Banner
City Life Population Health Energy Nature Communication Present Past

 

City Life

One of the most important questions about our future is how will we be living? Will we still live in overcrowded cities or will most of the people return to the countryside? Our idea of how a future city could look like is based on a concept by Aad Breed. We think people could be living in ‘pyramid cities’ in the future…

With a pyramid city we don’t mean living like the Egyptians did, but a city which looks a bit like a pyramid, because its centre lies higher than its surroundings. All of the houses in a pyramid city are build around big squares, these squares can be used as parks or as terraces. The businesses will be in the centre of the pyramid. This is why work and shops are easy to reach, which is a solution to the traffic jam problems which many cities face.

Because the pyramid city doesn’t take in much space, only 1 square kilometre is necessary to give home to 100.000 people, there’ll be lots of space left for nature and recreation.
In theory, we would only need a surface area as big as The Netherlands, to house all the people who will be living in cities by that time, which will be approximately half of the world population.

Because of the small surface area all transport could be done by foot, with elevators and maybe with bikes. So there’s no need for highways in the city, only for walking paths and biking paths. Cars and public transport are undergrounds, from where you can go with an elevator to your home.
Because of this not only the traffic jam problems are over, but there will also be less CO2 emissions and noise pollution.

Pyramid cities require not much energy. Not only because of the decrease in CO2 emission, because less fossil fuel is needed for transport, but also because less fossil fuels are needed to foresee the houses in warmth and electricity.

Rainwater can be stored undergrounds and garbage can be burnt, and besides, not much warmth will be lost because everything is built close together.

Even if we wouldn’t build entirely new cities, we can still use the pyramid idea on a smaller scale. These ideas can already be used with our present cities.

  • Apartments can be build in an pyramid shape, which use up less space than our present buildings.
  • Houses can be build over highways and railways. In this way a city as Amsterdam, could give home to another 200.000 people, if they would build this.

So although it seems far away, we think there’s a possibility that many people will be living like this in 50 years.

 

 

 

                        Source of information: www.piramidestad.nl