Cities of the Future

Lets try something new.
Imagine you want to design and build a new city.
A city for a few hundred thousand citizens.
Political problems and money do not matter. The only important task is to build it in a working future proof way.
Challenges and new technologies are welcome.

Where would you build such a city?
How would you start to design it?
How would you solve economical and ecological problems?
What would your city look like?
Keep in mind the needs of the peaople.

Discuss... and be creative.

Id be more interested in your thoughts about how such a city can/should work.

I like that so far... interesting thoughts.
My ideas so far went more into the direction of technical applications and design... but not society and its problems.

You have a very good point there.

funny thing is that lots of the mentioned stuff is covered by my own thoughts (I have written a huge wall of text that describe possibilities but i wanted to keep the discussion running)

didnt i say that costs play no role? so yes they paid

Quote from Portalearth

I meant did they pay for that Wall of Text? I was trying to make a funny.

How do you think we could get cloud cities? Would we have to solve the secrets of gravity or figure out some renewable/infinite energy source?

well i tried to reply funny
i guess we both failed

wall of text:

How to build a city?

Well, I would start with the question where to build it.
Personally I think that it is good to go new ways.
We dont need to think about building a new city in Europe or any other region that already has a high population with already existing infrastructure.
Even on ecological points of views I would accept the challenge and build in unusual places.
Id choose a region in the west-sahara close to the Atlantic coast (a few km from the coastline).
Why?
Its a region with extreme thin population and therefore alot of room for expansion. The region also is rich in unexploited mineral resources.
A few km away from the ocean under the aspect of global warming and rising sea levels.

This choice comes with multiple problems that need to be solved.
Its a very desolate and dry place (even in coast regions).
Fresh water is going to be an issue that leads to many other issues such as producing food etc.
That region does not have any lakes or rivers which can cover the needs. There is one large river in that area but it is not sufficient enough to serve as fresh water supply.
However, there should be the option to make use of it when other solutions fail temporarily.

Access to the Atlantic Ocean could in theory solve the freshwater problem since it is technically possible to build filtration facilities that can filter the salt water and produce fresh water.
Fresh water is a problem that in theory can be solved.
Its ambicious but not impossible.
Key problem here is that you need alots of energy to and large facilities that can get the job done.
With enough energy pretty much every of the following problems can be solved.

The region itself is pretty hot with many sun hours.
Combinations of solar-electric and solar-thermic power plants could deliver at least a part of the required energy.
But in the end re-newable energies are unreliable.
At night you have no sun. And Wind energy is also very unreliable (especially in an area where sand particles are carried by the wind, which would damage wind turbines).
Part of the required energy has to come from the city itself.
Our current cities pretty much "pollute" the environment with "hot air" and "hot waste-water".
Clever design might allow us to use these byproducts and recycle that energy. There are existing concept buildings which produce more energy than they consume. Partly this is done by clever use of recuperators.

In the end we also have to use other forms of enery because we dont just want a city for people to live in. We have to think about building a city with industry which consumes lots of energy.
And we need a way to regulate the power fluctuations from day/night cycles.
Personally I would completely ignore wind energy for the fact that it is the most unreliable one and has many negative side effects.
Coal, Gas? Not under ecological aspects.
That leaves geothemal power, nuclear power and fusion power.

Geothemal power is an option worth to think about but I have no idea what geological structures can be expected in that region.
I personally have also decided for the location because it isnt a regio with earthquakes. I would assume that large scale geothermal power plants a hard to realize in these areas.
It still might be an option.

Fusion energy is something scientists 50 years ago predicted to be possible "in 50 years", today scientiests predict that the technology is available in 50 years and in 50 years scientists most certainly will tell you "in 50 years".
Dont get me wrong. There are experimental Fusion power plants today and they work, but they only work for a few seconds. Then the fusion stops working.
It is a great way to generate energy and we shouldnt forget about this option.

Generally nuclear power is the only truly reliable source we currently have at hands.
Reliable up to the point where a reactor explodes.

Why can nuclear reactors explode?
Mainly because todays reactors are a crap design.
All nuclear reactors work with 3 components.
1. A radioactive material which is instable enough to allow fission. -> rods filled with uranium-235 (92 protons and 143 neutrons), a pretty big and heavy isotope
2. Then a reactor needs a material to moderate the reaction. Most reactors use graphite for that purpose.
3. And then you need something too cool the reactor and also transport the energy into turbines. Pretty much every reactor uses water for that purpose. It absorbs heat and can be transported to the turbines which produce the energy.

