Vision of a Sustainable City

A sustainable city is built around people and the natural environment, integrating workplaces, housing, energy production, transportation, infrastructure, farms, parks, and natural habitat. Humanity has a symbiotic relationship with nature, where people assist the restoration of forests, seacoasts, rivers, soil, aquifers, habitats and species, and in return receive sustenance and homes. To liberate human labor power and creativity, the city is democratic and egalitarian, with all citizens participating in day-to-day decision-making. It interconnects work and home, urban and rural, civilization and nature, local and global. The city concentrates people to maximize cultural development, while including farmland and native habitat.

Neighborhoods are highly self-reliant, with workplaces, apartment buildings, energy production, gardens, schools, daycare, health clinics, public safety organizations, stores, and service shops. Collective spaces include a town square, parks, community centers, meeting halls, gyms and sports facilities, indoor and outdoor areas for family and social gatherings, children, youth, and the elderly.

The city’s natural habitat belts connect to the surrounding forest, savannah, or desert, and bodies of water, to allow movement of animals and plant seeds, as wells as for beauty and quality of life.

Workplaces producing goods and services are clean, quiet, safe, and distributed throughout the city. Extractive industries, such as metal mining, use methods least disruptive to nature. Heavy industry such as steel and electronics that produce large quantities of waste, including toxins, recycle excess heat and materials, dispose of inorganic toxins safely and long-term, and decompose organic toxins.

Buildings are constructed primarily of natural materials such as rammed earth, layered timber, stone, and glass, with steel and concrete used only where essential. Apartment buildings are modular, built with prefabricated walls and floors to minimize cost while maximizing variety, beauty, and adaptability to local conditions. They are insulated to be largely energy self-sufficient, and maximize sunlight distribution through large triple-pane windows, interior open spaces, terraces, and balconies, covered in greenery for insulation and beauty. Housing is mixed by race, age, physical and psychological ability. It includes common spaces for gatherings and meetings, as well as small shops and services.

Energy is renewable, utilizing sun, wind, water, geothermal, depending on local conditions, with energy storage devices. Hydropower dams do not disrupt wildlife or the environment. Water is returned to soil, aquifers, and the atmosphere after use. Human and material waste is recycled as much as possible or safely disposed of.

Transportation at ground level is human-powered—walking, bicycling, skateboards. Powered public transit of people and goods and is either underground or above-ground. Long-range transportation such as trains, ships, and air-travel are energy efficient.

Urban farms raise vegetables, fruits, grains, and domestic animals using no-till, mixed crop organic methods that enhance soil and save water. While farmers work throughout the year, the citizenry participates in planting and harvesting, which are cultural events.

Science and technology enhance the symbiotic relationship between the city and natural environment. All technological and biochemical developments are vetted to determine potential hazards to mental and physical health.

Culture such as music, art, theater, dance, sports, movies, social media, are collectively developed and managed by communities. Individuality is expressed through creativity in both fine arts and applied arts such as clothing and interior design. Ethnic, gender, and all group identities are expressed culturally. Ideas are freely expressed, with conflicts engaged in peacefully, promoting both resolution and differences.

The metropolitan area maintains close ties with communities worldwide through exchange of goods, services, culture, ideas, and people, while being as self-sufficient locally and regionally as possible. Rural towns and farmland are closely tied to cities by transportation, communication, and exchange of goods and services. Cities are surrounded by extensive natural habitat.

Technology alone cannot create a sustainable city. If existing technology was repurposed and converted to meet the food, housing, and other needs of the world’s population, poverty and want could be eliminated in less than a generation. Meeting the needs of the masses is not profitable and the ruling elites have no motivation or plans to solve civilization’s existential problems.

Capitalism, with private ownership of production driven by profit, is incompatible with a sustainable city. The profit motive objectifies human labor and the natural world as quantities to be exploited. To prevent the devaluation of fossil fuel industries, capitalism obstructs conversion to renewable energy. The drive for efficiency reduces work to a dehumanizing routine. Capitalism profits from industrial, agricultural, and pharmaceutical chemicals that ruin human health and devastate the environment. Corporations restrict creative use of technology to meet human needs while driving it furiously in service of commercial profit and military destructive capacity.

Capitalism divides each country and the world into a small, obscenely rich economic and political ruling class, and the masses who struggle to survive. While advanced capitalist urban areas squander resources, rural areas go hungry, are subject to flood and drought, and forced to leave home to find work. To defend their wealth and power, the elites wage wars and control poorer countries through debt slavery. They use the media to obscure the harsh reality and divert the attention of the masses. In its five centuries, capitalism has maximized productive capacity, while increasing world population toward the planet’s carrying capacity, destroying habitat and species, and increasing global warming toward agricultural collapse and mass hunger.  

Only the liberation of people, our technology, and nature can end global warming and environmental destruction, the threat of global warfare, and erosion of standards of living and quality of life for the world’s vast majority, and ultimately, the collapse of global civilization.

Technology is secondary to the natural world, which has evolved over billions of years to restore itself. Many solutions, such as mixed crop farming and urban greenbelts, work because they are low-tech, relying on nature’s creative power.

In a true participatory democracy, all citizens are equally empowered in the economic system, the political structure, and ideology and culture. It is integrated by race, gender, age, and ability, who all participate in production, decision-making, and cultural activity. The division of labor connects rather than stratifies people in various occupations, races, genders, individual ability, mental and manual labor. Material consumption meets the needs of the people comfortably, and surplus is saved for emergencies or invested in enhancing the quality of life and natural environment. The law, compulsion, and any violence is used solely to defend freedom by suppressing attempts at amassing power or exploitation.

A sustainable world is only possible through visionary thinking and radical transformation of all aspects of society.