Tag Archives: urban infrastructure

Bill Gates’s potty project

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Bill Gates has a lot to say about toilets, so much in fact that his foundation has a “reinvent the toilet” initiative.

If we can develop safe, affordable ways to get rid of human waste, we can prevent many of those deaths and help more children grow up healthy.

Western toilets aren’t the answer, because they require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants that just isn’t feasible in many poor countries. So a few years ago our foundation put out a call for new solution.

One idea is to reinvent the toilet, which I’ve written about before.

In developed countries, what we do is build energy- and chemical-intensive factories to purify surface or groundwater into clean drinkable water, use more energy to transport it a short distance in pipes, defecate in it, transport it a short distance again (usually by gravity but sometimes with more energy-intensive pumping), then build another energy- and chemical-intensive factory to remove most of the fecal matter from it, before we dump it back into a river and the process begins again with the next town downstream. This system was not designed all at once, but evolved piece by piece over the course of a hundred years or so. If we were starting from scratch, it is highly likely we could come up with a better system. We don’t try because of all the money and effort we have sunk into the existing system. If somebody develops a truly better way of dealing with waste, turning it into useful energy, water, and fertilizer, without violating powerful social taboos about how to deal with waste, that will be a game changer. The concept is that developing countries using such a technology could “leapfrog” developed countries and never have to build the centralized infrastructure, much as they have with cell phones.

November 2014 in Review

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At the end of October, my Hope for the Future Index stood at -2.  I’ll give November posts a score from -3 to +3 based on how negative or positive they are.

Negative trends and predictions (-6):

  • There is mounting evidence that the world economy is slowing, financial corporations are still engaged in all sorts of dirty tricks, and overall investment may be dropping. Financial authorities are trying to respond through financial means, but the connections are not being made to the right kinds of investments in infrastructure, skills, and protection of natural capital that would set the stage for long-term sustainable growth in the future. (-2)
  • Public apathy over climate change in the U.S. may have been manufactured by a cynical, immoral corporate disinformation campaign over climate change taken right out of the tobacco companies’ playbook. It’s true that the tobacco companies ultimately were called to account, but not until millions of lives were lost. Will it be billions this time? (-2)
  • Glenn Beck has gone even further off his rocker, producing a video suggesting the U.N. is going to ration food and burn old people alive while playing vaguely middle eastern music. One negative point because some people out there might not laugh. (-1)
  • The new IPCC report predicts generally negative effects of climate change on crops and fisheries. The good news is it doesn’t seem to predict catastrophic collapse, but we need to remember that the food supply needs to grow substantially in the coming decades, not just hold steady, so any headwinds making that more difficult are potentially threatening. (-1)

Positive trends and predictions (+6):

  • A lot is known about how to grow healthy trees in the most urbanized environments. But only a few cities really take advantage of this readily available knowledge. (+0)
  • As manufacturing becomes increasingly high-tech, automation vs. employment is emerging as a big theme for the future. The balance may swing back and forth over time, but in the long term I think automation has to win. New wealth will be created, but the question is how broadly it will be shared. The question is not just an economic one – it depends on the kind of social and political systems people will live under in various places. This might be why the field of economics was originally called “political economy”. So I’m putting this in the positive column but giving it no points because the jury is out. (+0)
  • Google is working on nanobots that can swim around in your blood and give an early diagnosis of cancer and other diseases. (+1)
  • Economic slowing is probably the main reason why oil prices are way down. Increased supply capacity from the U.S. also probably plays a role, although there are dissenting voices how long that is going to last. I find it hard to say whether cheaper oil is good or bad. I tend to think it is just meaningless noise on the longer time scale, but you won’t hear me complain if it brings down the price of transportation and groceries for a year or two. (+0)
  • Millennials aren’t buying cars in large numbers. I don’t believe for a second that this means they are less materialistic than past generations, but I think a shift in consumption from cars to almost anything else is a net gain for sustainability. (+2)
  • I discovered the FRAGSTATS package for comprehensive spatial analysis of ecosystems and habitats. This gives us quantitative tools to design green webs that work well for both people and wildlife. Bringing land back into our economic framework in an explicit way might also help. (+1)
  • “Perennial polyculture” gardens may be able to provide food year round on small urban footprints in temperate climates. (+1)
  • A vision for smart, sustainable infrastructure involves walkable communities, closing water and material loops, and using energy wisely. Pretty much the same points I made in my book, which I don’t actively promote on this site;) (+1)

Hope for the Future Index (end of October 2014): -2

change during November 2014: -6 + 6 = 0

Hope for the Future Index (end of November 2014): -2 + 0 = -2

solar roads

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I clicked on this article from Woodhouse about new paving technologies expecting to hear about porous pavement. But it turned out to be all about paving with solar panels:

The company’s aim is to reduce carbon emissions by paving currently tarmacked surfaces with solar panels, turning a previously unproductive landmass into a renewable energy powerhouse.

