Skyscraper Forests In Cities

https://www.cnet.com/news/pollution-fighting-vertical-forest-coming-to-china/

This is just one of the more interesting trends in city architecture today with, for example, other cities often renovating things like old monorail tracks into walking parks as a cheap way to produce much the same effect. Japan is now building the first self-contained city in a skyscraper, a pyramid straight out of Blade Runner, that has entire levels dedicated to parks and shopping. The nice thing about taking it all vertical is they can add as many parks as the market will bear. Another push in this same direction is cities increasingly funneling traffic underground and replacing some of it with parks and plants along roadsides. The first robotic skyscraper systems are being used today that just keep adding as many layers as you want and I would not be surprised if, at some point, they become energy self-sufficient to a great extent as well. For example, huge advances have been made in synthetic photosynthesis and there's no reason whatsoever that an entire skyscraper can't produce energy for countless others around it turning the art of self-sufficiency into an integral aspect of remaining competitive in the local real estate market.

That might sound a bit far fetched, but already companies such as Walmart, Google, etc. have been investing heavily for decades in solar power and, today, we can genetically engineer plants to produce more electricity if we want. Exactly how far people with go with this is, apparently, only limited by their imagination.

 

What is left of the permaculture movement have been advocating a mix of plants and vegetable growers be put into architecture for some time now.

 

Yeah, but this is where the construction industry turns permaculture into high tech. Seriously, someone just figured out how to genetically engineer almost any plant to produce significantly more electricity if you want, while others have finally figured out the quantum mechanics of converting green sunlight into energy as most plants do. There are also plants genetically designed for superfund cleanup sites and no reason you can't design them just for city air pollution. At the rate they going future skyscrapers may be commonly covered with ivy or whatever that you plant once and, eventually, it covers the entire thing providing all the clean air and power the building needs.

 

I love this so much. We need to learn how to integrate with nature rather than bulldoze over it if we are going to survive as a species

 

Although we think of ourselves as being high tech, it was only around the 1880s that Americans became the first largely literate population that the world had ever seen. The last century and half of the rapid development of technology and the sciences has merely been providing us with the tools required to actually take the next step and integrate ourselves better within the natural world.