Clean Slate Metropolis

Imagine a new city of around 5 million, designed and built from scratch. Utilizing modern design philosophies, a mix of transport methods, and environmentally friendly infrastructure.

Lets look at some of the potential benefits to a clean slate city:

- Planning for a large, dense population from the get-go, we can design more efficienct, expandable infrastructures. For example, a false underground can be created to contain pipes, electricity, and transport systems, each of which can be easily accessed and maintained from within the false underground.

- Large portions of the city can be designed as dense, car-free villages in a european style. Perhaps similar to Venice or Paris.

- A fast, efficient public transport network can be coherently designed from the start. This will help the city to function in the event of an unaffordable fuel price rise.

- Essentially, a clean-slate city will allow for a modern utopia, perhaps incorporating many idealistic urban designs as part of a vibrant, yet coherent, bustling metropolis.

I would like to stress the importance of keeping as much variety in the design as possible.

In my opinion, idealistic and coherent designs suffer from monotony and boredom. We should include as many aspects from as many schools of thought as possible when designing this new metropolis from scratch. Even to the point where at least some degree of sprawl is embraced.

Personally, I'd like to see a balance of conventional suburbs, new urbanism, dense car-free european style villages, high-rise tower blocks, and the like.

Likewise for the transportation system: A mix of overhead commuter trains, motorways, boulevards, cycleways, buses, trams, taxi's, etc.

"Efficiently balanced variety" should be the mantra to guide the design of this new clean-slate metropolis.

The idea of an environentally efficient metropolis has gained popularity since the publication of an article titled 'Ecopolis, Last hope for the natural world' in NewScientist magazine.

http://www.newscientist.com/contents/issue/2556.html

for the transportation system, I must say that I like the idea of a 'superway'- or a train system far above the ground. I suppose it isn't much better than a subway, or a road system, but it sounds so cool.

In terms of transport the first question to ask is whether it's going to be a hydrogen economy because that's going to seriously impact your infrastructure design. For example hydrogen powered cars require tunnels of a much large diameter in case of accident because otherwise you end up with a large fuel air pipe bomb.

To be honest, I'm highly skeptical of the whole 'hydrogen economy' thing. From an engineering perspective, hydrogen-powered vehicles aren't a very efficient solution; they're generally sluggish and have short range. The infrastructure itself isn't very efficient either. And then there are safety concerns. Although perhaps electric cars aren't all that better either. Personally, I would like to see the development of a steam-electric hybrid, wherein a 'heat battery' is used to generate steam which powers a modern efficient steam engine. The heat battery could be very quickly recharged with high-current electricity. The system could also utilize regenerative braking more heavily, thus minimizing the required size of the heat battery and steam motor components. Potentially very lightweight yet powerful and highly efficient.

- Mike

Well if we are talking personal preference, I would probably plump for a battery/fuel cell/solar hybrid. A plug in hybrid with all electric drive train would fit in most easily with current infrastructure, given we already have mass power distribution as well as minimize the number of moving parts. However fundamentally hydrogen is a much better energy storage medium than lithium so augmenting batteries with a reversible closed cycle fuel cell would allow the benefit of hydrogen power density without the disadvantage of creating complex expensive systems to deliver the hydrogen to the car. Finally wrapping the whole thing in say some reasonably efficient polymer PV cells would provide some nice little trickle charge back into the system so that it can never truly run out of power.

I would suggest molten salt. As the CSCS will be located in a desert along the shore, most likely, desalination will be very useful. the salt could go to heat storage in cars, the water to the city. I would suggest basically an incandesent lightbulb filament to heat it to about 1200 C.

I can't profess any great expertise in this area but the rational for what I was proposing was that the theoretical energy density possible for a fuel cell are greater than for an electrochemical cell but electrochemical cells have the advantage that their infrastructure already exists. So using a regenerative fuel cell ( i.e. one that collects its exhaust and then splits it back into fuel when the vehicle is recharged with electricity from the grid) in conjunction with batteries would allow the best of both worlds in terms of energy density and external requirements, assuming we've built our nice clean nuclear plants, or hopefully, fusion ones. As part of a hybrid system more unconventional fuel cell systems could be considered as longer startup times could be tolerated, and being a closed system catalyst poisoning could be avoided creating a longer lived more reliable cell and by having battery augmentation it would run closer to peak efficiency by moderating the power drawn. That's just my thoughts on the matter, which are likely entirely wrong.

Actually, lkm, I believe you have just described the existing state of the art. I think most hydrogen fuel-cell powered cars these days utilize a hybrid-electric configuration; for the same advantage you mention (moderating power requirements from the fuel cell), but moreso to take advantage of regenerative braking to extend the range of the vehicle. I can only assume that directly electrolising the waste water back into hydrogen during regenerative braking (and general charging) would be the natural progression of this technology; thus lessening the need for auxilliary batteries.

