Super-Green City of the Future

5 Posts
Feb 2, 2008 11:57 pm
Super-Green City of the Future

Every day, a few hundred thousand vehicles cross the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, their drivers barely aware of the small, rectangular land mass lying just to the north.
From where I am standing, on rocky Yerba Buena Island, I can both hear the traffic thundering overhead and look across a narrow isthmus to the long-forgotten patch of real estate in the middle of the bay: Treasure Island. Home to an abandoned Navy base and a small population of low- to middle-income residents, the 400-acre property hardly lives up to its prosperous name. Defunct military buildings, rusty oil tanks and electrical transformers litter the landscape. Crumbling asphalt caps chemical dumps.

Treasure Island is an unlikely place to look for the city of the future, but that's what I'm here to find. My guide is Jean Rogers, an environmental engineer with the global design and consulting firm Arup. Surrounded by a panorama of postcard views—San Francisco, Golden Gate, Berkeley Hills—and buffeted by winds that whip in from the Pacific, Rogers seems somewhat unlikely, too: Petite, stylish, with an impressive string of degrees and a down-to-business manner, she speaks with easygoing "likes" and "you knows" sprinkled among phrases such as "tertiary water treatment" and "optimal solar exposure." Rogers jabs at the ground with the heel of her shoe, reminding me what an engineering feat we stand on: Completely man-made, Treasure Island consists of 20 million cubic yards of sea bottom that has been dredged up, dumped into walls made of 287,000 tons of quarried rock and topped with 50,000 cubic yards of loam.

Built for the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939, Treasure Island was claimed as a Naval base during World War II. When the base was finally decommissioned 11 years ago, San Francisco began studying how to redevelop it. From nearly 300 meetings among city officials, engineers, architects and the public emerged a plan for the most ambitious new community in the United States—a 13,500-person "urban oasis" that will rise from the soil of reclaimed Superfund sites, combining cutting-edge technology with restored natural systems to leave a light footprint on the Earth. After ground is broken in 2009, Treas­ure Island will become a testbed for the newest ideas in energy efficiency, water conservation, waste management and low-impact living. Says Rogers, with idealism undaunted by the task ahead: "We want it to be the most ecological city in the world."
 
Kind Regards

Grant Rowe

www.worldofrenewables.com
www.renewableenergyjobs.net
 
Feb 3, 2008 04:50 pm
Re: Super-Green City of the Future

I have all but been flat out accused of not being "forward thinking" when it comes to renewable energies. If that means that I cannot be easily spun into a sugary dream of cotton candy renewable energies technologies, then I am guilty.
I suppose its the lack of practicality of the cost of retrofitting in some cases, more so than the technology itself.
400 acres you say? Has to be detoxed and clean too? (Were would the toxins be relocated to?) Then the rebuild can start? I would imagine being a self reliant island it would need quite a bit of that 400 acres for such things as; water distillation, sewage treatment, electricity production, hydrogen gas production or methane from sewage, growing fresh produce, and unless colonized by vegans, livestock pasture, then of course a place to store these things, and least but not last housing for the Homo sapiens.

Don't get me wrong I like the idea of it! Look at how long the Amish have withstood the test of time! It would seem that these type of endeavors usually start with a dream by one or more people. What happens if the dream becomes corrupted? Wait, thats not a fair question. How about I ask it another way? Does that land have any spirits? Have you asked those spirits for direction in this endeavor? Or being manmade, is it completely void of any living natural spirits?

I hope these questions do not deter you from your dreams. I would like to see such an island stand up to the tests of time and set an example (God willing) for the rest of the world. A positive note: you have over 7,000 years of human history to draw data from. I would like to close with a quote from Albert Einstein,
"Every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe-a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble."
 
76 Posts
Feb 7, 2008 12:27 pm
Re: Super-Green City of the Future

It seems like for anything larger than a few families, you need to start with 1000 acres.  1000 Acres can be had really cheap in various parts of the country.  This seems like too steep a startup project, but good fortune!
 

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