I am looking out my window in Toronto, barely seeing the Sun due to a humongous condo across the street, and I say this is a really bad idea. I can’t imagine how you’d build a densely packed “tech city” and make it livable. We are entitled to nature as much as all other life forms.
Yes, we need to do it responsibly, but we need some grass and sunshine.
Jane Jacobs was all over this, the tower in a park is not anyone’s idea of a neighborhood. Low to midrise seems to feel the best to people, 3 to 6 stories. Keeping thriving neighborhood commerce is harder, lots of places have zoning preventing living above a store, and if you don’t have transit enough that people can go carless, they’ll shop at the big boxes rather than in the neighborhood. Suburban sprawl is definitely the least green, and most wasteful of every resource including public funds. Great nonprofit, website & podcast on this issue is Strongtowns.org.
Oh come now. Let’s be real. The planet and life itself will be fine. What we are worried about is that we are making the planet uninhabitable for us. A solution where we create monstrous structures where we concentrate all of humanity sounds like a nightmare solution.
most of the damage we do is due to our use of fossil fuel. I think if we can get off that addiction, plans like these will seem quaint in retrospect.
Read “The World Inside” by Robert Silverberg.
I’m surprised BoingBoing hasn’t discovered Solarpunk yet…
This problem will solve itself after we’ve used up all the buried oil, gas and coal.
I grew up in housing assosiation flats in Oslo. The flats are owned by the residents who also own a stake in their part of the neighbourhood. The neighbourhood elects a board to run and maintain the buildings and common areas and hires groundkeepers and janitors to do day to day maintenance. In spring every year we had an afternoon of common work to get the lawns and playgrounds ready for summer. It worked, there was a good sense of community. None of the buildings were taller than 8 stories or so and most were lower. And they left a lot of patches of natural forest and trees behind when it was build in the 70s.
We’ll also probably have a pretty big reduction in the population as people grapple for the last of those.
Win-win!
we stop all that fucking people over for empty demented reasons.
Ha, ha, that’s the trick. - Han Solo
Thanks for the link - I agree that something in the middle feels best. Dense enough to allow for lots of common infrastructure and energy usage, but loose enough to allow for homes and neighborhoods to have character. I agree that a lot of zoning laws are counterproductive - I marvel at how modern new towns can 100% lack downtowns at all - just suburbs and big box complexes, with literally nothing in between. I can’t imagine that was really the intent of the planners, just an unintended consequence.
That sounds nice - the solution to make sure that all the common area was under some specific group’s responsibility makes sense - it was one of the big problems with Pruitt-Igoe, all the common area was just “there”, and you couldn’t see it from any unit windows, so it became an easy place for crime, rather than a useful common space.
I know some northern white rhinos who would disagree.
Oh, wait, not anymore. Carry on.
Even in one of the densest cities in the country, much of the zoning dialog is about preserving street parking! But the very same people also complain about high housing cost, which is a problem caused by limiting density. There’s an interesting battle underway in California to change this and wrest control of development away from incumbent interests.
I wonder how these would work in cities for buying produce really locally? Mind you, up north normal produce is so incredibly expensive, it’s a lot easier to run these at a profit.
One can argue that extinctions are part of the fabric of this planet as much as anything. Viewing the current inventory as permanent is just as foolhardy as building houses on barrier beaches. The only constant is change. The Anthropocene Extinction Event will rank low on the “all-time greatest extinctions” list. The Permian took 90% of all species alive! Earth Abides.
I spent a week or so at Cosanti back in 1971 and a day or two at what would become Arcosant. Gotta tell you, Soleri designed for ants not people. The living spaces for visitors at Cosanti were designed and built by Soleri and his students but were dark, small, and dank. Really uncomfortable.
When I had the chance, I asked R Buckminster Fuller about Soleri and he thought for a moment and said, “Paolo is an artist, not an engineer.”
Arcologies might be a good idea but please don’t use Soleri’s models to build it.
What do I have to do to qualify as an “other animal”?
So basically build Caves of Steel? I can dig it.
I love Solarpunk art. It makes the future seem like we’re either all going to be living in giant hi-tech apartments with all the hard work done by robots, or we’re all going to live like some sort of techno-elves with hand crafted homes deep in the forest with all the wifi and outdoor activities we could ever want.
I guess the main thing I get from Solarpunk is less of the intended message of reaching an ecological balance with nature, and more that that I wont have to work myself to death for 50 years to get a nice place to live and the time to do stuff I like.
Yes, I visited Arcosanti (and I believe Cosanti) when I was in Arizona about twenty years ago. Not exactly what I would have expected from the sketches of arcologies that Soleri had in his books. Interesting that you asked Fuller about Soleri – they both seemed like dreamers that couldn’t really implement their ideas in reality.
