Home Is Where the Heart, Hearth, and Habitat Are
As cities grow and lifestyles change, the homes we decide to live in will change as well. In fact, we are already starting to see unique housing alternatives. Sometime in the very near future, we will see not only “smart” single homes but also superstructures that may encompass a dozen blocks or more. New forms and choices of housing, from the far-out to the hands-on, from movable homes to exotic homes in strange surroundings, will come in a plethora of shapes, sizes, and places.
Sixty years ago there were only two “megacities,” urban centers with populations of more than ten million people: New York/Newark and Tokyo. Today there are thirty-three, although this number is expected to rise possibly to fifty-three by 2030, mostly in developing countries. In 1990 there were just ten megacities worldwide. At present there are about four hundred million people in megacities worldwide. And the future populations of megacities are projected to be
900 million in 2050
about 1.1 billion in 2060
about 2.1 billion in 2100[1]
All over the world, new metropolises are being built, offering a snapshot of what our future will be like. At present the US megacities are Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and the metropolitan area of Washington-Baltimore. It is anticipated that by 2050 Asia will have thirty megacities, and Atlanta, Miami, Phoenix, and Riverside-San Bernardino could pass the threshold by 2060.[2]
By 2050 some will be monster megacities of thirty to one hundred million. Figuring out where and how to house their denizens will take a humungous amount of work wrapped around heaps of options. A central theme is to plan to make homes cost- and energy-efficient, sustainable, and very comfortable—some might even say perhaps too comfortable, as housing accessories, robots, and apps may put an end to the toil of household chores.
Silicon Valley, the jewel in Santa Clara County, is a suburban enclave that has some of the most expensive real estate in the country as a result of tech companies making the area their corporate home. Unfortunately, the once sleepy community has become one of the toughest places to find affordable housing due to the influx of techies and well-to-do money.
Google and Facebook, two of the many companies that have inadvertently caused the housing shortage, are now—with the partnership of local politicians—doing something about it, perhaps as a precursor of the future, and they have led the way in a series of new proposals from big business seeking answers to the problems of cramped housing. More than one thousand potential additional units were approved by the city in which Google is located.[3] Hopefully this will be a hallmark of big business and community needs.
Google will invest $1 billion toward efforts to develop at least fifteen thousand new homes in the San Francisco Bay Area. “Across the region, one issue stands out as particularly urgent and complex: housing,” CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a blog post. “As Google grows throughout the Bay Area—whether it’s in our hometown of Mountain View, in San Francisco, or in our future developments in San Jose and Sunnyvale—we’ve invested in developing housing that meets the needs of these communities. But there’s more to do.”[4]
The new future home will be not only smart but also intuitive; all the devices and appliances will be connected by software and the internet of things (IoT), and interaction will come from a robot loaded with an artificial intelligence (AI), a Siri-like device that will take care of and anticipate most of people’s needs.
As soon as you say something like “I’m out of laundry detergent” or “Do I have a clean shirt?” it will be picked up by a discretely placed microphone and trigger software to transcribe your words into a to-do list or into a command that will take appropriate action.
New research has found that 68 percent of people think their bathroom is old-fashioned and would like to see new innovations in this room of the home in the next ten years.[5] Some bathroom innovations on the horizon are included below.
