LifeBubble vs City

Cities and their buildings are made and maintained using imported materials and energy. Their inhabitants rely on vast external reserves and ecosystems to be available for exploitation by just their species.

For light and "climate control", cities seek to insulate from the outside world and depend on distant electricity generation and fossil energy reserves. Without this external energy, most contemporary buildings would be virtually uninhabitable.

For fresh water, they rely on a spaghetti of pipes and pump-stations, complex treatment, storage and catchment infrastructure. Maintaining just the artificial water cycle for a typical developed economy like California can account for 20% of the electricity grid.

For waste management, cities employ a bizarre logic of very expensive "away" infrastructure. Garbage collection systems, sewers and wastewater treatment systems that ultimately exchange electricity and non renewable oil reserves for the "privilege" of dumping and dispersing precious and essential plant and soil nutrients into the "receiving" waters, sea and air.

For food supply, cities rely on an absurd agri-industrial system. The first step is to destroy and replace a natural ecosystem with agriculture. Next involves mining for phosphorous, and other essential plant nutrients from remote and rapidly dwindling reserves, and by manufacturing nitrogen fertilizer from natural gas. This is then distributed using more fossil fuel to distant farms around the world where food is produced. For nitrogen, even in the best agronomic systems, more than half (sometimes as much as 80%) of this fossil energy intensive fertilizer is lost to the air and deep leeching during application. More than half of crops grown are eaten by insects, birds, rodents and other creatures. The food that is harvested is packaged, preserved, refrigerated and transported to cities & towns using still more fossil energy . When it reaches its destination it is displayed and sold, then stored and refrigerated in houses prior to being eaten. More than half of what is harvested is spoiled, dumped or wasted and then about half of what is prepared for eating in typical cities is scrapped again.

So of the food that is grown less than 1/8th actually becomes human nutrition in a typical urban ecosystem. When you factor in the further loss of nutritional value from over cooking and processing, the waste is simply staggering. The net result is food that quite literally costs the earth. Such food often embodies much less solar energy than it took non-renewable energy to produce. It’s a recipe for human extinction and I haven't even started on the embodied water content of food yet! Every other human problem, big as some of them are, is probably less significant than those linked to the production of our current urban food supply.

"The urban nutrient cycle is perhaps one reason to welcome peak oil."

Cities isolate us from the ecosystems that support us. We drive to the shops to buy food and other stuff, ride transport to work and then have to go to the gym and artificially devise exercise programs to stay healthy. A radical rethink is needed. Re-connecting people with their food growing, harvesting and processing and creating ergonomic human powered transportation will provide purposeful exercise that is still invigorating and fun.

What cities do reasonably well is in promoting a flow of ideas and social interaction. They can be a vibrant melting pot of cultural exchange, but even so the layout and nature of our buildings and urban spaces can actually also isolate and alienate individuals and fail to create a sense of neighborhood and community rooted in place. The Internet and communications technologies are increasingly making geography less relevant to community, but they can't substitute for a true sense of place, of deep connectedness to the land, soil and the ecosystems that support us.

It's high time for the evolution of LifeBubbles, a new paradigm of designed human ecosystems to replace the old broken and unsustainable one that is fundamentally at war with nature.

Are cities doomed?

If cities are so bad, why is it that urbanization is still one of the most entrenched human trends on the planet? And more importantly how can it be reversed so that we may see even a glimmer of a dis-urbanization trend?

The reality of rural life for most is that it is bloody hard work, and not financially rewarding. As a rural citizen you are certainly not in a hub of exciting change, and the night life are mostly rodents. Food is bought and sold as “agricultural commodities” and produced like a sweat shop factory with chemicals, energy and water inputs, mechanized processes, fossil-fueled transportation, packaging and marketing logistics, all in exchange for an uncertain crop and an even more uncertain amount of cash. No wonder rural suicides are rising alarmingly. The methods of feeding and provisioning the urban metropolis are as estranged from stable ecological cycles as the metro itself.

It's not surprising that rural folk the world over are attracted to the prospect of a better life in the city. The insistent promise of a more comfortable air-conditioned building, better food, big shops bristling with gleaming white goods, a mobile phone, computer, the internet and a more interesting social life are promised it seems on every flashing billboard and magazine.

The reality of course is that the bulk of rural poor (they virtually all are) who leave the countryside, (plus about 80 million born each year) end up in slums, sub-standard dysfunctional houses, as economic slaves cleaning the literal or metaphorical gutters, toilets and windows of the glittering metropolis.

Those with a choice however, “people who don't need to work”, naturally gravitate towards, or deliberately create, the exclusive leafy secluded sections of the city – not too far from the shops and delicatessens that can supply their every creature comfort, within easy reach of the cultural heartbeat of the city and just a vacation trip away from “the exciting and quaint destinations of the world.” These truly are the aspirational role models for rural refugees, but few outsiders of course ever join that club!

Healthy Fresh Food

Connectedness

Colour

Intrigue

Biolysis