Harnessing advances in automation, food production, and governance to create a new model for cities and society.
Pending success, this can serve as a starting point for future Earth-based megacities as well as off-world colonies.
TODO: add citations
If you agree with the above, we invite you to pause here and spend a few days thinking about a better way to build cities that solves all of the mentioned problems. Then come back and read our idea, and contact us with how you think we could do it better.
Have your own city architecture in mind?
Ok, here's ours.
We suggest a single megastructure:
TODO: mockup of city
With well-chosen decision-making/governance frameworks, city residents can enjoy the benefits and efficiency of centralized architecture (we will expound on these benefits below) without suffering the drawbacks of centralized ownership and power.
We also want to stress that we hope that much of the city can be built with the 3D printers of the future. With 3D manufacturing, complexity is free (or rather, complexity has up-front design costs, but can be replicated for free, as with all digital artwork), which means a giant megastructure need not resemble the all-concrete monoliths of the 20th century.
This megastructure will resemble a vast donut, with a sprawling green space, on the order of 2km in diameter, in the center. This green space can be subdivided and used for whatever the city residents agree upon – we imagine a mixture of parks and traditional agriculture. (For reference, this is approximately the scale of Central Park in Manhattan.)
Outside of the donut is preserved wild space. A land area immediately outside the city, equivalent in area to the city and park proper, will remain uncultivated in perpetuity. The exception at the beginning will be railways to and from the city, or connecting one Ring City to another. As soon as economically feasible, these railways will be either elevated or moved underground to minimize impact on wildlife.
This leaves the thin ring between wild space and cultivated green space for human habitation. Here we envision a stepped pyramid structure, thickest around the base of the donut, thinner higher up. This structure will rise approximately 10 meters between each level – the height of a three-story house – and recede from the outer and inner edges of the level below by approximately 3 meters each – sufficient width for exterior walkways and vegetation at every level.
Yes, vegetation at every level. We insist we build solidly enough that each level can have about two meters of soil below the outer and inner walkways, sufficient for growing many kinds of trees and bushes. This way, residents of upper levels need not journey the whole way to the ground level in order to access some greenery – they need only walk outside.
These two meters of soil mean that the effective height of each level is eight meters, with ten meters from the floor of one level to the floor of the next. Since residential and commercial spaces need no soil beneath, this leaves these two meters for other uses – storage, food production (more on this below), or other needs determined during a full architecture plan.
If designed well, we believe this can still result in plentiful natural light within the interiors of all levels, though we find it appealing to reserve lower levels for schools, hospitals, stadiums, theaters, sacred spaces, transportation hubs, commercial and industrial uses, and other large-scale interiors that are already scarce on natural light in current cities.
We envision the majority of housing in upper levels, where the thickness of the donut more closely approximates current city blocks. We caution against reserving certain levels for only residential or only commercial zoning, as much vibrancy of cities comes from the mixture of uses. However, the ultimate zoning of the city will need to be decided by its residents.
What does housing look like? Like any city, residents must have a great mix of options to choose from. With the form factor described so far, we believe it's possible to make the average house the size of a two-story row home, 5 meters wide, 8 meters tall, and 30 meters deep.
We use the word "house" intentionally. It is our vision that residents own their residence within the megastructure, as city residents can currently own their home.
Every level should have some means of transporting city residents around the perimiter of the ring, either on the outside or inside edge, or within the interior of lower levels.
At the top of the ring we propose a green roof, also accessible as park space to the residents. This level will of course be the thinnest of all, about 6 meters in width.
If we set the base of the structure at 120 meters from outer wilderness to inner park, rising an average of 10 meters at each level and becoming 6 meters narrower, this makes the total height 200 meters, with 20 levels total. This is a modest skyscraper; well within current construction possibilities.
The average width of a level is then 60 meters, approximately the same as a north-south Manhattan city block. With the park in the center measuring 2km in diameter, this means the circumference of the structure would be 6.28km. On average, we can think of each level as containing two streets – the outer walkway and the inner. The total structure then contains more than 250 kilometers of streets. Let's compare this to two reference cities, one short and one tall:
| city | population | total length of streets | ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| NYC | 11,000,000 | 9,775 | 1,125 |
| Lancaster, PA | 60,000 | 335 | 179 |
With these ratios as our limits, we can expect our city to spaciously house about 45,000 people, with an upper limit somewhere short of 280,000. Given the mandate to include undeveloped land surrounding our structure with area equal to the structure+park, this gives a population density between 5,700/km² and 35,000/km². For comparison, New York City has a population density of 11,000/km². But unlike New York City, in our city, every resident has multiple kinds of green space constantly visible and easily accessible.
A network of seven such ring cities, with attendant wilderness woven between, could fit on the island of Manhattan.
Even if all economic trade were cut off to a ring city, it should be able to meet all of its own basic needs for an indefinite period of time. We set as a design goal that each ring city:
We can learn from programs like ESA's MELiSSA.
This will require restricting what sorts of materials are permitted for use within the city.
Dealing with household refuse becomes easier in a single-structure city. We can design trash-handling systems into the architecture of the megastructure, and automate whole portions it.
We would like to see food production become fully automated. We hypothesize this will be possible using agricuture 3.0 techniques. We further hypothesize that these growing techniques can help grow bamboo, hemp, and other industrial material crops.
This style of LED-grown food can be placed below individual homes and businesses in the two-meter-high subfloor.
