This is a question of how best to combine dense human populations (as urban and subusban areas) with thriving of other lives, as especially trees and plants. And as abeginning restricted to architecture design and engineering of large structures and buildings. I hope the following idea is not too outlandish, but could we imagine an architectural design of buildings, especially for living (alternative to blocks with flats) more similar to trees, and perhaps mixed up with them? At the bottom a supporting structure of "collumns", and only somewhere above living areas, perhaps fragmented (some similarity to) greens and leaves, to let some sunlight come down for the "natural" environment at the bottom or "underwood"? I hope the reader gets some associations and are not completely lost.

There are always the megastructure concepts like Sky City, which compact the land usage.

I hope designers of skyscrapers consider that more plants will be hung near windows on the south side than the north...

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

It's easier to just put conventional buildings further apart, thus leaving more room for trees between them to get unrestricted sunlight. All designing buildings to look like trees would do is add more stairs to climb.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I think its more likely that we'll be simply having 98% of humanity licving in cities with much of the rest of land returning to wilderness.

Huh? That sounds like the opposite of what you would want to do to get more wild areas. That's called Urban Sprawl, the enemy of everything environmental. Parks and gardens inside cities are not the same thing as wilderness areas.

There are many different ideas about how to build new types of buildings and cities which would be much smaller in area size and vastly more efficient in energy and environmental terms. Here's just a few I've pulled off Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanate, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_city, etc.

Most such ideas have been around for decades and don't even need any new technologies to build and we know they would work. Why have they not been build? I'd say a combination of initial expense, cultural resistance to replacing "traditional" housing, and just the general malaise that "we don't need them right now". I can only hope such attitudes will go the way of the dinosaur and we can start building really sustainable cities.

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The Sky is no longer the Limit

In advanced industrialized nations, the current trend is towards de-urbanization (aka suburbanization).

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

Well this just in...

Those "green" building designs like GAP coporate head quarters in San Bruno CA. are turning into maintainance nightmares eight years later. And that design, implimented on the obscenely PC California Academy of Mooncalfness (Formally the Academy of Sciences) has been abandoned by the original architects.

You would think an architect would realize that having two feet of damp top soil on the roof of a major structure could cause, oh, untracable roof leaks, fire hazards from dead grass and brush, and the fact that for most of the year it looks like hell once the local wild seasonal grasses colonize it.

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In your rush to call everyone "entrenched" or closed-minded or "limited" you fail to note that the "limit" here has a very natural boundary: that point at which the evidence stops. - JayUtah

Science fiction was never meant to be an educational tool. - Editor Amazing Tales

How about algae instead of grass then?

Roof leaks? Just make the bottom of the green roof impermeable?
Dead grass and bushes? Use one of those lawnmowing robots for maintenance.
Not sure what to do about the wild grasses.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with a green roof. It just needs the right kind of construction and maintenance.

- Maha Vailo

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When you get down to it, Science answers how. Religion answers why. - hippietrekx

The Warp Point, my new geek culture blog.

That was the architect's solution. The real world doesn't work that way.

To have a workable green roof you need it separated from the actual roof structure in such a way that they can be maintained separately, because they will both need maintenance but for different problems and you don't want one to hide the problems of the other.

Any engineering solution including the word "just" is wrong.
That's why revolutionary building designs need civil engineers, not architects, I'm thoroughly unsurprised that an architect failed to consider practical problems in designing a building.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

See attached Algae City in Gulf of Mexico

Attached Images

Caribbean.jpg (145.2 KB, 14 views)

I see you've heard of the new World Trade Center then?

There's a thought... Can you imagine the stench a leak in that pond would create?

I opt for a nice, well-chlorinated swimming pool instead!

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

How about fluorinated instead? For extra bug killing capability!

So how would you do that, pray tell? A canopy or sunroof?

- Maha Vailo

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When you get down to it, Science answers how. Religion answers why. - hippietrekx

The Warp Point, my new geek culture blog.

Neither.

I'd have the dirt on a raised structure on top of and separate from the actual roof structure, in discrete modules with enough structural integrity of each to allow them to be removed separately for access to the underlying structure should repairs be needed.

It will allow for a somewhat simplified roof structure as it'll be protected from sunlight in normal use but it shouldn't be a replacement for one alltogether.

And budged for a full time gardener to look after it.

You could put a canopy on top of the whole thing, if you want to control waterflow.

The important bit is to not hide the layer that keeps water off the people below in a way that makes it difficult to find and fix leaks, because leaks will happen.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

All true, but that wasn't the point I was addressing: the OP was about areas that have buildings mixed with trees.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I once designed a large geodesic dome that 'floated' on a circular foundation
which facilitated the traking of the entire dome shell with or away from the sun, as needed and allowed for the growing of fruit trees within the
central courtyard. You need to welcome the bees in for pollenation from time to time, but it lets you maximise your livable area and gets you closer to your garden.

