Carbon-Neutral Ziggurat Could House 1.1 Million In Dubai 393
Engadget is reporting that a new pyramid-shaped city of the future, dubbed a "Ziggurat," is being touted by Dubai-based environmental design company, Timelinks. Claiming that their design allows for an almost self-sufficient energy footprint and, obviously, economy of space, the real trick would be getting 1.1 million people to live in such close proximity. "Martijn Kramer, managing director of The International Institute for the Urban Environment told WAN: 'As a general reaction the Ziggurat Project is viable from a technical point of view. However reflecting from a more sustainable holistic approach we do wonder if the food supply and waste system are taken care for, as the concept seems rather based upon carbon neutrality and energy saving.' Kramer's initial reaction to 'Ziggurat' also raises a very important issue: are people willing to live in a mega building of 2.3 sq km? Will the thought of living in a machine comfort people?"
Cool! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Easy target (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cool! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Dibbs! Level 3-top Corner, North East facing (Score:2, Informative)
Or, since your environmentally advanced, you want to catch most of the sunlight, leading to 20,000 people with north facing windows, and 1,080,000 in windowless holes behind your solar arrays. Somehow, this sounds like a bit of a marketing challenge for the less than optimally placed units. So it does make for a nice "Bladerunner" scenario.
Re:Control of personal space (Score:5, Informative)
Dharavi, which is probably Asia's largest slum, has roughly 1 million people living on roughly 2 sq. kilometers already and is damn low in carbon footprint, with most things done by hand. The Fact that they can design a building to do the same isn't that impressive, What would be impressive is if they can do it without turning the lower floors into slave pens.
Re:right up till... (Score:5, Informative)
If it's that large, nothing short of a nuke will take it out quickly. A big fire might take it out eventually, but it will take a while.
Looking at the concept art [worldarchi...renews.com], it looks like a fire would have a hard time spreading throughout the structure.
Re:Dibbs! Level 3-top Corner, North East facing (Score:4, Informative)
From the article, the concept art shows a structure that is more of a perforated pyramid, so the surface area could be substantially longer than your napkin calculations suggest.
Re:Who Came First (Score:4, Informative)
The silent film "Metropolis" predates "Caves of Steel" by a few decades. It doesn't bother to explain how the city is self-reliant and carbon neutrality is never an issue. It is very much about having a rich upper class living above a poor lower class and taking advantage of their willingness to serve in the dark squalor of the depths of the city.
Re:Cool! (Score:3, Informative)
Dubai considering building Arcologies! =)
Paolo Soleri would be so proud, especially since it's being conceived as almost carbon-neutral. Soleri's latest project, Arcosanti, doesn't seem to be catching on (only 3% completed since 1970?!). Then again, most Americans aren't all that hip on living in a desert.
Re:Live in a bathroom! (Score:3, Informative)
Square kilometers = measure of geographic area.
The "Ziggurat" is a city. Cities are measured by their geographic area, not the sum of all the floors in all their buildings.
Re:right up till... (Score:3, Informative)
The WTC was a disaster waiting to happen for a whole bunch of reasons. The evacuation plans that had been put into place when the building was built weren't even followed, nor was there any sort of realistic thought given in terms of practically evacuating that building complex.
There were issues like fire exits sealed by sheetrock (with desks+cubicles put in their place), a design failure of the stairwells themselves, and an evacuation plan that hadn't been reviewed for well over 20 years by the tenants of that building.
I disagree with your presumption here that sky scrapers aren't designed to be evacuated. They can be designed that way, and I've seen a number of buildings that indeed have such an evacuation plan set up and reviewed. Indeed, that very same NOVA episode that you are referencing here went into some examples of a good evacuation plan that could be implemented and safety equipment installed that could ensure a rapid evacuation of a building... including in a situation just as happened on 9/11 where you could evacuate people who were "trapped" above the fire zone and were unable to get out via the normal stairwell exits.
One other sad fact about the WTC and 9/11: It was only at about 10% of its normal occupancy when the planes struck the building. Had the highly intelligent terrorists simply waited for a slightly later flight, the building would have been near capacity and had that 10x the number of people there to evacuate. That as many of them got out as it was is an amazing accomplishment.
Re:right up till... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Ziggurat (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Control of personal space (Score:1, Informative)
Re:right up till... (Score:3, Informative)
Even if you can't exit all of the way up, a pyramid has a much higher ratio of ground-level surface area to volume than a tower. Every level you descend increases the area at that level, meaning you can devote more space to stair wells lower down, which makes bottlenecks less probably. In a tower, increasing the height makes no difference to the ground area (and, thus, the number of exits). Increasing the height of a pyramid increases the ground area, potentially increasing the number of exits.
A pyramid is also less likely to collapse, since each layer is supported by a bigger layer, so you don't have such a rapidly increasing amount of force on each layer as you go down.