De-Industrializing the City
February 8th, 2010 Posted in Green News | Comments Off 
One of my favorite quotes by Bjarke Ingels:
"Engineering without engines. We should use contemporary technology and computation capacity to make our buildings independent of machinery. Building services today are essentially mechanical compensations for the fact that buildings are bad for what they are designed for—human life. Therefore we pump air around, illuminate dark spaces with electric lights, and heat and cool the spaces in order to make them livable. The result is boring boxes with big energy bills. If we moved the qualities out of the machine room and back into architecture’s inherent attributes, we’d make more interesting buildings and more sustainable cities."
These are all ideas very much at the core of green building, but there's a focus here that I think is important: that sustainable cities involve removing machines designed to do ecologically stupid things, and that new technology should reorient the city around the human body.
Fewer machines. Smart surroundings for people.
So much of the ecological destruction caused by contemporary prosperity is the by-product of crude, brute-force industrial solutions to fundamental urban problems (and magnified by the modernist glorification of those solutions).
Burning petroleum to drive pistons and turn wheels to move a big chunk of metal around the city is what you do when you haven't yet figured out how to make the normal needs of daily life readily findable and accessible: it's conquering space through BTUs, rather than data and design.
Building giant dams and piping rivers of water from those dams to distant cities, then piping away other rivers of polluted water to be treated in giant industrial vats with massive doses of chemicals before being dumped (semi-polluted) into the nearest river or ocean -- well, that's what you do when you are powerless to defeat bacteria with anything but brute force and petrochemicals. More complex, living systems (complete with rainwater harvesting, passive green infrastructure and graywater re-use) are already possible, and with lab-on-a-chip-level technologies, they can be made at least as safe as the 19th century water supplies most of us depend on now.
Hell, even manufacturing itself -- with its tsunamis of product directed at retail shelves -- is a brute-force, mechanized approach to providing the things we want. Much of what is manufactured is utterly transient in our lives: we use it, it breaks, we throw it out. Much of the stuff we buy is not used at all, or only a few times in a lifetime: its major purpose is to be stored as a symbol of wealth, safety or status (think outdoor gear, power tools, obscure kitchen devices). A lot of stuff is made, never touched, and thrown away (think of recent clothing store scandals). All of this stuff is industrial society's answer to the problems of household needs and human aspiration; all of it will look ridiculous in the very near future, when people aim to have access to stuff that they actually like and use, avoiding accumulating stuff that merely impoverishes them and clutters their homes (already "stuff" is acquiring negative connotations). We sit in environments designed to hold and display credit-leveraged objects, rather than promote the highest possible quality of life.
I could go on, but I think the point is made. Want to see the city of the future? Start looking for machines to replace.
(Image: Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieus, public domain)
Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!
(Posted by Alex Steffen in Emerging Technologies at 12:27 PM)
BEDFORD, MA – February 1, 2010 – Spire Corporation (Nasdaq: SPIR), a global solar company providing capital equipment and turnkey lines to manufacture photovoltaic (PV) cells and modules, announced its 30MW per year turnkey solar cell line has been accepted by Hanwha Chemical Corporation Ltd. of South Korea (Hanwha). The line exceeded both its efficiency and throughput specifications producing 15.8% efficient multi-crystalline silicon solar cells at the rate of more than 34MW per year.
Once "unthinkable" in North America, renewable energy feed-in tariffs are gaining momentum in the U.S. and elsewhere. On March 4th, author, advocate, and renewable energy industry analyst, Paul Gipe will present the latest developments in the feed-in tariff debate.
SolarCraft has been selected by the Novato Chamber of Commerce (NCOC) as the inaugural recipient of its Green Business of the Year Award. In business since 1984, SolarCraft celebrates its 26th year providing renewable energy services to the North Bay. They offer full-service solar electric, solar pool heating and solar hot water, including consulting, design, sales, installation, monitoring and maintenance.
While millions of families became lost in the visual effects of the blockbuster movie Avatar, to me it also offers an ironic similarity to the quest for renewable energy here in the United States. In the movie, humanity is seeking to harvest a highly precious mineral on a far-off moon to solve their energy crisis back on earth. They do so despite increasing resistance from the native species of humanoids. The conflict is made worse when the humans grossly underestimate the native's ability to mobilize and fight, with inferior weapons and resources.
President Barack Obama unveiled on February 1 a $28.4 billion budget request for DOE for fiscal year (FY) 2011, including $2.36 billion for the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). The proposed budget aims to reduce unnecessary energy use, boost renewable energy sources, and strengthen clean energy research as the United States moves toward a clean energy economy.