Dan

Very good point indeed made regarding a second roof

Imagine a row of houses or shopping mall with a giant overhang shelf

Most building make little use of the roof top for us Human Beings

This is generally true for two reasons , the extra cost for these play areas and people dropping or throwing things from tall buildings is a danger to passer by in the vicinity

the last may sound like a minor detail...until you remember there are a lot of idiots out there

I read a scince fiction story i think it was the rise and fall of Phineas snodgrass

to cut a long story short it is an interesting pathway of population growth from 6 billion to 6 trillion souls ( most of whom lived underground)

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We are not short of room on planet earth to house countless trillions

WE ARE short of quality living space and resources to fund that quality living space

If it came to pass that Humanity found a way to limit its population to 1 billion i would gladly sign up. For in this world there are is plenty of room to play and plenty of EASILY available resources that we need not fight over them = quality of life for the human body and spirit

Alas as, Historically as a switching predator we seemed doomed to ravage the earth with our booming population and hunger for energy and resources.

Hence this topic on high density living....which i fear is a prelude to easter island :-(

A green roof doesn't have to be integrated too tightly. It could be planters on a rooftop for a garden of some sort.

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

Actually, old-style (pre-automobile) cities were fairly efficient; a compact city like San Francisco or NYC is less environmentally damage than the "suburbs in search of a center" model taken by cities like Los Angeles.

Build down! small parks and naturescapes can be installed within structures, but building down into the upper earth's crust provides the most compact structures with least exposure to environmental conditions.

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Iyam what Iyam

To The Sea is a short story I wrote some time ago which proposes a range of solutions regarding how best to combine dense human populations with thriving of other lives by building urban ocean dams. I think all the ideas in it are scientifically and economically feasible, although it is rather futuristic.

The problem with building down...ie into the ground is ventilation. Try the subway sometime.
One of the primary problems of living in the future is quality jobs for us all.
We have many solutions for good housing, and more than a few efficient
solutions for quality housing.
For myself, I do not like more than three stories as it produces problems with points of convenient egress in fires. But for much of the world today,
these concrete megaliths are the design of choice, and necessity.
Building them near the jobs which will support them is the real trick.
I found the writings of Buckminster Fuller interesting , once you make the effort to grasp his engineering eloquence.
You can certainly gain a perspective on excellent, well thought out and efficient approaches to solving affordable, strong and durable housing which can be mass produced at a reasonable cost compared with the traditional
methods.
The more you get into it, the more you understand that there are tradeoffs no matter what you do. C'est la vie, mon amis.

Best regards,
Dan

Different environmental concerns, surely, but perhaps as dangerous, if not more so. Fires, loss of power, flooding, ventilation, earthquakes, etc, will all pose serious threats to cellar dwellers. Perhaps more so than to skyscrapers.

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

Certainly so, I would think that a lot of this could be resolved with the proper design, but it is definitely a concern, along with lighting in the event of power outage, that comes to mind as issues of trade-offs.

Instead of pushing skyscrapers into the earth, however, what if we consider something more along the lines of terraced pits and canyons?

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Iyam what Iyam

I'm not sure how far down Trakar is thinking, but very tall buildings are often built with five to ten sub basements, for technical reasons such as reaching bed rock and keeping the pounds per square inch weight on the bed rock about the same as before the building was built. Too many sub basements would produce the reverse problem = less pressure on the bed rock than before the building was built. I presume nearly all of the occupants of the sub basements of the world trade center died, but hopefully, this is not typical. Apparently there were no deaths or injuries from the first attempt to bring down the World trade center with explosives in the lowest basement. Does anyone know any other sub basement, tunnel or subway tragedies or is Ara being overly pessimistic? Ventilating would be a severe problem 1000 feet below the surface or more. LED lighting would permit limited plant growth with less heat than other lighting methods. LEDs can operate on as little as three volts, so low voltage batteries can supply light during a power failure. Neil

One solution to underground ventilation, if coupled with a tall building...ie
5 stories above , is utilizing a central chimney (vent shaft ) letting warm air rise, pulling fresh air in, giving an air change on demand without power or machinery. But... you have to warm that air...(air to air heat exchangers..? ).
Still, the real problem isn't population density. It's population where the jobs are. Or.... good cheap , reliable transportation to the jobs at a reasonable distance. Solve THAT problem, and you have the luxury of spreading out a little.

Dan

Unfortunately, if spreading out involves transportation back and forth over large distances, we exasperate current problems rather than aleviating them.
Moder communications and distributed work from home systems are the best answer to much of the transportation issue, telepresence with a single human overseeing and controlling multiple semi-automated systems may address many of the other transportation issues, but in the end, especially in service industries, people need to live near where they work, and for the most part this means near as many other people as possible.

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Iyam what Iyam