26 april 2015
Future city life In the light of creating a more sustainable world, I have been looking at the innovations which will give us a good green life in the future. How will we be living if we don’t have enough space for the growing population? And how will we create enough green landscape without the space to keep our world a healthy one. One most on avoiding thing is we need to go live higher to make better use of the space we have. This most of all in light of the urbanization happening now, and therefore the growing aspect of urbanization in the future. The things below create a good example of how our future urban life will look like. What kind of future improvements or concepts are there? skyscraper big imageOne of the first very interesting things I found is a future multifunctional skyscraper named the Essence skyscraper. It’s a new concept that creates a wild environment inside an urban life. Essence is the winner of 2015 future concepts of urban towers. The skyscraper is a solution to reintroduce nature into the concrete and grey cities. It can be placed in any city center and will contain eleven different natural interior landscapes. It are Indoor gardens. The goal of Essence is for you to escape the urban life and its crowded self. As well residents and visitors will see numerous floors with miniature jungles, fish tanks and other biomes represented in the indoor gardens. It will be an amazingly trip into the wild in the middle of a city life. Secondly we also need new ways of creating more green and more green energy in future cities. A great solution to both of these problems is Plantpower. Living plants as a clean, sustainable, renewable and efficient energy source. Experiments worldwide showed that plants can be a new source of energy. Living plants in microbial fuel cells for clean, renewable and sustainable energy. It is an amazingly found. We can grow the plants all around our house for our own energy use. This will also make the city greener in looks and healthier in living. For example like the picture u can also put the plants on roof tops and balconies. With all this new energy we also need to ways to lighten our future cities and make the lightning more sustainable. An invention of the Dutch designer Chintan Shah called Tvilight. He was searching for a more sufficient way to lighting the streets. Especially when he saw that most of the time streets are lighted without any reason. Like at nights, when mostly no one is walking them. It’s a lot of waste of energy. The Tvilight is an intelligent, on demand lighting system by using wireless sensors. This way streetlights will only light up in the presence of a car, bicycle or a person. The lamp will remain dimmed for the rest of the time and save a huge amount of energy. The lamp even has the technology to notice the difference between smaller animals and people. This will avoid the street light lighting up unnecessarily. This is not only a great solution as a part of a more sustainable city but it will also is better for our wallet and safety. In the video below is explained how the Tvilight works with a perspective of Dan Roosegaarde. Why is are these innovations important for our future? We’re facing an overpopulated world in the future. Besides this, the cities will grow to an enormous extant. Already half of the world’s population lives in urban settlements. ‘’ Around 3 billion people—virtually half of the world’s total population-now live in urban settlements. And while cities command an increasingly dominant role in the global economy as centers of both production and consumption, rapid urban growth throughout the developing world is seriously outstripping the capacity of most cities to provide adequate services for their citizens. Over the next 30 years, virtually all of the world’s population growth is expected to be concentrated in urban areas in the developing world.’’ [Cohen, B.,2005. Urbanization in developing countries: Current trends, future projections, and key challenges for sustainability] Meaning the growing world population and the need for cities to be more efficient in the way of living and dealing with space is highly important. If we don’t find other ways to live on this planet it will take a great toll of the world’s resources. That way, there won’t be nothing left to have a future with. How will the future urban life look like? All these innovations together create a good image of how our future cities will be able to look like. By collaboration we can turn this into a realistic world’s image. I would like to live to see the cities become so beautifully green and full of great innovations like the ones above. It will be a big improvement to our overall quality of life. Bronnen: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160791X05000588 http://www.psfk.com/2015/04/evolos-2015-skyscraper-competition-essence-skyscraper.html http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/18/tech/innovation/tvilight-street-lamps-roosegarde/ http://joostengelen.net/energie-opwekkende-planten/ http://www.wageningenur.nl/nl/show/Planten-maken-stroom.htm