Sounds fascinating, doesn't it? I wonder how long such technologies will take to reach the general market?

- Mike

Individially all the technologies may well exist but I don't think anyone's putting them together in the same machine. Which is pretty much the point, there's no point in suggesting something using technology that doesn't exist yet as a solution to an immediate problem all you can do is look at what you do have and put it together in a new way.

The more I read about it, the more I like the idea of car-free cities. The safety, scenery, and sense of community they offer is something that many modern cities can only dream about.

Currently, car-free cities can be built with a max population of roughly 2 million, based on reasonable transport time. Designing a high-speed underground subway system could increase that cap to tens of millions. I don't foresee any problems going 100 to 200 mph underground. Plus with all the cheap energy being produced, it's only infrastructure that would need to be dealt with.

This would also allow for more space above ground for anything from industry to housing to green space.

Yes, I agree, cars are a nuisance. I think it should be organized as many somethings skyscraperlike, with largeish sidewalks in between, and instead of avenues, some form of waterway, to allow ease of mass transportation. As a main kind of transport, I think that we can improve on subways, but I really don't know how.

May I suggest the mach 1 vacuum tube underground maglev, New York to LA faster than a speeding bullet, with airlocks at each station. And a reactor every 100km.
Less frivilously (though I really love the idea of sucking all the air out of tube tunnels) i would say that effective transportation policy is like energy policy, you really need a god diversity of supply for everything to work smoothly.
And that means cars. Now having said that I'm all in favour of moving towards a network integration of the automobile. In ten, fifteen years I think most new cars will probably be drive wire on an electric drive regardless of fuel source. The autodrive systems being pioneered to impressive effect by the Darpa grand challenges will fit seemlessly into such vehicles and as a result a great bluring of public and private transport will be possible. Whether it is your car, a rental, PRT, a cab, a bus, a minibus, a mobility scooter, you could page it to pick you up, tell it were you wanted to go, it would interface with the transnet which would route the journey in the most efficient manner through the city to the destination taking into account all the existing journeys on its system, road works, traffic management priorities, accidents, parades, giant robots going berserk, etc.

Diversity doesn't necessarily need to include a large number of cars. A high-speed subway system will provide for pretty much all medium to long-range travels, bicycles and walking will suffice for anything less.

Or if we insist on allowing cars, perhaps freeways and streets can be primarily underground, eliminating any congestion on the surface, with small parking structures throughout.

Should the need arise for an increase in mass public transport, these freeway tunnels could just be converted to additional subway lines, the parking garages becoming stations.

Also, I think the average size of cars should be decreased substantially. The lumbering behemoth that is the American SUV should be replaced by something similar in size to the SmartCar. There's really no reason for all the seats; if you have a large family it would be more economical to take the free public transport anyway.

Transport between other major Australian cities need not be by vehicle either. Our city could fund the building of a bullet train from Perth to Adelaide, and along the coast to Melbourne and Sydney.


Looks more like a jet fighter, doesn't it?

But what about the plumber? Or the electrician, the delivery man, the courier, the door to door salesman, the traffic warden, the police officer, the fireman, the ambulance driver, the good humour man. Some transport just has to be flexible, just has to be door to door, and just has to have a fair degree of cargo. And you can't do that by train, or plain or bus. So you have to have cars in your mix. Because thats what diversity means, flexibility. Yes, the base load of transport should be shifted as much as possible to trains, and buses and onto foot, but some things will always require a car or something functionably similar. Noe I'm not saying those cars can't fly. I want my flying car. Where is my flying car?

Car-free doesn't necessarily mean free from all cars. The roads would be wide enough for emergency vehicles as well as deliveries, maintenance, etc. Most of the time, however, it would be a rarity to see a car on the road.

The bulk of the city should be built underground. Building underground means a lot less energy being expended onair conditioning and heatig. As a bonus the surface can be left (mainly) as one giant park for people to enjoy. As noted in the 25 hour time thread, most of the time humans aren't actually in sunlight, so it shouldn't affect them to much.

Dig deep enough an you have plentiful geothermal energy (probably needed for the air circulation systems down there). Giant elevators would be used for goods transport through the city, coupled with maglev trains at the elevator stops.

For people who don't want to take the train and elevator, sloping walk, bicycle, and electric vehicle (Segways and scooters for human transport, electric carts for cargo) ways would be used. Perhaps wires could be embedded in the track, to make it possible to use Inductrack for vehicles.

