Future Cities
Sustainable Solutions, Radical Designs
We stand at a crossroads. Cities must change radically to achieve long-term sustainability. Energy, food and water sources, transportation systems and basic infrastructure, must all adapt to emerging pressures from climate change, dwindling resources and growing urban populations.
How will we meet this immense challenge? In a program that is part celebration of human ingenuity and part stark reminder of the problems we face, urban planner Peter Head, architects Blaine Brownell and Mitchell Joachim, environmentalist Majora Carter, and microbiologist Dickson Despommier laid out radical blueprints and innovative solutions as they imagine housing, feeding, transporting and sustaining city dwellers of the not too distant future. The event was moderated by President of the Aspen Institute and noted journalist, Walter Isaacson.
Image © SOA Architects
Blaine Brownell is an architect, sustainable building advisor, and a researcher of innovative materials for design and construction. From self-cleaning paint to transparent ceramics and biological plastics, he has described these and hundreds of other revolutionary products in his two-volume book Transmaterial: A Catalogue of Materials that Redefine our Physical Environment. New developments and discoveries are reported on a website of the same name. As the founder and director of the design/research firm Transstudio, he aims to promote awareness, provide resources and stimulate creative thinking about ecologically-sensitive building and design. He also is the Visiting Professor in Sustainability at the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan.
Majora Carter is a green economic consultant who combines social, economic development, and region wide infrastructure needs into positive feedback systems. She has been a driving force behind some of NYC's most progressive environmental legislation, as well as cultural acceptance of sustainable practices.
In the emerging field of medical ecology, Dickson Despommier is a trailblazer, devising solutions to problems in agriculture and public health that likely will be magnified by climate change. A microbiologist, he is a Professor of Public Health at Columbia University's Mailman School, where he developed the idea of growing food in urban farm skyscrapers.
Peter Head is a civil and structural engineer who has become a major proponent and practitioner of sustainable urban design. He applies "biomimetics" — an engineering approach that looks to systems in nature to design efficient structures and systems in the manmade world that produce little if any waste.
Walter Isaacson is a longtime journalist and the author of Einstein: His Life and Universe (April 2007), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), and Kissinger: A Biography (1992), and coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986).
Mitchell Joachim is on the faculty at Columbia University and Parsons School of Design. He is a partner in Terrefuge, a New York-based organization for philanthropic architecture and ecological design. His design of a compact, stackable “city car,” developed with the MIT Smart Cities Group, won the 2007 Time Magazine “Best Invention of the Year.”This event made possible with the support of