A body analysis scale in a bathmat will not only track weight but also analyze your body fat percentage and body mass index while taking your temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, and thermometer readings from any number of trackers. These may be in the form of a wrist monitor, glove, body wrap, underwear, electronic tongue depressor, finger pinch monitor, among other utilities.[6]
All readings will be fed into a health app along with other data about your level of activity, nutrition, and sleep patterns to give a basic picture of your health, note any anomalies, and make basic health recommendations. This information can be relayed to a doctor or other health practitioner that can provide follow-up.[7]
Your smart toothbrush will connect sensors in the brush head to a health app, to give you real-time feedback on your brushing technique and tell you when to change your brush. Smart sensors will track everything from areas missed to whether you’re brushing too hard; they will assess your gums and suggest changes that need to take place. They will also track tongue cleaning and oral health, and, since 80 percent of bad breath comes from odor-producing bacteria on the tongue, they will measure bacterial by-products in the mouth. The app then records the information, offers advice, and can send the results to your dentist.[8]
Everything that goes into your body will be analyzed when it comes out, from its nutritional content to its caloric value. This will offer a complete picture of how well the body is functioning and how well you are living. An automatic urine or stool test will provide early warnings about urinary tract infections, pregnancy, and markers for types of cancer and other diseases.[9]
Indoor air can be from ten to one hundred times worse than the air outdoors. Air purifiers equipped with professional grade sensors can monitor the levels of particles in the air. An air purifier can be set to check for allergens and filter out up to 99.9 percent of airborne viruses and bacteria that are 2,500 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.[10]
Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a condition in which the walls of the throat relax and narrow during sleep, interrupting normal breathing and often resulting in snoring, broken sleep, and—at worst—asphyxia (a condition arising when the body is deprived of oxygen, causing unconsciousness or death; suffocation). Sensors will monitor sleep patterns and sounds and note abnormalities.[11]
The latest technologies for babies’ health will include connecting a smart baby monitor and ear thermometer to a mobile phone app that helps identify all manner of health matters, recording results for later examination. Babies’ poop can be analyzed by automatic diaper or commode swabs. Results can be fed to a doctor’s office. (This can also be used for adults.)[12]
If you’ve fallen and you can’t get up, a help button pendant will sense it and activate a GPS locator and two-way communication with a helpline via a speakerphone that is automatically turned on and dialed by AI anywhere in the home. Movement sensors around the home will track all activity and behavior in general in the house. Smart analytics will identify each individual in the house and notice and record any abnormal behavior. Automatic phone or video calls can notify caregivers, physicians, or relatives. Of course, for those who are anxious about their personal privacy, the sensors and the personal information they store can be deactivated.[13]
Half of all medication for chronic illness is not taken as prescribed, especially by the elderly, often because of absentmindedness or dementia. So a smart medicine dispenser can issue reminders, via a watch, phone, TV, or in-house intercom device, to a patient and/or a caregiver when it’s time to take meds. It can also calculate how many have been taken and share this information with the in-house medical app and a doctor, relative, or caregiver.[14]
A look into the bathroom mirror will trigger a mini–health check and use facial recognition technology to pick up subtle cues about your health and mental state. It may advise you on what skin care regimen to use on a given day, based on your appearance.
It is becoming increasingly important to devise ways of ensuring that the elderly, ill, and disabled can live safely and independently for as long as possible. One of their biggest issues is often lack of mobility—being unable to get out of bed, move around, take care of errands as well as themselves.
For such situations will be carebots, which are designed to provide assistance. They can range from life-size humanoid bots that can take blood samples and analyze them, lift patients, or help them walk; furniture that transforms from a bed to a wheelchair; and mobile servants that can fetch and carry things from one room to another and have the ability to monitor and notice the abnormal and communicate to various contact people.
There are hopes that robots will make aged-care jobs less demanding and help senior citizens maintain a longer independent life in their own home, assist caregivers at home or in a nursing home, or provide company to the lonely.[15]
Your kitchen app will take orders for beverages and foods from the pantry or refrigerator and can survey contents and make menus for days or weeks in advance. Miniaturized technology will allow the scanning of almost anything to find out its molecular composition and, in the case of fruits and veggies, check for ripeness. The smart fridge will be programmed to sense what kinds of products are being stored, keep track of what’s been used, make comments about whether you’re drinking too much beer or consuming too many carbs, order anything that is running low, and suggest nutritionally balanced meals; it will also sync perfectly with your levels of activity and weight-loss goals.[16]
