Netizen: New York City

Showing posts with label New York City. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Food And Housing Are 10 Times More Expensive Than They Need To Be

At least 10 times. More like 100 times.

The world has to move towards abundance. First through technological breakthroughs. Then through policy innovation. Imagine an America where just like 5% of the people get to be on unemployment benefits, there is free food and housing for that 5%. Nothing fancy, but enough basic food and housing. Part of it might be faith-based. I don't mind.

The thing about rent in New York City is, it is misguided. The message is, it is demand and supply. Too many people want to live here, that is why rent is so high. Hogwash. Big cities are good for the environment. You want NYC to get two times as big, 10 times as big.

Come in bullet trains and satellite cities.

NYC should build a city just for the homeless. About 30 miles away.

Cheap housing also has to be about moving retired lower middle class people to far away countries where they can live like kings and queens on the same retirement income.

You make basic food and housing guaranteed, and the world will see a new era for art and culture.

I think strong, cheap material will be nanotechnology. So housing prices come down like a house of cards.

Monday, May 18, 2015

Green New York

buildings could be repurposed to include vertical farms, with internal greenhouses, exterior scaffolding for hardier plants, and terraces for free-range animals. Rooftops could be covered with growing space, and solar panels could help offset the costs of keeping greenhouses warm year-round. If all of New York’s food were grown within its political limits, the city’s traffic would flow through an ocean of green. ....... discovered, unfortunately, that it would take some thirty nuclear power plants to provide enough heat and light for all those urban farms. (You need a lot of agriculture to feed eight and a half million people.) ...... how thirty per cent of New York’s consumables might be produced within a hundred-mile radius of the city ...... “Trees sequester carbon, they provide ventilation, they give shade,” he said. “We could easily lower the summer temperatures here by five degrees with more trees.”......... people fare much better, emotionally and cognitively, in greener environments than in purely urban landscapes. ....... In New York City, developments such as the High Line, the greening of Broadway, and Citi Bike are extensions of Mumford’s vision. ........ green-roofed buildings connected by tree-lined walkways.

A better idea than 30 nuclear power plants would be a city that is in tune with the Caribbean islands. Let them grow the food. It is only hours away. They do solar. Not solar heaters. Simply solar: direct Sun. More trees in the city, on the other hand, are a great idea.

Friday, May 15, 2015

Cutting Edge Urban Design

Water Parkitecture: A Look at the New Cutting Edge in Urban Design
Urban Planning Ideas for 2030, When Billions Will Live in Megacities

by 2025, the world will have 37 megacities, defined as urban areas with more than 10 million people. New York City and Newark are expected to have more than 23 million inhabitants; Tokyo, more than 38 million people. All told, well over half of the world’s population will be living in these super settlements. ..... two-thirds of that population will be poor .... New York, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Lagos, Hong Kong, and Istanbul ...... “Many of these proposals are based on the idea that top-down planning has been failing people in many aspects.” ...... 85 percent of Hong Kong is surrounded by water, yet the city’s population is expected swell by 50 percent. ....... building eight new islands, each dedicated to an economic or social activity unique to Hong Kong, like fishing. ....... a new kind of utopia, where the TOKI clusters get retrofitted with micro-farms, solar panels, and shared car services. Called R-Urban, the services would be open-source and connected through a series of apps. It builds a sharing economy layer on top of the TOKI clusters, which reinforces, rather than destroys, the sense of community that drew inhabitants there in the first place. ........ Governments might want to eradicate favela housing, because they can’t control it, but that improvisational style of living exists in part because of the skills and community values that already live in a city. That’s an opportunity, not an obstacle.

Sweden's Cutting-Edge, 17-Story Greenhouse

After 12 years of planning, Swedish design firm Plantagon has finally begun construction on its first vertical greenhouse. The 17-story structure will grow food year-round for the city of Linköping (pop. 104,000) in the hopes that its model will prove more cost-effective than shipping food in from the countryside. ....... Central to its design is a "transportation helix" that transports potted vegetables on a rotating conveyor belt for better exposure to sunlight. ....... "As urban sprawl and lack of land will demand solutions for how to grow industrial volumes in the middle of the city, solutions on this problem have to focus on high yield per ground area used, lack of water, energy, and air to house carbon dioxide."

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Early State Tech Startups

Charging Bull, a bronze statue by Arturo Di Modica at Bowling Green, Manhattan, New York City (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I met a friend for lunch today near the Charging Bull, Battery Park. I said, I remember this graphic from one of the textbooks in high school biology. It showed a few different species a few weeks after conception. They all looked the same. Early stage tech startups are like that. You don't know if you have a camel, or a human being, or a unicorn. Or a stillborn. Most early stage tech startups end up being stillborns.