do not “talk” to one another, they operate in isolation, and facility staff are unable to get a holistic view of building performance. This is one of the reasons why building energy management systems (BEMS) emerged to integrate a multitude of disparate systems and functions.[48]
There are those who will loudly howl or silently grumble that this is nothing less than a precursor to Brave New World, or 1984, where “Big Brother” is looking over, under, and around your shoulder. This is partly true. But it is a compromise of privacy in exchange for safety. (See chapter 8, “Getting Somewhere from Someplace.”)
Fossil fuels still represent over 80 percent of total energy supplies in the world today.[49] But extensive use of alternative energy sources will allow cities to eventually achieve carbon neutrality. And with the advent of modular smaller grids, not only will power outages be eliminated but an excess of energy will also be left, to be saved or shared on other small electrical grids, which can be connected to larger county, state, or national grids to help create, save, and distribute energy where it might be needed.
One of the first options that should be considered is establishing net zero carbon dioxide–clean cities. Only a couple of these are being built in the world today, and none is being planned in the United States.
California’s Energy Commission unanimously passed a law mandating that all new residential buildings up to three stories tall must be equipped with solar panels by 2020, making California the first state in the nation to mandate access to solar in virtually every new home. In addition, the new provisions include a push to increase battery storage and reliance on electricity over natural gas. This is seen as a key measure to decarbonize the building sector—an area that, when electricity use is factored in, represents the second-largest source of greenhouse gases in the state. The rule will likely eclipse the state’s current energy-efficiency goal, approved in 2007, requiring all new homes to be zero net energy users by 2020, which regulators now say is not enough to offset a building’s use of fossil fuel–derived electricity at night.[50]
Battery storage in homes and businesses (and electric cars) will eventually serve as a giant electricity bank for renewable resources. In this scenario, known as “partial grid defection,” homeowners would generate and store 80 to 90 percent of their electricity on-site and use the grid only as a backup—transforming buildings into small power plants and minigrids.[51] (See chapter 9, “Priorities for Power.”)
Water, thankfully, will probably not be an issue in the future. We get water from lakes, rivers, and underground sources such as aquifers. These, along with water saved in cisterns, water desalinized from oceans, and water treated from toilets to tap, are being used for drinking water. This will be accomplished by using state-of-the-art treatment technologies powered by solar energy. Potable water will be stored, ready to use in buildings. Used water will be cleaned and filtered underground via something much like mini–electrical grids, in cisterns or aquifers, where the water will be stored and ready to be used again and again.
Concerns that are already being addressed in some cities are the food deserts (where there are fewer places to get fresh and healthy groceries but where there are plenty of fast food and liquor stores) and the rising demand for fresh food from farm to fork. One of the solutions is “vertical farming,” or “agri-tecture,” which is based on farming that grows upward, around, in, or on buildings and can produce more than enough for residents. Today’s largest vertical farm is located in Michigan and is home to seventeen million plants.[52] Other types of soilless farming include hydroponics, aeroponics, and aquaponics, which produce fruits and vegetables, fish, and ducks simultaneously. (See chapter 10, “Provisioning the Populace.”)
As governments look for ways to adopt green construction codes, they will put more pressure on the construction industry to change the way buildings are designed, constructed, operated, and dissembled. Bleeding-edge materials, innovative uses of old materials, and various applications for recycled materials are nothing short of mind-stretching.
Thanks to recent advances in robotics, computing, and other technologies, a growing number of scientists and engineers think robot-made housing might finally be possible soon. Robotic construction will increase the speed of construction, improve its quality, and lower its price. (See chapter 7, “Bleeding-Edge Building Supplies.”)
Buildings that are abandoned and that have physically deteriorated are another vexing problem that older cities face and a plague in all parts of the country. As a quarter of Detroit’s population drained out of the city from 2000 to 2010, tens of thousands of buildings became hazards instead of homes.[53] A survey examining vacant land and abandoned structures in seventy cities found that on average, 15 percent of a city’s land was deemed vacant.[54] For a city with a rapidly growing population but fixed boundaries, vacant land and deserted buildings can represent a key competitive asset for economic development. They can create various kinds of jobs, increase tax revenue, improve infrastructure, and attract new residents, merchants, and money for improvement.[55] They can be reclaimed as opportunities for productive reuse, as solar farms, urban farms, community gardens, open land, general reclamation, and distribution centers for the future dwellers of metro centers.
