The tools are in our hands to make our cities erupt with fecundity and beauty.

I want a thousand new streams running through the world's cities. Through buildings, over rooftops, and bouncing and bubbling and twisting along uncounted urban byways. Streams rich with oysters and crayfish and tilapia and a hundred varieties of watercress, cranberries, and seaweed.

I want Rocky Mountain Oysters in Denver that really are freshly obtained and local bivalves.

I want shrimp grown on neighborhood kitchen scraps.

I want mile long, six foot wide living machines that twist and turn like the Mississippi and pop up where you least expect them. It's time to take another look at aquaduct technology but this time running a hundred feet up between and through Tampa office buildings.

I want ducts connecting the fountains across blocks and blocks in areas of corporate towers so passersby look down and see fingerlings schooling in them and tiny little crabs skittering along beneath.

I want cities to compete on whose carp get bigger faster. And I want the majestic and terrifying sight of a hawk or an eagle swooping down to snatch a wriggling lunch from a swift current to be a normal part of the day of officeworkers and city cops.

And I want even more.

We have many, many square miles of "pancake" buildings all across the industrialized world. Vast corporate behemoths as much as a mile long and a quarter mile wide. Usually just three to six stories tall but endlessly, oppressively long and wide. Not to mention barren. Look at Google Earth over any part of the world high tech enough to have traffic jams and you'll see rooftops with an area that dwarfs many medieval cities. Malaysia to Norway, they're inescapable.

Do the math. Energy costs on those things are insane, much of it even now lost off the roof. Heat loss in winter. Too much heat in summer. Venting problems. Toxicity accumulations. Flashing torn loose in storms.

So let's turn them into fields. Seriously. A stream or two. Some rodents. Not just field mice. On the really big ones maybe even a family of predators or two. The sound of coyotes at night. Nine or ten trees placed over load-bearing members. A few hundred shrubs scattered about and along the edges. The smells of rosemary, sage, and mint wafting over neighborhoods of shipping firms and machine shops. Maybe some trellises covered in food-bearing plants or simply ones that feed migratory birds and butterflies. Some thought given to microorganism balances. The entire roof doesn't need to be covered in soil. In some spots you could leave no more than a few inches of lightweight medium and, done right, after a few months had passed and some groundcover had settled in, it would still have the feel, and much of the biological dynamics, of a functioning meadow. A few dozen new beams pushed up through the three or four floors of cubicle farms will handle the few new concentrated loads just fine for the cost of one year's energy costs. And don't tell me that a few thousand feet of new "penthouse" dining rooms and conference rooms built to look out over these new vistas will be anything less than magnificently profitable.

My friend Ben Self says that this kind of thing is a hundred years from being viable. He said, "…What holds us back, I think, is that technology is mostly applied to ventures with maximum profit at minimum risk and cost. Junk is the capitalist's favorite -- junk food, junk buildings, etc. …"

I hope that his obviously valid general point isn't enough to damn projects like this to Never Never Land.

My friend Angela Bocage wrote that "so much of this is so possible now: depends somewhat on which cities, where and how the beginning stages are managed. It's not just the science, as you all know, or even the funding, but the social engineering spectrum."

I couldn't agree more.

For what it's worth, Earnest Callenbach was writing about streams run through city streets and related concepts in the mid-seventies back when the world mostly knew him as a Bay Area music critic. (Mostly of jazz, if I remember correctly.) And while Ecotopia and his other books are now bestsellers, this kind of urban wilderness is still taken as not really viable. And maybe on a citywide scale, for now, that's simply the sad truth.

But when it comes to the pancake building scenario, I would say give it about ten years and plenty of people will be talking about it, maybe even a few projects seeking funding. And since it only takes one company deciding to pursue it, as Ford decided not too many years back to cover their iconic River Rouge plant in greenroof, and then did it, the whole thing starts to look a lot more doable. Now.

Here in Portland, as it happens, we have any number of buildings that would make superb candidates, some in places where many people would see them and, in fact, have their real estate values boosted by such things. And with our stormwater treatment concerns, there is certainly a municipal motivation to encourage this kind of thing. And from Chicago on down, plenty of other cities are saying the same.

If you think the engineering can't work, then fine. Let's sit down over dinner and we'll see how your numbers look when you've got all the pieces in front of you.

Then prepare to go home and dream about it.

Comments

[Craig A. Glesner]

Ick. While I know that this is probably a way better idea, I can not stand it. I live in the City exactly because it is not Nature or Rural. Those places suck in my arrogant opinion. Give me glass and steel any day!