We want CAAS to be a new way of thinking about
humans and their relationships with their
habitats, transporters and their environment.
We, as humans, are on a picnic, on this planet.
The city that we live in –
Imagine that one day it just unplugs
and takes off and goes and lands someplace else.
If it is a friendly city it leaves no trace of having been there.
No trash. It has lived there lightly.
We want CAAS to be an intelligent way of designing future cities.
Each city would be composed of small, spaceship-like
semi-closed-loop eco-systems where most resources
the city consumes, are produced locally, in-situ, leveraging the
power of technology to reap efficiencies through sub-systems
that plug into mega grids, to share excesses,
while not sacrificing self-sufficiency, or the ability to
decouple from ‘the city’ in the event of a crisis.
Most things these eco-systems spit out as waste gets
recirculated and recycled back in.
This urban philosophy can
lead to the design of future cities that could exemplify what
Buckminster Fuller meant with “Spaceship Earth”.
We could find many different strategies.
On one hand, these eco-systems could be completely
independent systems with even dedicated food supply.
On the other, they could have strategic interconnections
with the inevitable trade-offs. Within a framework of completely
self-sufficient eco-systems, there will be certain costs imposed
by redundancies, and the lack of scale, minimized somewhat by
technology and through the accomplishment of
grid-based scale economies.
The benefits are those afforded by complete modularity.
Resources would never collapse completely. The variety
in technologies and eco-systems would play into security
where one mode of attack, or failure, couldn’t compromise
everything, or affect too large a part of the city.
Interestingly, practices such as organic farming would work
rather well for such systems because they rely on diversity and
variety for their success. In the model of selective interlinking,
one would sacrifice the benefits of complete closed loops
in favour of some scale economies.
The implications for what we seek to address may be very
significant, and urgent, especially in the present day context
when global climate change is staring us in the face.
The western industrialized nations are re-thinking the results of
several decades of thoughtless depredation of the Earth.
Two of the most populous nations on the face of the planet –
India and China - are urbanizing at a monstrous pace, and
doing it in much the same way as the industrialized world did
in the preceding decades.
The world needs new answers if we are to stand a chance
to keep it habitable, and sustainable
for the future generations.