Plans for reclaiming, stabilizing, and revitalizing neighborhoods will not only stimulate economic recovery and growth but will also help to eliminate a growing problem—arson. The US Fire Administration estimates that there are more than twenty-eight thousand fires annually in vacant residences and that 37 percent of these fires were intentionally set, resulting in $900 million in property damage and numerous deaths and injuries each year.[56]
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Department of Transportation (DOT), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and several other agencies have made available hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to support the planning and implementation of projects to promote sustainable communities.[57] Federal and state grants for historic buildings have also helped finance these efforts. Investment funding is available for a variety of uses, including community planning, affordable housing, technical assistance, and capital infrastructure. To help navigate the complex maze of opportunities Reconnecting America has compiled a list of all upcoming programs and deadlines.[58]
In a smartly controlled building, comfort zones will be monitored by computers that will offer middle-of-the-road temperatures, or something like a constant humidity-controlled 72 to 78°F, depending on weather and, in living spaces, on one’s age and gender.
A recent report by Christian Aid indicates that more than a billion people in coastal cities will be vulnerable to severe flooding and extreme weather due to climate change by 2070.[59]
The architecture group Terreform One adopts a counterintuitive but practical approach in its Governors Hook project in New York. Instead of keeping water out, the design allows the water in, to be stored or moved by many methods, from permeable pavement to redirection to building up. Many architects suggest preventing a siege mentality that would require people to fight a losing battle with the elements.[60]
The choices of where and how to live in the future will make the science fiction of yesterday morph into the facts of tomorrow. Imagine urban visions on the horizon of the future: living as a terrestrial on or under the earth, as an aquarian on or under water, as a citizen of the sky in massive skyscrapers, or as a space colonist in orbit or on other planets.
We can also do what ancients couldn’t do with their cities—pick them up and move them. With developments in the assembling of buildings through drones, nanotechnology-enhanced materials, and industrial 3D printing, dissembling and deploying cities elsewhere could be accomplished with good planning. In fact, houses are currently being designed that can be moved by boat or dirigible.
Then again, one dystopian outcome is that cities will simply continue as they are or become deserted. The costs of change may result in some areas simply being sacrificed and abandoned. Unfortunately, the same may be true for people.
William E. Rees, “Building More Sustainable Cities,” Scientific American, March 1, 2009, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/building-more-sustainable-cities.
Jeff Desjardins, “Animation: The World’s Largest Megacities by 2100,” Visual Capitalist, July 16, 2018, https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-20-largest-megacities-2100.
“America Moves to the City,” Khan Academy, https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/the-gilded-age/gilded-age/a/america-moves-to-the-city.
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“Chapter 25: America Moves to the City, 1865–1900,” CourseNotes, https://course-notes.org/us_history/notes/the_american_pageant_14th_edition_textbook_notes/chapter_25_america_moves_to_the_ci.
Wikipedia, s. v. “Urbanization in the United States,” last modified July 25, 2019, 13:58, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States.
“Rise of Industrial America, 1876–1900: City Life in the Late 19th Century,” American Memory Timeline, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/timeline/riseind/city.
Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).
SeniorLiving.org, “1800–1990: Changes in Urban/Rural U.S. Population,” https://www.seniorliving.org/history/1800-1990-changes-urbanrural-us-population.
Med Amine Bensefia and Abdelhafidh Benmansour, “The Ambiguity of the American Dream and the Shift to Hollywood Dream” (master’s thesis, Abou Bakr Belkaild University, Tlemcen, 2014–2015), http://dspace.univ-tlemcen.dz/bitstream/112/8031/1/amine-bensefia.pdf.
Wikipedia, s.v. “Mortgage Discrimination,” last modified August 1, 2019, 22:42, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_discrimination.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Living Apart: How the Government Betrayed a Landmark Civil Rights Law,” ProPublica, last modified July 8, 2015, https://www.propublica.org/article/living-apart-how-the-government-betrayed-a-landmark-civil-rights-law.
Rachel Becker, “World Population Expected to Reach 9.7 Billion by 2050,” National Geographic, July 31, 2015, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/07/world-population-expected-to-reach-9-7-billion-by-2050.
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