At a minimum, we believe this growing technique could grow the nine MELiSSA crops needed for basic human sustenance. We anticipate growing many more than only these nine crops using this technique, however; enough to offer a rich and varied vegan base diet for all residents. If residents desire to produce animal-based foods beyond this, they can set up more traditional farms using portions of the city's central green space.
Eventually, the ideal source of energy will be fusion power, especially given the high energy demands of food production. Until then, each ring city can use whatever renewable energy resources make sense for its location.
Efficiencies of scale will help lower the energy needs of such a city. We can design efficient heating, cooling, and refrigeration systems that work for entire portions of the city at once, rather than every home and business re-implementing inefficient systems individually. Take as an example the common refrigerator, which generates waste heat in order to cool food. To battle this waste heat, people often install lossy window air conditioners. By incorporating these systems into the architecture of the megastructure itself, we can design living spaces that offer more comfort with lower energy demands. We can also build efficient systems such as geothermal cooling into the city as whole.
Until humans possess a means of synthesizing substances from the subatomic level up, we will not have reached full post-scarcity.
And even in a society as fully-automated as possible, we doubt it makes human sense to automate certain aspects of existence. We suspect most humans will always prefer other humans to help with medical care and education.
Here's what we propose automating:
We believe this amount of automation already necessitates rethinking how ownership and economics work in such a city.
Let us start with our biggest break with traditional economics. We do not want to sell residence in our city to the highest bidder; we do not want a city that starts with the "money equals status" mindset of scarcity-based economies.
Since space will initially be limited compared to the number of people who may desire to move in, we do need some way of limiting immigration. This leaves us these options:
We suspect that, when it comes time to start moving into this new city, a combination of the last two options would make the most sense. An application process, though it comes with many challenges, could allow picking initial city residents who understand and can help fulfill the vision of the city.
Upon selection, a future-resident then has the chance to pick their home style – would they like large common spaces? A workshop? An industrial kitchen? More rooms for a large family? Outdoor space with a garden? The construction bots will build their new home according to their specification, and then they can move in.
Once moved in, they get to pick what raw foods they want delivered. The automated food production systems of the city will allow tweaking a household's menu at any time.
Every resident receives these guarantees – a home they own outright, clean water, and customizable raw food for a vegan diet. With 3D manufacturing, guaranteeing various home goods may also be feasible – kitchen accoutrements, pots and pans and appliances for cooking the provided food.
A resident could choose to live on only this, but we suspect they will want more. We suspect that some residents will excel at and enjoy baking bread while others enjoy making candles, or whatever the case may be. They might decide to start swapping these items, or selling them to others. We propose allowing this internal economy to develop ad-hoc, with no taxation or required transaction currency – residents can barter and trade or use a local currency or use a more widely-circulated regional currency, as they prefer.
At some point, a successful company comprised of city residents will want to start selling their products or services to the outside world. The business may need to scale up with more city resources, such as warehouse space or a new factory. We believe it's at this stage of business that it makes sense for the city to also start taxing the business. The exact arrangement here needs further study, though it will ultimately be up to the city residents.
We hypothesize that such a city will foster a high number of novel enterprises and valuable exports, and anticipate a large long-term income for such a city. From this income, the city can also provide essential services to residents outside of food and housing, such as healthcare and education.
This experiment will require a long-term vision and a massive budget, and the source of this budget must have a non-extractive mindset. This is a city, not a business; the residents of a city own the city.
We need more research into novel funding structures. But before we get carried away with trying to build the city itself, there are some other pieces that need to take shape before construction could begin on any potential city. And these parts would provide value for existing cities; no need to wait.
This concept city relies on two main forms of automation:
No one has solved these problems yet. We propose starting here, forming a multitude of ventures focused on the various challenges herein.
We would like to see future ring cities operate as city-states, using some form of direct democracy, sociocracy, or other inclusive governance structure. In a city where everyone shares the same megastructure as their home, we need to ensure that the decision-making processes about that structure make everyone feel welcome and heard, but don't bog down every decision in endless discussion.
Once an early food-systems-automation project becomes available, we have an opportunity to experiment with group ownership of such a system. Indeed, we believe that the best target market of such a system might not be individuals or families, but entire cities, city blocks/neigborhoods, and small towns. What governance structures would these entities need to employ to help all stakeholders co-manage such a food production system while enjoying the benefits of unlimited food?
If, somehow, we manage to complete the three preceeding steps, then we have the building blocks to start building the first prototype Ring City. We will have automated much of the construction process, making the cost of building such a city only a huge amount, rather than an astronomical amount. We will have secured funding enough to build on our terms. And we will have several long-running Proofs of Concept with automated food production and co-ownership of such systems.
Now comes the time to interact with existing nations to find a place to build a brand new city.
The ideal nation-state partner would allow the city to operate independently, making its own decisions about education, healthcare, currencies, education, criminal justice, etc. The city would require from the nation-state military protection. The city could provide tax income to the nation-state.
To help this project along, you can do a few things:
Right now, this is an idea. Not an organization or company. Spreading to new minds is the best thing that can happen to ideas.
Take it in. Let it morph in your head and come out in new ways.
And respond here! Click the "issues" tab up above and leave feedback, or edit this file directly and send the suggestions.
If you see any part of this that you could start working on now, start. Contact us to tell us about it, or don't.
Maybe you could make a new food automation startup. Maybe you can start making new kinds of 3D printing robots. Maybe you can start experimenting with hemp-based industrial materials. Maybe you can co-own your own food sources with your community and experiment with post-scarcity economics. Do it.
We don't know what that might look like, and we're open to ideas. Start a conversation in the Issues tab up above.