How about a TV that blends into the wall? That’s the promise of a new generation of TVs. Samsung’s Smart Things app, for example, allows you to take a picture of the wall using your phone camera, sends it to your TV, and reproduces your wall right on the screen. You can color-correct the image manually, but most of the process is automatic. Even when it is turned off, the TV displays the image of the wall. Also when off, the TV can still display news headlines, weather reports, and even traffic, or just show the time and date. Custom art is also included and can be matched to the background.[17]
Waving your arms at a gadget will turn electronic devices on and off, which might be “too smart” in an overly melodramatic or energetic household. Entertainment systems of the future will be able to plug into your moods—based on the number of hours that you spend watching TV or listening to music, how your choices affect your emotional vibe, and how you seem to want to feel when choosing a TV program, movie, or music. All can be tracked, remembered, and analyzed. Sensitive sensors will turn off a device if there is no one in the room for a period of time.[18]
Smoke detectors and carbon monoxide monitors can alert you about dangerous levels of certain gases, but the newest technologies can let you know exactly where and when a problem exists and notify you about a fire, pollen levels, coming weather conditions, and indoor and outdoor air pollution so you can be sure to take appropriate actions.[19]
Modern paints and materials will enhance natural light and reduce the energy needed for lighting in the home. Light for particular times of the day will be programmed and automatically regulated. Less energy used means lower greenhouse gas emissions, greater fossil fuel conservation, less waste produced, and a lowered utility bill. Smart window coverings and thermostats will complete the picture.[20]
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted at home will be used to feed microalgae, producing biofuel that in turn will be used to generate heat and power. The CO2 produced from the heat and power generation will be once again used for biofuel production in a closed loop.[21]
Liquid and solid waste material will be treated to break the matter down into its chemical properties for fuel or fertilizer. Consequently, it will be possible to recycle endlessly and re-create any type of material. Products for recycling will be sorted by microscopic nanobots that separate mixtures of materials into categories based on their size, shape, color and on their physical and chemical properties. This will be especially useful for colonies in outer space.[22]
Municipal waste will be collected via a pneumatic network separating and transferring the waste flow in underground tubes to treatment facilities in a 24/7 service, reducing the presence and pollution of vehicles that collect garbage in the city. Customer will be billed via an RFID (radio frequency identification) sensor by weight or material.[23] Multiple bins will be replaced by pods integrated underground. The pods will then drive waste via tubes to a treatment facility.[24]
One example of really going urban green is a project in Singapore comprised of four towers, all connected by what’s called the “heart center,” an area filled with thousands of plants, trees, and even a waterfall. There are also sky bridges and terraces decked out in greenery, for a total of 160,000 plants helping reduce heat (by transpiration, reflecting sunlight, and creating shade) and improve air quality while reducing the amount of CO2 on the island.[25]
The development is LEED-certified. (“LEED” stands for “leadership in energy and environmental design.”) LEED certifies designs and structures that reduce CO2 emissions and water and electricity consumption, and reinforce resource sustainability for buildings. It has four levels: certified, silver, gold, and platinum.[26]
The garden will also experience a fusion of tradition and technology for plant lovers—multisensor gadgets will keep tabs on everything from water content and soil acidity to temperature, fertilizer, and ripeness, in the case of fruits or veggies. Meanwhile, robot mowers and pruners will keep the landscape neatly trimmed, and digital art will allow the stylization of the garden with beautiful and changeable holographic statues, colors, and sound scopes.[27]
Microchips and remote controls are becoming as popular in the garden as they are in the kitchen, den, or even the office. We knew it was only a matter of time and that time is now. Smart-thinking landscape architects are reducing their environmental impact via water conservation, solar technology, kinetic energy, and drought-tolerant planting—at the same time creating charming designs.[28]
New technologies in building and materials will allow construction of previously unheard-of geometric complexity. Design trends will become more free-form and organic. New shapes and new combinations of materials will allow for entirely new building aesthetics and larger structures.
Finally, cost will be cut by robots handling heavy and dangerous work, inexpensive prefab building components, and the use of existing material (like dirt and clean refuse), all of which will afford architects more creative leeway.
Prefab components are also environmentally friendly, as they reduce material waste as well as the number of delivery trips needed to the construction site. In other words, instead of transporting raw materials and basic supplies to the construction site to build a structure from scratch, most of the structure is prebuilt in a centralized factory and then shipped to the construction site to simply be assembled.[29]
Along with techno-changes, adjustments will have to be made in long-standing and out-of-date zoning and building ordinances that have often impeded development and innovation. If urban areas are going to attract developers, then city planners must recognize the need to overhaul outdated policies concerning land use and built environments. Cities need to consider a range of innovative and aggressive polices to lure new money and make room for more people.
