The cities of the future will have waste-to-energy
plants, not shopping malls or churches, at their centre, according
to urban designer Mitchell
Joachim of Terreform
Speaking at DLD Cities in London, he
said "cities have centres that celebrate the previous centuries --
in Europe, the cities celebrate spirituality, with cathedrals.
After some time the new cathedrals became downtown cores,
celebrations of capitalism and commercialism". The cities of the
future, he argues, will celebrate "the belief of what keeps us
alive" -- those things that make our lives better. And that might
mean recycling plants.
Terreform ONE, a green design company based in
Brooklyn, explores biohacks for the ecological issues that face
modern cities. For instance, the waste that New York City produces
every hour weighs as much as the Statue of Liberty -- in the
future that waste could be recompacted into building blocks,
or recycled "bales". Better still would be to create a city which
didn't produce waste in the first place.
That means growing
thousands of homes -- building a new suburb could involve twisting,
pruning and manipulating large trees into the frames of buildings.
"There would be no difference between the home and nature -- it
would be something that would be a positive addition to the
ecology," explained Joachim.
Mushrooms, too, could be exploited. Joachim described
the potential of biopolymers produced
by living things, with the example of using a kind of massive
mushroom grown within frames to create blocks of building
materials. Layers of these giant mushrooms could be used to build a
chair, for instance, and then covered in a skin of conventional
material like leather -- a familiar object made using a radical new
process could get people used to the idea of using such materials
in other circumstances in the future.
But why stop at plants and mushrooms? Joachim loves
the possibilities of cellular engineering, pointing out the
similarities between the structure of a building's wall and the
exterior skin of a piece of meat. It could be used for small
structures beyond just body parts, but no sentient creature would
have to die. He even proposes a theoretical "meat house", grown in
a lab -- a throbbing piece of meat that could function as a
building. These biopolymers often have comparable (if not superior)
strength to conventional building materials like concrete.
The emphasis there is heavily on the theoretical, of
course. "Future cities are about the speculation of the narrative,"
Joachim argued. "If we didn't have Jules Verne speculating about
going to the Moon, we wouldn't have Nasa engineers getting us
there. We use that narrative as inspiration."