Water is the weak element in this reaction because when water gets too hot (and it will if there isnt a steady flow of it from outside) then the molecules split into oxigen and hydrogen which are higly explosive gasses.
Fukushima and Tschernobyl were hydrogen explosion after the breakdown of the cooling cycle.
And that can happen in EVERY nuclear reactor on this planet. There is no secure reactor.

I still would decide for nuclear power because these 3 components can be exchanged allowing to build a large amount of variations.
One variation might use some different material for uranium, the other might use a replacement for water.
And thats where it starts to get interesting.

There is the controversial idea (working concept) of liquid fluoride reactors.
That are nuclear reactors which use a high temperature and high pressure liquid fluoride as replacement for the water. Instead of having nuclear fuel rods (which are very hard to control and which need to be renewed after just 10% of their burntime) the nuclear material floating directly in the liquid fluoride.
The liquid fluoride itself has the benefit no pure hydrogen gets released even when the reaction is getting hotter.
It also has the benefit that the liquid expands with rising temperatures which increases the distance between the nuclear material and therefore automatically slows down the nuclear reaction when the reactor gets too hot.
Such a reactor can never explode.

But why dont we have such reactors today?
1. There are technical difficulties which I will explain below.
2. The current nuclear reactors use uranium-235 and the reaction has to a very tiny amount a byproduct. Plutium. And our governments need Plutonium to build nuclear weapons. Thats one of the main reasons why we still dont have "clean energy".

When saying "clean energy" I come to the difficulties of the liquid fluoride reactors.
They are not clean.
It is possible to use uranium in them or an element called Thorium.
Thorium has the advantage that every country of the world has large deposits of it and does not know what to do with it today.
There is probably enough thorium for the next 1000 years of the worlds energy consumption.
Thorium is a radioactive material so just like Uranium will create nuclear waste.
However, since the Thorium reaction happens directly in the liquid fluoride there is no need to reprocess the material. It burns by 100%.
The byproducts are still radioactive but their halflife is much lower than using uranium 235 in a normal reactor.

Germany once had an experimental reactor which was shut down due to security reasons.
One byproduct is Tritium with a halflife of 12 years.
Tritium is a hydrogen isotope and thus very volatile. There was an incident very small amounts of tritium got into the environment. Unfortunatly this happened in a type just a few years after Tschernobyl where the fear of everything "nuclear" was big.
Political pressure forced this powerplant to close.
The problem is real... but it is not impossible to solve. After more than 30 years there is the technology to build a thorium power plant.
China is currently trying to do that.

In my eyes this is the way how to generate power for that new city.
And btw. the Tritium is useful for further applications because it decays with a halflife of just 12 years into helium-3.
Helium-3 can be used for cryogenic purposes or in combination with Deuterium as fuel for Fusion reactors (scroll up).
(Deuterium can be filtrated from salt water)

In terms of energy transportation in the city I could imagine a grid of superconducting "cables". The Helium-3 could be used for the required cooling.
A superconducting energy grid has the benefit that you can transfer alot more energy because there is no resistence anymore.
No resistence means no heat, and that means no energy loss.

Ok... with that I consider the topic energy DONE.

Now that we have energy, we can start to solve the other problems.
Fresh water is no longer a problem with access to the ocean and that much energy at hand.

How would my city look like?
I would build it under multiple domes to protect it from the environment.
With that I mean the wind which carries sand over the atlantic ocean and also high temperatures due to the intense sunlight in that region.
The domes would be directly connected. This modular design would allow expansion if required.
The material for the domes have to be relative light-weight. I doubt that glass and steel would be good materials for that. I guess alternatives have to be found.
The glass (or whatever else) would require to block part of the sunlight. I could imagine a semi-transparent solution in combination with photo-voltaic.
The material would most likely heat up so the domes would require cooling.
Since we dont have any power problems, cooling shouldnt be a problem.

The domes by default have to be big but weight always is a problem. I would prefer a design with a large building in the middle of the dome which reaches to the top and stabilizes the whole structure.
Around this center building I would build multiple green terraces as large scale park structure. I want a green city and the air under a dome requires as much green environment as possible.
Then multiple larger building can be build in the outer regions of the domes.
All buildings under the domes are supposed to be for living purposes. Apartments and everything that the population needs for freetime and relaxing.
Offices and Industry would be put underground or if required into specialized domes/structures.
Unlike the pic above I would not want to build a compact underground city for the fact that all the weight from above would cause a terrible high pressure that it would be very hard to construct something like that.
Instead I would prefer the design to be more like a large scale tunnel system where the surrounding rock naturally stablizes the underground structures.
People generally dont like the idea of being underground and working there. Thats a problem that needs to be adressed.
One solution is to take care of the light down there.
The human organism requires natural light to feel well. Especially the day/night cycle needs attention underground.
There currently is a company working on a concept of OLEDs which emit natural light (exactly the light composition we have outside) and also simulate day/night cycles in closed rooms.
Yes, such small details can make a huge difference.