The dream of universal affordable housing has been an idea tried and tested by architects throughout history, from Bucky Fuller’s wacky Dymaxion House,[30] to mail-order homes assembled like do-it-yourself furniture. This isn’t to say that poverty, ghettos, and disadvantages won’t be part of the landscape, but we will have the technology and, hopefully, the will to begin removing those roadblocks.
Some of the promises of 3D printing—one example is “Contour Crafting Technology”—is the capacity for building multiple homes quickly, creating less waste than conventional construction methods, and the use of robotics for labor. Of course, that’s bad news for the people in the construction industry who will suffer the loss of thousands of jobs.[31]
With any luck, owning a home will no longer command the sizable investments of generations past when younger buyers were priced out of the housing market. On the other hand, a glut of new housing will begin lowering housing prices, negatively impacting current homeowners who are depending on the stable or rising equity of their homes for retirement or the ability to move on up.[32]
When it comes to the price of homes, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the majority of the sticker shock comes from the value of the land more than that of the actual structure. An even bigger factor driving the value of land is the demand for housing within a chosen location, which could cause the housing market to boil over.
In the future, a lot of folks will be buying movable micro homes and even small apartments that can be parked, like cars, on small lots. Some even imagine that people will be able to move their houses from city to city with the aid of autonomous and remote-controlled aerodrones. (A remote-controlled vehicle is always controlled by a human. Autonomous devices are aware of their environment and incoming data and have the ability to learn and make decisions on their own. By 2020, an estimated fifty billion of these devices will be connected to the internet.)
Some homes in the future will downsize in terms of square feet, but there will be many more choices available. One example is Ecocapsule, a smart, self-sustainable micro egg-shaped structure that utilizes solar and wind energy for power and a battery for storing energy. Rainwater is collected on the surface and filtered into a water tank. It enables the inhabitant to stay in remote places in comfort and can serve as a cottage, pop-up motel, mobile office, or research station. It’s been engineered to be self-sufficient, practical, and functional. It measures 15.32 feet by 22 feet, is 8.20 high, and weighs about 35,000 pounds with a full tank of water (and filtration system) and incineration toilet. It is made of fiberglass over a steel frame.[33]
Homepod specializes in building energy-efficient homes that the company expects will be popular among new homeowners looking for more efficient, smarter homes with controls for electricity, security, HVAC, and more. The houses range in size from two-bedroom apartments to four-bedroom townhouses.[34]
Tiny houses are becoming a popular alternative as well as a new social movement. People are choosing to downsize, live with less, simplify the space they occupy, and still be comfortable. Tiny houses can be configured for a shared, two-person household or for an extended family. Most range from one hundred to four hundred square feet; among their features are movable partitions, recessed-in-the-wall amenities, and pull-down furniture, which enable transformation of the unit without reconstruction. Countertop and cabinet height may be adjusted manually or mechanically for all customer sizes and physical abilities. There are many no-cost blueprints available online. More and more cities are rethinking lot size regulations to accommodate tiny homes and communities.[35]
One of the most creative models is an experimental, low-cost, micro housing unit made from concrete water pipes approximately eight to twelve feet in diameter, and eight feet wide. The repurposed pipes are designed to accommodate one or two people and come with approximately one hundred square feet of petite living space. The interiors are made up of micro living room furniture with a built-in bed, a minifridge, bathroom, shower, and plenty of storage space for clothes and personal items.[36]
Although these structures are not lightweight, at twenty-two tons they require little in terms of installation costs and are easily stacked. Entire tube communities could be installed in small, unused spaces. Cost varies around $15,000 (not including the cost or use of land).[37]
In its approach, SPACE10 shares goals and methods similar to Wiki House (a generic name for an open-source project for designing and building houses that endeavor to democratize and simplify the construction of sustainable, resource-light dwellings). SPACE10 focuses on something that, while not terribly new, has rarely been explored. Known for simple, well-designed, flat-pack furniture, IKEA is proposing expanding their DIY model to a much larger scale: entire city centers with square boxes shaped and stacked on one another.[38] The result is low-cost, adaptable, and sustainable housing that could be manufactured locally. It’s a 527-square-foot micro house built using only a milling machine and plywood certified by the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council), with a total cost of around $206 per foot.[39]
The ALPOD is a sleek, rectangular 42.6-by-10.8-foot mobile home (about 480 square feet of living space) made of insulating blocks and wooden panels with an aluminum sheath, with thermal insulation, solar power, and a built-in kitchen and bathroom.[40]
The Pop-Up House is low-cost, recyclable, passively heated, and has all of the qualities of tomorrow’s homes. The prefab structure snaps together like LEGO bricks in a few days. Robotic labor may increase the speed of this construction, improve its quality, and lower its price.[41]
A “digital construction platform” is another mode of 3D autonomous printing that boosts efficiency and building strength; it only puts material down where it’s needed, and it’s safer, faster, and more precise than manual construction methods.[42]
We will also see more and more apartments in cities that have converted parking garages and repurposed other buildings to living spaces comparable to tiny houses. Some of these retrofitted garages have a community feel with amenities that urban folks find attractive and venues for theater, dining, and other cultural activities desired by those who want to live, work, and play in the heart of the city.
