by Michell Joachim. evolo issue 1. fall 2009 (62-65)
Imagine our colossal municipal landfills as sensible resource sheds to build our future urban and peri-urban spaces. If so, what kind of effort is required to reuse their copious contents as housing and infrastructure? Now that the bulk of humanity has chosen to settle in urbanized areas, waste management needs a radical revision.
For hundreds of years we designed cities to generate waste. It is time we design waste to generate our cities. America is the leading creator of waste on the earth, making approximately 30% of the world's trash and tossing out 0.8 tons per u.s. citizen per year. It seems value has devolved into feats of rampant affluenza and mega products scaled for supersized franchise brands, big box retail, XXXL jumbo paraphernalia, etc., encapsulating a joint race for ubiquity and instantaneity in the U.S. mindset. The first we must take is reduction, meaning a massive discontinuation of objects designed for obsolescence. Then we need a radical reuse plan. What is our call of action?
At the moment, New York City is disposing of 38,000 tons of wste per day. Previously most of this discarded material ended up in Fresh Kills on Staten Island before operations were blocked. Manhattanites toss out enough paper products to fill a volume the size of Empire State Building every two weeks. Our Rapid Re(f)use project strives to capture, reduce, and redesign New York's refuse. The initiative supposes an extended city reconstituted from its own waste materials. our concept remakes the city by utilizing all trash entombed in the Fresh Kills landfills. Theoretically our method should produce, at minimum, seven entirely new Manhattan Islands at full scale. This will provide housing for another 3 million people. Started by Robert Moses.
How does it work? Outsized automated 3D printers are modified to rapidly process trash and complete this housing task within decades. These automatons are wholly based on exisiting techniques commonly found in industrial waste compaction devices. To accomplish this job, we deem nothing drastically new needs to be invented; most technologies are intended to be off-the-shelf. Instead of machines that crust objects into cubes, devices can use adjustable jaws that will craft simple shapes into smart puzzle blocks for assembly. The blocks of refuse are predetermined using computational geometries to puzzle fit domes, archways, lattices, windows, whatever patterns needed.
Different materials serve specific purposes; transparent plastic for fenestration, organic compounds for temporary scaffolds that decompose, metals for primary structures, etc. Eventually the future city makes no distinction between waste and supply.
Idea is not new, Sambo Mockbee is one such example...
Terreform ONE group prepared a presentation that would unpack a view of one version of the future. A world free of carbon loading in the atmosphere and abundant in self sufficient lifestyles and housing. As eco savvy architects, we had meticulously crafted cities within the rubric of a socio-ecological domain. Everyone and everything in these urban ideations were carborexic to the hilt.
We design places for people to fit symbiotically into their natural surrounds. We design the scooters, cars, trains, blimps, as well as the strets, parks, open spaces, cultural districts, civic centres, business hubs, etc. that comprise of a future metropolis. For centuries cities have been designed to accommodate the drama of our human will. We have joined the ranks of delivering a new sense of the city, one that privileges the drama of nature over anthropocentric whims.
How much new technology needs to be obtained to do so, or should we modify existing methods? If it is plausible to adapt the current machinery, how much material is available? At first look--any westernized sanitary landfill appears like an ample supply of building "nutrients". The heavy industrial technologies to compact cars into lumber or automatically sift/trommel through garbage are readily available. Other technologies are scalable to make the system articulate specific forms. 3D printing, an exhausted hackneyed capability, is mutable for grander tasks.
Our city will be delivered from trash, but not ordinary trash, smart trash. We were inspired by Woody Allen. The integration of devices into the everyday city is an essential piece in a familiar puzzle. He used to tell a great parable about mechanical objects with attitude.
A significant factor in our city composed from smart refuse is post-tuning. unitized devices will not immediately adapt. integration into the city texture is a learning process. After a time the responses will become more attenuated to the needs of the urban dweller. This city is made from trash, but each individual component is enhanced with a modicum of CPU power. Many short durational events will gives these smart units experiences needed to evolve.
Our final objective for this city is to establish a self-sufficient perpetual motion urbanism. Perpetual motion is said not to exist, yet. It defies the laws of thermodynamics and energy conservation. It claims that an apparatus can be created that produces more energy than it consumes. What if our city was like an instrument that produces more energy from renewable sources than it consumes? Or instead of a city like a single instrument, it is a city of a trillion instruments making more with less. In this case, nothing can be thrown away. Every bit is a vital piece of stored energy poised to be reused in a cyclical nutrient stream. It is a city without a tail pipe. It is a city that not only has zero impact, but it is a positive contribution towards the natural surrounds. It is the highest standard we can conceive. JFK said "if man created problems, man can solve them." We think it is not only about solving our ecological issues but returning to a system of perpetuity. This is the future for a truly breathing interconnected metabolic urbanism.
Urban housing has passed the age of industrialization and entered the age of recovery. After this great cleansing of orders; positive waste. Here is an order that captures our socio-ecological needs. not utopia, but a philtopia, a place where everything is precious and nothing is disposed.
