Transforming Current Cities Into Green Smart Cities

I've often spoken about decentralizing city services with technologies that could be installed in every home from solar panels to make homes energy self-sufficient, to drinking water production equipment, to wastewater recycling and so on...  I believe this is still something that will happen at some point, but I also think there are other form factors for larger city subsets like apartment blocks or integrated smart cities that could work rather well.  After all, not every area in the world has sufficient land to allow most families to have their own homes.

Thankfully, communities can use some very nice technologies to take care of the inhabitants starting with city planners.

One of my favorite ideas is based with Jacque Fresco's concepts (The Venus Project) where communities live in harmony with nature using advanced technologies and social constructs.

As far as I know though, none of M. Fresco's projects have been built according to his vision, yet.  However, China likes to experiment with interesting concepts.  One of them actually looks like one of Fresco's ideas.  The Liuzhou Forest City is planned to be built in the region of Liuzhou, Southern China where it was commissioned and the plan is that it will house approximately 30,000 residents.  

One of the main points of the city project is to take little space by building apartment complexes in height but also by making sure carbon emissions and other air pollutants would be completely absorbed by the heavily eco-green concept.  Because the Forest City has so much surface area planned to be growing with plants, it is even estimated that it will produce 900 tons of oxygen a year, likely making it very pleasant for inhabitants.

This is a great idea on its own, but if you've been following me, this sort of concept doesn't need to be built on brand new parcels of land and we could transform some of our cities with this concept without destroying any of our current buildings either.

In the video here, I talk about this a bit further:

What I mean is with the self-driven cars, delivery vehicles and public transportation systems coming out in the next 2-5 years, in most advanced societies, it is anticipated that most parking areas in cities can be re-purposed to... something else.  In some cities, 20% of the surface area is in fact parking space.  Why not growing things there instead?  Trees, plans, gardens for in-city fruit and vegetables and so on.  Those would also absorb carbon dioxide and toxins as well as producing oxygen for inhabitants.  Not to mention most of the self-driven vehicles on the street (moving, almost never parked) will be electric, which means no emissions at all.

Wouldn't that be cool to live in a green city without having to rebuild everything?  Costs and effort would be minimal wouldn't it?  An idea for you readers that happen to be interested in city planning...

While we're at it, why don't we make our shopping more efficient by having staff-less stores available to us (less people moving around to work is ecological).  I've already spoken of Amazon Go.

Here is another concept from Swedish company Wheelys, who has deployed their own self-serve store in China.  Sure we can have products delivered to us by self-driven electric delivery trucks or drones, but sometimes you just want to grab something as you walk by, or you want to touch and feel what you wish to buy this time...

Aside from removing pollution we'd still be ejecting in the air just by breathing and living, such cities would need a way to treat water at a fairly large scale, as in for apartment buildings right?  Well, one nice find from a while back is the NEWgenerator concept that takes solid and liquid waste from public or large toilet systems, treats it and spews out water you can use to water plants and solid material that can be used as fertilizer directly and bio-gas that can be used for heating and other uses where solar isn't enough.  The NEWgenerator has been designed so far for toilet blocks but no reason it cannot be restructured for other large toilet systems to serve a community.  In this instance, our water and solid waste from home could be used to feed the plants outdoors that give us nice air, fruit and vegetables.

Finally, as far as neighborhood and apartment security, we could easily use new technologies to ensure every aspect of daily life is covered from:

• walking in the tree-filled streets, by being observed by all manner of street cameras and UAVs such as those built by the Korean Aerospace Research Institute.
• apartment building entry and other semi to fully public areas, by adding facial recognition technology software to CCTV in order to identify who should be in certain places at a certain time and identifying persons of interest that have been flagged as undesirable.
• entering your own private space using your smartphone using smart lock systems.  Different models exist and you can already install those in your own home today.

Ultimately, with the freeing of all that parking space in cities, we could resolve some serious pollution problems, make our neighborhoods way more comfortable and nice to live in, and why not in the process ensure we have more efficient and smarter use of resources by recycling apartment waste into plant food?

Smart city?  Yes indeed!