Do-it-yourself (DIY) projects (like the Wiki House) are being developed by architects, designers, engineers, inventors, manufacturers, and builders, collaborating to develop the best, simplest, most sustainable, highest-performance building technologies that anyone can use and even improve upon.[43]
The developer’s aim is to offer designs to every citizen and business and to make it easier for industries to deal in, invest in, manufacture, and assemble better, more affordable homes in order to grow a new housing industry while reducing dependence on the top-down, debt-heavy mass housing systems of the past.
It took only three weeks for a Chinese company to build a fifty-seven-story skyscraper. The construction company reportedly wants to try to build a 2,749-foot skyscraper. The “Mini Sky City” tower is the work of Broad Sustainable Building (BSB), a Chinese firm that specializes in prefabricated construction.
By preparing more than 2,700 modules in a factory for four months before site work began, BSB says it was able to assemble the structure at the rate of three stories per day—like a giant vertical jigsaw pieced together from a minutely detailed set of instructions.[44]
The company already boasts a fifteen-story hotel assembled in six days and a thirty-story hotel in fifteen days, among other achievements. What the Chinese are trying to do is sell buildings worldwide—making them in China and shipping them across the globe.[45]
One of the obvious pros of using modular construction to build affordable prefab housing is that units can be assembled off-site and then quickly stacked into place. It’s another alternative that significantly reduces development time and cost, making it easier to build affordable housing faster and cheaper along with smaller microapartments and multifamily buildings.
There are many prefab houses on the market that are made of various materials from fiberglass to metal and foam over a frame. Even HUD is looking into financing prefab homes for the growing market.[46]
It’s one of the targets of futurist buildings—the use of geometry to assemble and repair structures that will grow and evolve all on their own, like trees, assembling their matter through something like genomic instructions encoded in the material itself. It’s a contemporary philosophy of architecture that seeks solutions for sustainability in nature, not by replicating the natural forms but by understanding the rules governing those forms.[47]
A major problem worldwide is power shortage paired with buildings’ high consumption of energy. As they attempt to resolve this issue, architects are turning to biomimicry, which simulates or co-opts processes that occur in nature, producing, for example, ultrastrong synthetic spider silks, adhesives modeled after gecko feet, and wind-turbine blades that mimic whale fins.
Biomimicry figures in the belief that architecture should reflect the geography and culture of its setting and that architects must discover the most efficient solutions that resemble available natural objects. They might build screen systems on windows that use elasticity, geometry, and thermobimetal properties to open and close in response to sunlight—as flowers do. Inspired by coral reefs, researchers are using bacteria that alter the pH balance of surrounding material in order to allow calcium carbonate to grow and bind the material together with little outside energy and no carbon emissions.[48]
On average, 15 percent of a city’s land is considered vacant; it ranges from undisturbed open space to abandoned, contaminated structures to brownfields.[49] The roots of today’s hypervacancy problem lie in the Great Recession of 2007 and subsequent foreclosure crisis, especially in inner cities.[50]
One of the worst examples of hypervacancy is the 84,641 blighted structures and vacant lots in Detroit, almost half of which should be demolished, which would cost almost $2 billion.[51] These Detroit properties collectively form a space the size of Manhattan, and they’re not alone. Gary, Indiana, has 25,000 vacant homes or lots, covering 40 percent of the city’s parcels, and Philadelphia found 40,000 vacant lots with no known use. Vacant structures in the country number more than twelve million.[52]
Many cities contend that when a structure is abandoned, it presents an “imminent danger” to the community and threatens the city’s “health and safety,” attracting arson, squatting, drug use, and other illegal activities.[53]
Abandonment or vacancy is a sore spot for many communities regardless of size and geographic location. But it also represents a lot of possibilities for use, from inner-city farming to storage to repurposing structures for public housing or community activities—or for soup kitchens for the homeless and hungry, as famed Italian chef Massimo Bottura has done.[54]
Some cities are tearing down and/or transforming homes to create affordable single-family neighborhoods. Other cities with local nonprofits have turned to greening these buildings and lots, creating urban farms, pocket parks, playgrounds, and community gardens.
