The cities of the future will be grown, not builtThe 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 ONE.
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."