The solar energy collected by the smart surface could be used to feed the grid during the day time, or even power things such as heating elements under the surface to clear ice and snow from the roads in the winter. Eventually, it might be possible to power electric cars as they drive along.

Pavement covers enormous areas in our cities, so this could be huge. On the other hand, the lack of any mention of stormwater worries me slightly. There is a lot more time and effort going into developing better materials to capture energy than to manage water, when both are important. In fact, when it gets to the point (now in some places, very soon in others) where people can make serious money installing solar panels on their rooftops and paved surfaces, that could even come into conflict with stormwater management opportunities (green roofs and porous pavement being two examples). On the other hand, my water bill has been creeping up to the point where it is not that much less than my electric and natural gas bills. So where the economic drivers have been overwhelmingly on the side of energy until recently, water may be catching up. Of course, we want to find materials and approaches that do both, so let’s get to work on that.

cars are evil

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One of the most important things we can do to build a sustainable, resilient society is to design communities where most people can make most of their daily trips under their own power – on foot or by bicycle. It eliminates a huge amount of carbon emissions. It opens up enormous quantities of land to new possibilities other than roads and parking, which right now take up half or more of the land in urban areas. It reduces air pollution and increases physical activity, two things that are taking years off our lives. It eliminates crashes between vehicles, and crashes between vehicles and human bodies, which are serial killers of one million people worldwide every year, especially serial killers of children. It eliminates enormous amounts of dead, wasted time, because commuting is now a physically and mentally beneficial use of time. There is also a subtle effect, I believe, of creating more social interaction and trust and empathy between people just because they come into more contact, and creating a more vibrant, creative and innovative economy that might have a shot at solving our civilization’s more pressing problems.

No, Joel Kotkin, this is not the same thing as saying everybody has to live in tiny apartments, or in a “luxury city” where young childless “hipsters” do nothing but eat and drink and shop and party. Only someone who has never really experienced a walkable community would have this misconception. These are communities where people live, work, innovate, raise families, shop for groceries, garden, and care about each other. There are a lot of ways the actual buildings and infrastructure can be laid out to achieve the basic objective. It might be “dense” in terms of people, but it won’t feel crowded if the space is used well rather than wasted. There can be lots of breathing room for people, and even for plants and wildlife, as long as space is not wasted on oceans of parking lots and rivers of angry people trapped inside glass and steel bubbles separated by one car length for every 10 miles per hour of speed.

“a single, supple mesh of mobility”

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I wrote recently about European cities considering a complete ban on private cars by 2050, and I said that didn’t sound so ambitious. Well, according to The Guardian, Helsinki has a plan “to transform its existing public transport network into a comprehensive, point-to-point “mobility on demand” system by 2025 – one that, in theory, would be so good nobody would have any reason to own a car.”

Helsinki aims to transcend conventional public transport by allowing people to purchase mobility in real time, straight from their smartphones. The hope is to furnish riders with an array of options so cheap, flexible and well-coordinated that it becomes competitive with private car ownership not merely on cost, but on convenience and ease of use.

Subscribers would specify an origin and a destination, and perhaps a few preferences. The app would then function as both journey planner and universal payment platform, knitting everything from driverless cars and nimble little buses to shared bikes and ferries into a single, supple mesh of mobility. Imagine the popular transit planner Citymapper fused to a cycle hire service and a taxi app such as Hailo or Uber, with only one payment required, and the whole thing run as a public utility, and you begin to understand the scale of ambition here.

Now, that’s ambitious! I love the vision. It’s not just about transportation – imagine, if all these transit vehicles are in motion, they won’t be parked. When they do park, they can do it in small, out-of-the-way spaces. If they are autonomous, they won’t need so much space to maneuver around each other and around people. If this is the city of the future, what are we going to do with all the extra space?

So it looks like the race to develop the most sustainable transportation vision is a race to the Finnish! Sorry.