Media alert: Future Cape Town in New York

Attending the Harvard Business Review and Siemens’ Future Influencers Global Meeting on May 27-29.

Meeting with representatives of PlaNYC, the Mayor’s office of long-term planning and sustainability as well as…

February 7th, 2013

Keynote Speaker: Maria Aiolova

At Atmos 5 in the ARTlab at the University of Manitoba, Keynote Speaker Maria Aiolova discusses her non-profit organization (Terreform) and their ideas regarding Urbaneering Utopia, which is a new profession imagined for what the future will look like (1). 

One of the large projects discussed with the Brooklyn Project (first image below). The project looks at the city of Brooklyn, New York, 100 years from now. They chose one hundred square yards of Brooklyn and redesigned it to be self-sustaining. The goal was to implement more green space and recreational green space, as well as adding systems to enhance water filtering and reusing of water as well as its own production of food. By combining and squashing together the function, the goal was to create 100% renewable energy and 100% recyclable water. The strategy was to include replacing chosen structures by adding vertical agriculture and housing that would be merged with the surrounding infrastructure. Places that were once streets would become enriched with renewable energy sources and ecologically active pathways.

This company is highly concerned with futuristic planning, revolving around sustainability and reduction of land use. One of the ideas included the implementation of smart cars into the urban fabric. These are cars made of soft materials going at reduced speeds that can bump into each other and cause no impact, meaning no one shall die in a car accident again. Another idea Maria discussed was a blimp bumper bus, which would be a blimp-like structure with hanging chairs or seating that would hover above the urban fabric and drop the public off and pick them up at designated spots.  The roads would then be replaced with smart-highways, which would change direction and location based on the needs of the pedestrians and cyclists (2).

These were the two projects that I personally found most interesting. A couple others discussed including the idea of the meat house, which was a passive housing systems that would typically be "alive" and the insulation was the fat of the organism. Mycoform was a project that involved making bricks with organic garbage and aluminum. Finally, Gen2Seat was a living biological chair which was "genetically engineered from naturally occurring bacterium which secretes copious amount of cellulose, which can be harvested and used directly as a building material (3)."

Personally, although I found these projects intellectually captivating, very interesting, well composed, and I know a lot of education and science backs them up, I still find a hard time wrapping my head around the concepts she discussed. The ideas of the Brooklyn project seem like a possibility in the near future, and probably will become a reality as people become more aware of sustainability cities and will eventually require a zero waste, 100% recyclable urban structure. However, some of the ideas such as living within a living organism, to me, seem like some sort of abstract representation rather than a legitimate future possibility. 

Sources:

(1) http://www.aiolova.com/profile.html (accessed 14 February 2013)

(2) http://www.terreform.org/projects_urbanity_brooklyn.html (accessed 14 February 2013)