Travel Documents 136: 2100: A Dystopian Utopia / The City After Climate Change

by StudioTEKA and Vanessa Keith

Genre:  sci-fi, near-future, social change, cultural change, urban planning

The Dust Cover Copy

Fast forward to the year 2100. New York, along with Phoenix, Beijing, Sao Paulo, Manila, and many more of the world’s most populated cities, is irrevocably changed.  Much of the earth’s great middle swath is subject to droughts, wildfires, and desertification while increasingly frequent super storms plague coastal areas, destroying precious agricultural lands by bringing seawater far inland. Where in the world shall we live, and what will our built environments be like? How can we change our way of life to be more in keeping with natural systems and processes? Through 2100: A Dystopian Utopia, Vanessa Keith and StudioTEKA visualize possible design solutions to suggest the profound adaptability and possibilities of the design field to meet environmental challenges in the future.

The Scene

Worldbuilding

Once a year, the design and urban infrastructure firm of StudioTeka does a deep dive into a city, researching its trends, its narrative, and its future. In 2100 they’ve collected these narratives into an incredble volume. This quote sums it up:

“while this work may seem to be in the realm of science fiction, it is based in the best current research available”

First, there’s a chapter on current trends. It’s grim. It lays out all the numbers for a hot, dry, challenging future in stark maps, graphs and bar charts. There’s no getting away from the facts: the world has changed. The world will change a lot more by 2100. A lot of our grandkids simply won’t be able to live where we do: home will be flooded, baked dry, or on fire.

But instead of the same old tired Malthusian argument (aka a whole bunch of people just have to die off and the survivors will be fine), 2100 posits that we can get everyone to a high standard of living and keep them there, if we put in a heck of a lot of work and reorient our priorities. That starts with how, where, and with what tools we get what we need: food, water, clean air, shelter and community. From this conditionally hopeful premise, 2100 guides readers through a well-reasoned, researched, and really exciting possibility for how we reimagine and rebuild our cities to support thriving future cultures.

The Lingo

Writing Style

With deeply researched thoughts on the possibilities of climate and human adaptation to it, this book is a solid 201-level course in climate adaptation, remeditative urban design and the ways we can build better from where we are today. It expects the reader to come to it at the 201 level: there are graphs, footnotes and appendixes to read, there are terms to check against the glossary at the back. There are further reading notes and there are points where you’ll have to go google some of the discussion points. And that’s a good thing. This book wants you to go and google its terms. It wants you to think.

The key to this work is the concept of ‘environmental delegation’, that is, letting nature do what She’s already really good at doing; just helping it along by wrapping it in tech. In this vein, algae will be used to purify water and produce chemical biproducts that humans can use. Organic waste will be composted into nutrients. We’ll find out where the wind naturally blows strongest through our cities and set up wind-capture tech in those spots high off the ground. The sun will create a lot of our energy, as it always has for our planet. We just have to work with what we’ve already got and start working with nature instead of fighting Her.

In my perfect world this slim volume would be expanded to textbook size, with a detailed explanation of every proposed technology in the appendix and a list of numbered parts instead of an overview. But this book isn’t an installer’s manual; it’s an architect’s overall design book. And for that level of insight, it’s perfect.

Overall this work has a professional tone without sinking into the droning cadence of a textbook, and it balances well the needs of introductory and experienced readers.
And if you do happen to find yourself nodding off, hey, there are lots of pretty pictures.

A reimagined Brooklyn

The Moves

Plot

Once it takes you through the dystopian intro of the book and lays down its main premise-IE listen up kids if we want a decent life here’s the facts, we need to change a lot of stuff pretty fast-the book dives into the meat of its concept: most of the human population is going to head towards the poles in the next hundred years, leaving the middle band of the earth pretty sparsely inhabited but full of old cities. Lots of valuable materials and empty land? Lots of crowded northern cities with lots of needs? What to do?

2100 addresses this by positing a sister city program: every compact megacity at the poles is paired with what’s called an extraction city in the middle that focuses on rewilding the area’s flora and fauna, dismantling and recycling the city as was into usable materials for their descendants, and creating energy for the use of their sisters. In this imagining, the half-drowned New York USA becomes the extraction city for Vancouver CA, the often flooded and brutally hot Sao Palo Brazil is the extraction city for Troll, Antarctica. Baking Manila pairs up with the megacity of Wellington, and so on. Personally I don’t love the term ‘extraction city’, as it has a lot of colonial overtones. But the concept is great: instead of abandoning our old cities as they become challenging for lots of people to live in, we’ll have smaller settlements working on returning those moribund places to nature and reimagining them as healthy, smaller enclaves. Where it’s still comfortable for humans to live, most of us will thrive. Those with the interest and the skills will rotate through the Middle Belt cities to help on the long-term projects of rewilding and sustainable land stewardship.

A Future Vancouver

Each pair of cities gets its own section, with a City Narrative for each explaining what it might become and a number of illustrations showing city plans over time, maps of land use, and artist’s mockups of what a street in that city will look like. A lot of it depends on working existing green tech into building facades and really harnessing their potential: in the future Phoenix, roofs are green with biofuel algae grow chambers that produce carbon-neutral biofuel and old parking lots are blue with solar panel installations sending power to Canada and Antarctica in super-efficient flow batteries. In Beijing and other windy places, turbines and wind belts are built between buildings and into pierced walls to provide both power and passive cooling. All around the world, carbon is captured and turned into graphene to make any number of things (that won’t put it right back into the environment!) And all of it is integrated into our built environments. The park-bench-and-streetlight combo in the park has a carbon filter built into it. The park itself is helping to cool the city and act as a sponge during flooding. And the buildings around it are maximizing the power of the sun, heat, and wind their presence creates to power them in health. This is where city design comes in: instead of focusing on singular projects and return on investment for single firms, city design will become overarching and integrated. Building priorities will change from ‘make a buck quick’ to ‘make this work a long time’. Cities will design themselves around the demands of the natural environment, because they’ll have to. The environment won’t be asking nicely anymore. And city planners will have more and more incentive to plan with nature in mind, because it’ll save them the escalating costs of cleaning up another disaster site when a badly-designed city gets tanked in another two or five years. All these ideas and more get explored in the chapters of 2100.

The Wellington of 2100

Future Phoenix: much hotter, much drier, much smaller, much more sustainable.

Best of all, most of it is done using tech we already have and aren’t really putting into production. We can already do 90% of what 2100 wants us to do; the only problems are cost and willpower. When the incentives change, we’ve got the green tech to change the way we do things. Even the new architecture, as futuristic as it looks, already has real-world example. Take the earth scraper, for example: it’s basically inverting the concept of a skyscraper and digging your buildings down deep, where it’s nice and insulated. No, this isn’t miserable bunker living. All kinds of nifty tricks funnel fresh air and sunlight to every single level. And we’ve already proved that with places like Vancouver House. What you see here is just the very top of an earth scraper.

I think this is what I find most satisfying about 2100: in aggregate the pictures look fantastic. But every single element is possible right now. If we choose to put it into production.

Whether it’s the challenge and interest of building the biggest extraction and recycling center in the world in Beijing, China or the delicate and interesting work of comfortably housing millions more people in Vancouver, this book dives deep into what these reimagined cities can and will do for their citizens. Will it be hard work? Sure. But it’ll also be rewarding. And…dare I say it? Maybe even beautiful.

Overall Rating

A powerful exploration of resolve, resilience, ingenuity and change. I really hope we can live up to it in the years to come.