I like this idea. I would put carbon into the dirt being removed, make it react to turn oxides into CO2, and metals. (capture the CO2, so as to not hurt the environment). Block off that dirt from the surrounding dirt, so you get a good shaped building. At the bottom there will be some (presumably liquid)
metals.

This picture: (~1/3 0f the way down)
http://www.indiana.edu/~geol116/week2/mineral.htm

Shows that the volume should decreace considerably, and there will be free Iron, aluminum, and silicon at the bottom.

Did I mention induction charging for the electric vehicles? if you put the coils on the underside of the car and the charger under the road surface you could have wireless charging at every parking place or even under special stretches of highway. Assuming you have a permit to be allowed on the streets, like for your weekly family shop, or buying a new telly, and your application had better be in triplicate, having been burried in peat for 3 months.
As for the underground city, I was always rather fond of the Japanese engineering design for underground development in high density cities. As I recall it looked something like an onion with a tall above ground skyscraper onto of a bulbous underground complex, they were going to dig tunnels round the base in concentric spirals like a chinese lantern and build inwards. When ever they needed to expand they'd just dig another spiral and add another onion skin. Very clever design.

Popular Science magazine came out with a great article this month (July 2008):

Ecotropolis; A blueprint for Fresh Air + Pristine Water + Cheap Energy

Check out http://www.popsci.com/futurecity for the free interactive version of the article.

If we accept a city as a mode of high density living, then an effective city is one which manages to pack as many people into as small an area as possible while maintaining acceptable levels of comfort and privacy and doing so as efficiently as possible.
That suggests going upwards and downwards, which means skyscrapers and below ground facilities. Now, as I understand it the limiting factor on both of these is mobility, i.e you can build a 3k building but the entire base would have to be elevator shafts to be able reach the top. So what seems essential for the CS city is to move from a 2 dimension street plan to a 3 dimensional one. It should be imperative to maximise the ability to move about at any height or depth, which would allow taller building and greater utilization of the underground. This seems to mean highly elevated streetways and under streetways.
Perhaps in combination with a grid system a 3 dimensional street plan would make for a cubic city, regularly sized square blocks stacked on top of each other cross braced with sloping roads to change level, with a large volume pedestrian elevator at each intersection.
How does that sound?

Expansion underground is definately the way to go. There's too many benefits to building underground that we can't ignore if we want efficiency.

Re: Ecotropolis

Some really good ideas, others not so much.

Below-sidewalk people-powered dynamos are hysterical though. The extra expenses and labor that would be tacked on to building something as trivial as a sidewalk are comical.

I really liked the desalination membranes they mentioned are being developed.

It did start with that dreaded meaningless word "sustainable".
And didn't seem to have much housing.

Ha ha, exactly.

We live in a world of buzzwords.

Carbon footprint is another one I loath.

Al Gore and buying carbon credits.

Anything involving or revolving around the word "Green" tends to annoy me. Not because I don't like the idea, but because some things are passed off as "green" when they don't even come close to it.

Fuel efficiency tagged on to anything that gets over 20mpg.

Biofuels. Courtesy of corn-based ethanol production's wonderful track record. Which was thanks to George Bush thinking it was a good idea in the first place.

Biofuels were always near gibbering idiocy, only ill educated greens and media politicos ever thought they were a good idea.
Firstly it's damn hard to produce and ship a biofuel that makes any meaningful carbon surplus over existing fossil fuels, secondly it's incredibly difficult to produce a fuel that doesn't cannibalise food production in some way, and thirdly it's near impossible to do both one and two and still manufacture a fuel in sufficient quantities as to not make the entire enterprise an exercise in idiotic redundant dead end futility.

lkm, do you have any more information on the Japanese idea?

That would be useful to build it as, if it's simple to expand.

I only really remember it because I wrote a pretty awful scifi novella that used it as a city. I think I read about in a New Scientist feature called beneath your feet from 1995, it was actually almost a passing reference but i think it refers to Alice City.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14619718.200-beneath-your-feet.html
http://www.drtomorrow.com/lessons/lessons7/20.html
http://www.gel.civil.nagasaki-u.ac.jp/text/concept/con9/con9.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_City

That NewScientist article is an excellent read indeed!

This piece also caught my attention, as it has relevance to the clean-slate city-state:

Quote :

Mercury is not alone in its aversion to digging up the roads. The world just below street level is extremely congested, with pipes and cables carrying gas, electricity, water, TV, and telephones competing for space. Every time the road has to be dug up, not only is it vastly expensive, but traffic has to be diverted with dire consequences for the life of a modern city.

Obviously, this is an area where the clean-slate city-state will have a huge advantage.