Design advocates are encouraging redesigning and retrofitting existing buildings rather than building new. Major renovations and retrofits reduce operation costs and environmental impacts and can increase resilience in a neighborhood. An existing building should be looked at in terms of the human labor and material costs that might be saved by renovating it rather than demolishing it and constructing a new building. Retrofitting an existing building can often be more cost-effective than building a new facility.[55]
People want buildings that inspire and delight. Inside buildings and out, designs should try to realize stunning effects and playful forms in order that buildings work in harmony with their surroundings and their residents appreciate their living spaces.
A good example of urban price-out is going bicoastal. In San Francisco following the collapse of the housing market in 2007, the median price of a home was around $700,000 compared to a whopping $1.65 million.[56] Manhattan has witnessed a 20 percent raise in rent just since 2016.[57]
Many cities (like New York and San Francisco) have no more space to build. Middle-class employees like teachers and office and city workers have been priced out of the city. And they can’t look to the suburbs for relief—the burbs are bursting at their borders with boarders looking for a break, and the cost of either buying or renting is unbelievable and unrelenting.[58]
As a generation the millennials are hesitant about making babies and buying homes. They are not in a financial position to dive into the current housing market with average listings costing a millionaire’s ransom. The nation’s birthrate is going down and at present, there are more baby boomers and seniors in the suburbs than there are millennials with children, leading in some places to the decay of tax bases.[59] The aging boomers care less about schools and parks than they do about supporting services that they’ll need as they age. The traditional suburbs are in danger of becoming senior burgs.[60]
In response cities are starting to go “country,” providing a lifestyle for people who value walkability, sustainability, green surroundings, and the ability to live within their means. Urban city planners are starting to redesign the landscape so that people can ride their bikes and enjoy nature and space. The property lines of city and country areas are becoming blurred as modern population’s values and bank accounts become modified or completely transformed. Everywhere in these new communities, residents prefer driving a mile or two instead of ten or twenty, and they own one car instead of two.
“Access, access, access” to all the things that make cities great places to live has become at least as important as “location, location, location.”[61]
Metro markets have to deal with changing demands not only for living and working spaces but also for resources—water, energy, air, food, transportation, city services, sustainable building methods and materials, green spaces.
In the future LEED may see heightened competition in new construction ratings from the Green Globes (GG) rating system and possibly from new entrants in specialized niches, such as retail or office interiors. In 2013 and 2014, the federal government put LEED and GG on an equal footing for government projects, lending further legitimacy to GG.[62]
While both LEED (the most widely used green building rating system), and GG (which promotes a sustainable future and a healthy planet by designing homes with green energy solutions) seek basically the same goals and ideals, there are differences. LEED calls for a minimum indoor air-quality performance while GG does not. LEED makes it mandatory that builders have “some documentation of the initial building energy and operational performance through fundamental commissioning.” In the United States LEED is run by the Green Building Initiative (GBI), a nonprofit organization. The LEED rating system frequently requires prerequisites to many of their credits, whereas GG does not require any prerequisites. It should also be noted that GG uses life-cycle assessment and multiple attribute evaluations, whereas LEED does not use them.
