Dickson Despommier, emeritus professor of public health and microbiology at Columbia University, is renowned for having developed the first models for large-scale indoor vertical farming.
Despommier notes that cities, which occupy 2% of the world’s landmass, contribute 60% of the greenhouse gases that fuel rapid climate change. So, as the major catalyst of anthropogenic climate change, cities must play a major part in mitigating its effects. In his recently published book, “The New City,” Despommier offers a primer on the environmental and ecological features and benefits of a future vision for urban centers.
The concept of the new city refers to the ideas emerging from urban design labs for future cities built from the ground up using innovative planning, materials, technologies and approaches that improve upon existing cities. The design vision for the new city emphasizes environmental sustainability, adaptable and modular infrastructure, advanced digital technologies, human-centered design, and transparent, participatory governance models.
While the new city remains a somewhat inchoate vision decades away from full realization, planned cities incorporating these design principles are under construction in South Korea (Songdo), the United Arab Emirates (Masdar City), and Malaysia (the crisis-riddled Forest City). The Line — a linear city scheduled for construction along a 106-mile straight line in the Saudi Arabian desert — represents the most ambitious (and most maligned) version of a new city based on sustainability and livability design principles.
In “The New City,” Despommier reviews the “four pillars” for building a sustainable urban future: carbon storage, urban agriculture, the harvesting of water and renewable energy. These pillars focus on technologies that can remove cities’ dependence on centralized municipal grids for energy, food, water and waste management. Using temperate tree zones as his inspiration from nature, Despommier advocates incorporating their biological characteristics into urban design.
Like temperate forest trees, each building should be able to sequester carbon (by incorporating technologically advanced wood building materials in place of concrete and steel); harvest rainwater and recycle wastewater (to create a circular water economy); grow its own food (using vertical and underground hydroponic and aeroponic farms); and generate its own energy from solar radiation (photovoltaic and wind-generated), geothermal energy, waves and tides and perhaps ultimately nuclear fusion reactors.
To this list, I’ll add that Despommier also relies heavily on artificial intelligence to create positive, self-sustaining learning and signaling environments that allow each building to balance and share resources much as trees communicate and support each other within forests.
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Despommier is a technological optimist. His assumptions about technology as a driver of human progress leave him vulnerable to charges that he pays insufficient attention to the political, financial, cultural and psychological constraints to implementing these technology-dependent urban design visions.
Skeptics will point to the lack of progress in building any of the planned cities at a scale that would make any meaningful difference in transforming urban environments to avert climate disaster. Despommier himself acknowledges that humans have demonstrated little success in learning from failures when designing their new cities, which have continued to overburden the environment while distributing most of the costs to vulnerable populations and reserving most of the benefits for privileged elites.
For these reasons, Despommier concedes difficulty visualizing the final form the new city will take. To his credit, however, Despommier does offer us a vision of “imprinting” that allows him to at least imagine that the new city might represent a meaningful and durable form of adaption to the existential risks of rapid climate change.
Despommier discusses how animals such as geese will attach themselves at birth to the first moving object they encounter. Similarly, in social settings people from a young age adopt the values and attitudes of those in their immediate communities, which over time, in different neighborhoods of a city, reinforce structural differences between wealthy, middle-class and low-income neighborhoods, locking in inequality.
By starting from scratch, with the new city as literally a tabula rasa, Despommier asks: What if we were to build urban environments designed to “recognize, support, and respect the lives of everyone who lives there, regardless of age, ethnicity, religious beliefs, or politics?” Might this not imprint within the community a broad base of shared values and attitudes that extends across the entire urban population, allowing these communities to establish the social foundations for successful adaptation to a rapidly changing climate?
While Despommier denies that his new city is “utopian,” of course it is, and from an evolutionary perspective, this vision of socialization might be asking too much of our species.
Indeed, one of Despommier’s peers, the enormously influential biologist E.O. Wilson, voiced his concerns about the mismatch between human psychological and technological development: “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”
Peter H. Schwartz writes at the broad intersection of philosophy, politics, history and religion. He publishes the Wikidworld newsletter on Substack.
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