From CarFree.com (and posted in the city-state topic aswell):

Quote :

"While building a heavy-rail metro in an existing city is a very expensive proposition (although quite reasonable when compared to some recent urban highway construction projects), the costs can be controlled in the construction of a new city. The ability to combine the installation of water, sewer, power, communication, and transport infrastructure without having to work around existing installed infrastructure is a major simplification and probably cuts costs by half or more. The tunnels can be built using simple cut-and-fill techniques, work can proceed around the clock without disturbing residents, and considerable use of prefabricated concrete components should simplify and speed the process. False-work, the bane of construction projects within cities, is nearly eliminated if unrestricted cut-and-fill operations are possible."

Democratic_Anarchy wrote:

The bulk of the city should be built underground. Building underground means a lot less energy being expended onair conditioning and heatig. As a bonus the surface can be left (mainly) as one giant park for people to enjoy. As noted in the 25 hour time thread, most of the time humans aren't actually in sunlight, so it shouldn't affect them to much.

From the second article that lkm posted:

Quote :

The last acre of land sold in Tokyo went for US$7.8 BILLION.

Now that is a good reason to build underground! However, in the clean-slate city-state, you won't be restricted nearly as much as far as land goes. So there is less incentive for it. But, as hinted in the above post, if you really wanted to do it, it would be a lot cheaper. Especially if you aren't building especially deep underground, as you can use the cut & fill method (i.e. dig a trench, place your tube or enclosure, then fill back up with earth), which is a lot quicker and cheaper for most projects. There is also potential to build a vast false-underground into the city.

Hehe, I couldn't find any articles on the 'false-underground' construction technique. Perhaps I am using the wrong term. A false-underground, as I understand it, is when (for example) the lowest floor of the building is left un-used, and an artificial ground-level is created adjactent to it; so that the space both below the building and below the artificial ground level becomes a 'false-underground'. Does that sound familiar to anyone?

- Mike

I really wouldn't call it a false-underground because it is actually underground.

Also, we shouldn't build the majority of the city underground. Who would want to spend thousands of dollars on an underground house without a view of anything? But I do think that manufacturing and some other industries could easily be done underground, thus reducing noise pollution and eye sores.

Edit:

For excavation, a tunneling or digging device could be built that uses plasma beams to convert bedrock/dirt into usable raw materials. Mobile processing, dual-function vehicles for efficiency would be handy during initial construction.

It depends where we're building the city. If we're building it in an otherwise hostile location as a demonstration of what technology can do, a harsh desert under intense sun for example, then protecting the citizens from the enviroment will be necessary and as such extensive underground structures for actual human use should not be dismssed lightly.
Aren't the opal towns in the outback mostly built underground because of the high winds? People don't seem to find that unplesant.
I seem to recall that Calgarry, a canadian oil city, has a downtown business district entirely conected by glass walk ways such that people never have actually set foot outside into the adverse climate. (very funny film WayDownTown set there, highly recomend).

How many houses have a nice view from them anyway? And, how many people sit in there house looking out at the view. If you want a view, go to the parks on the surface. The main things people use their houses for don't require a nice view.

Anyway, how about building it inside a big rock? That's not as silly as it sounds, as it will lessan the need for supports, and so make it easier to construct. Plus, if it's limestone, you get a lot of crushed limestone to sell.

what are some possible locations?

For a rock city? Loads. Anywhere there is a big rock. There's plenty in America, deserts are littered with them, a lot of Islands are basically rocks.

Everest That's a big rock. And above sea level.
But of course the bigger the rock, the harder the stone, and thus the difficulty of excavating it.

What about Limestone? That was used as a building material for centuries, probably millenia. It's soft enough to dig into, but hard enough to provide a home. I just call it 'Rock', as it's the most common rock found where I live.

Granite? We wouldn't have to worry about nuclear attack

I don't think you get limestone mountains for that very reason.
They would just dissolve in the rain.

Took the world long enough to realize this, I'd say:
Secret World Bank Report Blames Biofuels for Food Price Spike
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/agriculture/index.html

Seems like anyone with half a brain should have figured this out long ago.

Also, skim down a bit and check out this article:
Corn-Based Biofuels Spell Death for Gulf of Mexico

The Popular Science city is a great example of how a Clean Slate city could be done. It could easily produce more clean, renewable energy than it could use as well as cleaning up more pollution than it could produce. In fact energy production and pollution could be the primary industries in this eco-city and could be made very profitable in this infrastructure.

The December issue of Focus magazine has a front-page article on the subject of eco-cities titled "Welcome to Eco-City; No fuel bills. No traffic jams. No pollution.". Both the Chinese clean-slate ecocity of Dongtan and the UAE's Masdar City are explored in depth. Overall a good read.

- Mike

http://www.bbcfocusmagazine.com/

No people. No money.

China? No people? No money?