The LEED process is also far more stringent than GG in a few areas, but GG is a lot more user-friendly. LEED has minimum standards that must be met in order to begin the certification process and requires detailed documentation for every point pursued.[63]
GG is used to certify a wide variety of building types, including many that cannot be certified through LEED. Examples include recreational centers, transit centers, and parking garages, to name a few. It is increasingly becoming the system of choice for building owners, managers, architects, and engineers who want an alternative that offers the quickest and most understandable way to achieve superior building performance.[64]
The Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) is the world’s leading sustainability-assessment method for master planning projects. Its marketing system is used in sixty countries and seems poised to enter the United States.[65]
Other North American systems include the Living Building Challenge and LEED Canada, which competes in existing buildings with the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA), which addresses an industry need for realistic standards for energy and the environmental performance of existing buildings based on accurate, independently verified information.[66]
In a survey of more than seven hundred construction professionals, 80 percent cited “higher first costs” as the biggest obstacle to green building; it’s the most common criticism of sustainable building,[67] despite claims that “LEED buildings cost 25 percent less to operate and enjoy nearly 30 percent higher occupant satisfaction and lower interest rates.”[68] And overall, “the more green building and materials are used, the more the cost will lower.”[69] A 2003 study by the California Sustainable Building Task Force shows that an initial green design investment of just 2 percent will produce savings greater than ten times the initial investment, based on a very conservative twenty-year building lifespan.[70]
A study of twenty-two green federal buildings was conducted by the General Services Administration and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. It compared one year of operating data and surveys of green building occupants to those of the national average for conventional commercial buildings. It found that green government buildings
cost 19 percent less to maintain
used 25 percent less energy and water
emitted 36 percent less CO2
had a 27 percent higher rate of occupant satisfaction[71]
Others maintain that the initial costs simply outweigh benefits. The costs associated with these structures are believed to be quite expensive. In fact, homeowners might have to invest lots of money; however, in the long run, the invested money could be returned through energy-saving possibilities.[72]
Even if green construction does cost more as an additional investment, it typically
yields operational savings worth several times that much. Other studies show that
many LEED-designed buildings do not cost more and can actually cost less than conventional
construction as they save money in the long run via their sustainable practices.[73] Numerous sources of funding for green building are available at the national, state,
and local levels for industry, government organizations, and nonprofits. To begin,
check out https://archive.epa.gov/green
building/web/html/funding.html.
We will be able to do something the founders of the first cities could not—pick up and move them. With developments in the assembling of buildings through drones, nanotechnology-enhanced materials, and industrial 3D printing, dissembling structures en masse and deploying them elsewhere could be accomplished with good planning. At present, houses are being designed that can be moved by boat, dirigible, or drone.[74]
Then again, one dystopian outcome is that cities will simply continue as they are or be deserted. The costs of change may result in some areas simply being sacrificed and abandoned.
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 seventy-two to seventy-eight degrees depending on weather and, in living spaces, also depending on your age and gender.[75]
Zero net energy (ZNE) consumption means that the total amount of energy used by the buildings on an annual basis is roughly equal to the amount of renewable energy used that produces no greenhouse gas. ZNE buildings should be the goal of all cities, present as well as future. Developers of speculative commercial buildings have begun to showcase ZNE designs.[76]
As we venture out into the solar system, many new modes of living space will be experimented with and improved upon, incorporating sustainability, comfort, and planned growth. Space is the limit.
Brian Wang, “World Wealth, People and Cities in 2050–2060,” Nextbigfuture (blog), September 14, 2018, https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/09/world-wealth-people-and-cities-in-2050-2060.html.
Bret Boyd, “Megacities and Complexity,” Grayline, https://graylinegroup.com/megacities-and-complexity.
Liam Tung, “Google’s Massive Expansion Plan: Its Own Village with Up to 8,000 Homes,” ZDnet, December 10, 2018, https://www.zdnet.com/article/googles-massive-expansion-plan-its-own-village-with-up-to-8000-homes.
Jennifer Elias, “Google to Invest $1 Billion in San Francisco Bay Area Housing amid Regional Expansion,” CNBC, June 18, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/18/google-to-invest-1-billion-in-san-francisco-bay-area-housing.html.
Katie Avis-Riordan, “Top 10 Bathroom Innovations People Would Love to Have in the Future,” House Beautiful, March 16, 2018, https://www.housebeautiful.com/uk/lifestyle/a19432401/bathroom-technology-innovations-future.
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