Next year Sky City in Changsha, China, will become the world's tallest building. But before you mock the idea as national one-upsmanship, consider the following:
This is not a trophy like the Burj Khalifa, a thin high tech spire that isn't even connected to a sewer system. They call it a "pragmatic" building, designed for efficiency, affordability, replicability. They also make a strong case for it being sustainable...It will be built with prefabricated parts on a modular basis, allowing construction to be completed in less than a year.
The Sky City concept significantly reduces the per capita use of land, and the CO2 emissions generated getting around... By going up, hundreds of acres of land are saved from being turned into roads and parking lots. By using elevators instead of cars to get to schools, businesses and recreational facilities, thousands of cars are taken off the roads and thousands of hours of commuting time are saved. It makes sense; vertical distances between people are a whole lot shorter than the horizontal, and elevators are about the most energy efficient moving devices made. A resident of Sky City is using 1/100th the average land per person.
And it really is a city in and of itself—4,450 apartments, nearly 100,000 square feet of indoor vertical farms, 250 hotel rooms, 92 elevators, 30 foot courtyards for athletics, and a six mile ramp that can be used to walk or run around the entire city...The most detailed discussion I've found is at Next Big Future, which presents the developers' details about safety, comfort, energy, and sustainability.
There's a more distant concern that this may not be the most pleasant way to live; stacked atop one another, separated from open air and nature. Plus, that cookie cutter aesthetic could eventually sap the architectural diversity of the cities of the future, and turn our most notable population hubs into towering Levittowns.
Or maybe it's exactly what we need, with resource consumption and energy use spiraling out of control. Maybe our best hope is to churn out a host of massive, identical, self-contained Sky Cities to house the booming population—maybe this is the future of how we'll live on a teeming planet.
Life imitates art.
ReplyDeletePublished in 1971.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Inside
If it can be done safely, I think it's an excellent idea. We're rapidly running out of room and it's only going to get worse. While it might not be pleasant to 'live on top of each other,' it's what a lot of people do already and it's better than not having anywhere to live.
ReplyDeleteWe're not running out of room. We're running out of resources.
DeleteWe're not running out of resources. They're distributed in a grossly inequitable way.
DeleteObligatory Judge Dredd reference.
ReplyDeleteIt's a rather old idea.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology
"Arcologies would be dramatic, unusual structures that support a different way of life. They are naturally interesting to writers of speculative fiction. The first mention of an arcological structure might be in H. G. Wells' The Sleeper Awakes, published in 1899. A more in-depth description of arcology's design principles can be found in "The Last Redoubt" from The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson, first published in 1912. In it Hodgson envisions structures complete with a full artificial ecology, agriculture, and public transport by mobile roadways."
If we start to connect these scy-scrapers with roads 20-40-100 floors up, we get a very futuristic city right away.
As someone with a fear of heights, I'd be in real trouble if I lived in a city like this.
ReplyDeleteWhat if it catches on fire? Wasn't "Hotel" a movie about a fire in a many-storied building?
ReplyDeleteWhat if you don't like the neighborhood? Will the McDonald's smell up the whole building? It would be handy to just take the elevator to work, but what if you have a day off? They could still call you in, 'cause they know you aren't doing anything but watching TV. And you'd have to live next to all the people you work with...
I'd want more privacy.
"The Towering Inferno" was the movie about the "modern" hi-rise live/work building with poor safety considerations. I imagine that, just like on a ship, fire is probably the top concern for safety as far as spill-over between units is concerned.
DeleteYou know that people have been living in skyscrapers all over the world for almost a century? Mega highrises since the '60s
DeleteThese cities will certainly have the advantage of bringing together all the most shallow and materialistic people into one place where they can be more easily dealt with. Is this not a variant on the modernist vision of blasting off into space to become masters of the universe? In both cases the point is to create a world out of our own brilliance and cuteness that is far better than the humble little planet earth with its many creatures. Haven't we heard stories before about ancient people who built towers into the sky? One might even say that THE point at which ancient Greek and Hebrew, indian and Chinese visions of the world come together is in their concurrence that hubris like this never ends well.
ReplyDeleteOf course, reliable birth control widely used would solve lots of problems as well.
ReplyDeleteGood God, click the wrong button and goodbye thoughtful post. Sheesh. Argh.
ReplyDeleteI'll boil it down.
1. Population growth looks to be trending downward and reversing in the near future.
2. Sprawl will still happen, just as people move out of NYC to the "burbs" to raise a family, but still want to work in the City.
3. Might be good as a testbed for future space exploration without the attendant problems of couching such a test in the stigma of "space exploration." Sigh.
I hope it works, but I doubt it will. I bet that Chinese engineering and manufacturing (dismal track record) will end up shredding corners here and there, and many will die unnecessarily.
Hopefully they won't use the Chinese drywall that was used here in Florida. That stuff caused corrosion of metal and illnesses in occupants that made homes uninhabitable until the drywall was removed. That took years to prove and litigate.
Deletemanufacturing (dismal track record)
DeleteYou probably typed that on a machine made in China.
I sure did. Do you have a point?
DeleteIn my industry (manufacturing medical devices) there is a strong push to move stuff to China for cost savings. But interestingly, Chinese companies developing devices in China for its market are shipping projects to (wait for it) the United States. The devices are made here, disassembled, and shipped to China for reassembly so that they can meet whatever arbitrary rules the government sets up for their medical device industry.
So what if a computer is manufactured there? If my computer dies because of shoddy construction, I won't probably die. If a train smashes into another train that I'm on, I stand a good chance of getting killed.
Even though the idyllic little house in the suburbs may be the worst ecological way of living in terms of AC/heating and long commutes. Even if it is properly insulated with hemp fiber recycled from tampons.
ReplyDeleteJust like mass transport, communal living creates too much social exposure and to much potential for conflict to be enjoyable. It requires strict(er) rules and their enforcement, heavy maintenance and security just to keep things civil. The potential to annoy and grief people out of carelessness, stupidity or sociopath'ic malice is multiplied manifold by the close proximity and communal infrastructure.
With climate change and increasing wind speeds, building sky scrapers may not be the safest idea either. Large steel structure need to be replaceable in parts, should materials age, which is I imagine hard to pull once tons and tons of material are towering on top.
Strange that crime is worse in the U.S. in midsized cities than it is in all of our biggest cities. Yep, that's because what you say is not rooted in any kind of reality.
DeleteI'm still betting there's gonna be a whole lotta concrete burbs replacing all them trees come five years...
ReplyDelete