In terms of transportation there also is much to consider.
Transportion has to be designed carefully.
Trams and busses might work but in the end humans are individuals and have individual needs.
You most certainly wont transport a new couch via tram and you definitely dont want to walk home with your groceries because your next bus station is 15mins away.
An individual traffic system is required. Maybe a rail based self-driving car solution that offers the use of public vehicles in different sizes (depending on needs).
This rail-car systems has the benefit that you can use e-cars which dont require expensive and ineffective batteries.
An underground train system could take care of industrial goods and "oversized" deliveries (industrial components and machines need to be transported and require a transportation system that is big enough).

Food production is another problem to be solved.
But actually we have everything we need covered already.
We have fresh water, we have energy, we have perfect light.
Imaginable would be to have agricultural domes and/or multi-level food farms inside buildings or underground. With artificial "natural" light it is possible to grow plants even without direct sunlight.

Such a city would also produce alot of waste products.
Most can be recycled and should be recycled. Some can be used as fertilizer for the food production.
The radioactive waste from the energy production would be stored in an underground facility, maybe 50km away.
The Tritium has as I already mention a halflife of a bit more than 12 years. After that the decayed material can be filtrated and used for other applications.
There would need to be large multi-layer tanks to store the Tritium and a venting system that could detect leaks.
For the other radioactive waste a sectional storage system would reasonable. That way leaks could be detected and the sources of the leaks isolated.
That radioactive material has a halflife of a few hundred years (which is a joke compared to the hundreds of thousands years our current radioactive waste takes).
Btw. also the Fusion power plant would generate radiation and radioactive material. It is a misbelief that this is a clean type of energy production.

There still will be a need for Oil. So probably it would be good to have oil platforms and a refinery.
The oil would not serve as fuel but as resource for the industry and medical products.

Regading drugs.... a beer brewery! (eventhough here in germany we consider that normal food)

Connectivity to the rest of the world also needs a thought.
Normal streets might not work since they require normal cars. But maybe a rental solution can be found.
Most of the traffic in and out of the city would most likely be done via trains.
A sea harbour in my eyes is definity required even if its going to be located a few km away from the main city structures. Especially the industry highly depends on sea transportation.
Airport? hmm maybe... but that higly depends on the size of the city. The bigger the city gets the higher the need for air transportation gets.

Work and living conditions should be equal for everyone in the city.
Wages for a farmer should be as high as for a person in managing position (and here i dont mean facility management ^^).
There should be bonus payments for everyone based on fixed criteria to motivate people to do more than default work.
Living conditions should be equal for everyone. No bigger or better appartments for certain ppl.
Designing a city from the scratch would allow to make sure of such conditions.

Well, thats it so far.
I most certainly forgot some important aspects but its just a rough conceptional idea based on what in theory would be possible.
Technically there are thousands of problems to solve but challenges are a great opportunity to make progress.
Just alone the choice of location is one of the biggest challenge here but maybe its really worth to think into that direction before we destroy even more of our planet.

To be honest i am not convinced that solar panels outside the city ever will be able to create enough energy. Especially the sand is a problem that could damage solar panels or reduce their effectivity.
Nuclear power isnt by default insecure. There are definity secure ways to make use of it and like I descripted there are additional very useful applications for the byproducts.

I also dont think that the Rocky Mountains are a good region to build such a ctiy for the fact that the terrain is not optimal and there are ecological aspects which simply do not fit into the concept.
These mountains are result of plate tectonics and are located relative close to a subduction zone. That are sub-optimal conditions in my eyes.
Next to that would multiple ideas I described simply not work in that area. e.g. Transportation.

I also think that your idea of vaporator farms wouldnt be practicable for the fact that such farms would require gigantic dimenions to cover the needs for hundred thousands of people. On low scale it might work but not on such a large scale (especially not without ruining the environment which might dry out then).

I dont see a problem with society when everyone is treated equal. Corruption can not happen because nobody can get more than the others (except for getting good work done - which requires fixed criteria).

Every drug has its dark sides.
A modern society however can allow and controll drugs at the same time.
That being put aside I also believe that a happy and educated society has lower risks of getting addicted.