Fractal architecture
Next: Energy
Its time to look at the decentralised model in detail from a slightly higher perspective and start putting the building blocks in place.
But before that a note on scope. We’ve looked at decentralisation from a relatively coarse, let’s say human level. How would it work on a community or city level with some diversions into global viewpoint.
Its good to take a coherent view on scope. That’s the point of this post.
Introduction
For a system to be resilient, it needs to be able to sustain failures at any level. This typically means replication. That’s how nature works also – we have two kidneys, two lungs, two ears and so forth. Decentralisation leads naturally to replication. Some services cannot be created an a very small scale – for example geothermal power stations require quite a big investment that needs to come from an equally larger set of people. At the same time many decentralised services happen on multiple levels of scale. Geothermal power is just one way of generating electricity, solar cells scale from powering individual sensors to thousands of megawatts.
Resilience is best achieved when different units can operate in island mode – disconnects from neighbours and larger context for shorter or longer stints. A system that has resilience both on different levels of scale and replication provides the best guarantee against external shocks whether caused by natural forces or adversarial powers.
Or you can think of it as having two mirrors facing each other creating an image of similar images growing smaller and smaller into infinity (Spiegel im Spiegel is a composition by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt that has similar quality) or a fractal image that you can zoom into more detail and similar pattern emerges again.
How problems got solved differ depending on scale (personal, room, building, borough, city, national, global and in future multiplanetary).
On-body computing
At the smallest level is naturally an individual person and what they are wearing.
Sensors and computing are being integrated into clothes. They can harvest energy via small solar cells, from the movement of people (mechanical watches have used for long similar idea) or allow wireless charging. A natural use case for on body devices is to monitor users’ health. For example, gait (how we walk) changes with memory problems and vital signs like temperature, pulse rate, respiration rate etc. have been used for thousands of years as health indicators.
But health measurement is not the only use. Clothes can communicate with users through dynamic color changes: running shoes bursting into “flames” when jogging is going particularly well or with different color show if the running position is wrong.
Difficulty with clothing sensors is that they need to sustain constant washing, consumers must trust that the data gathered respects their privacy (not that lack of privacy has been a problem so far). On the positive side you do not need to remember to put them on like with watches - your nearest and dearest will kindly give you feedback for omissions.
Every room a data center
With printed electronics it’s possible to create sensors, PV cells, batteries. Add to that plastic processors, and computing can be integrated to everyday household objects. Your wall paper can be a data center powered by the ambient light in the room. Other furniture can also get smart.
Printed sensors can monitor indoor air quality and detect CO2, volatile organic compounds and other aspects of air quality of interest and indicate potential risks. You see efficacy of changes you make. For example, some common house plants are good for air quality: money trees continue producing oxygen at night making them good for bedrooms, aloe is good at removing formaldehyde and benzene used in cleaners and paints.
Electrochromic inks (made from polymers manufactured in the same building or nearby) can change color and do not need constant power to maintain the change. This makes it possible to program what is displayed on the wall. Different types of art or used for ambient communications. After a restful sleep the wall on the bedroom might be green or grow a tree showing by height roughly how long you slept. Or be grey and gloomy if the air pollution is bad.
Your wall paper can snitch of what your plants are doing at night.
Previously separate products like smart speakers could be part of your wall paper once printed electronics has enough computing capacity. Talking to walls might be the most common and natural thing of the future.
It’s possible to cache content and public services on you own apartment. This means that educational content and real-time health analytics will be performed in the same room where you are. No need to transfer your health data to any external actor on the cloud. Only important results are communicated.
Rooms can become colder in cold countries and warmer in hot countries when no one is in during day time to save energy.
Your body area computers will talk to your room data center when you enter the room. They can inform the room of your preferences in anonymized form and the logic of the room adjusts it settings based on what it can offer and who else is there. Or they can use services of the room like interactive games you play with the wall or with a projector that uses floor as canvas.
Building as mini-city
Buildings can have some of the functions of the society. Collecting environmental energy from the ground via heat pumps or from the air via heat collectors, electricity generation from wind and solar energy. Extra electricity stored for short duration (next night) into batteries and what cannot be locally stored, sold to grid operator or directly to some other energy user.
In areas with plenty of sun, the roof tiles will have solar cells integrated as it makes no sense to build two roofs on top of each other (real roof and PV cells on top). This is especially important in areas that are less affluent.
Each apartment is a modular construction (like cabins in cruise ships) that an army of independently working intelligent robots-ants slide in and out of the building scaffolding. This allows people to move with their apartment to a new city or country if they have compatible scaffolding architecture. The main elements of the scaffolding like roof tiles or sheets, design profiles and facades or sandwich panels are modules themselves so most of the scaffolding itself is movable or can be re-sold.
Some food production is integrated to the building. Bioreactors in the basement can churn out protein and milk powder or egg white or every apartment can grow some vegetables by automated systems.
Buildings have APIs that allow residents to fetch information about it (important for new residents and in unusual situations like knowing who is the care keeper) and to allow the building to participate to larger scale services like a demand response system. Detailed data about apartments is deleted when residents change.
The parking spaces will to some degrees have been converted to parcel delivery spots for logistics companies when self-driving fleets have taken over much of the traffic.
Buildings might have computing capacity in basement to run some digital services like caching commonly used content and services.
In Finland buildings (one or more) are associations where owners have shares and the decisions about common structures like major renovations (plumbing, roof repairs) are done at yearly shareholders meetings. They are mini-democracies themselves.
Boroughs
Boroughs as of today are not independent from the city but if the aim is for granularity and ability for small areas to act isolated in island mode, this may well change. Boroughs as additional entities will have schools, health clinics, small power and district heating stations and in future even local communications networks as contained entities (just providing local service), so they might well be built, owned and operated in decentralized manner by residents.
The higher-level entities (city, country, global) levels are discussed in the next posts when we sum up the story so far to look how the whole picture looks like.
Cities
Cities are mostly done deals and once roads are laid out, buildings and public infrastructure constructed, you can mostly retrofit and gradually change it.
Instead lets do a short excercise on a little bit easier problem, that with informal settlements and refugee camps where one still does build new structures.
Drivers
Today, 55 per cent of the world’s population lives in urban areas and it is expected to grow to 70 per cent by 2050.
Urbanisation combined with the overall population growth are projected to add 2.5 billion to the world’s urban population by 2050, with almost 90 per cent of this growth happening in Asia and Africa.
If a city has ten million people and its population grows by three percent (not uncommon in emerging markets), this means the city should build infrastructure for three hundred thousand people (roads, public transport, schools, hospitals) yearly. That’s like constructing a moderate size city every year. This enormous demand is leading to formation of informal settlements. Another contributing factor are the complex property laws discussed earlier that prevent legally owning land and using for urban development.
Living in these settlements often poses significant health risks. Sanitation, food storage facilities and drinking water quality are often poor, with the result that inhabitants are exposed to a wide range of pathogens.
Cooking and heating facilities are often basic causing exposures to indoor pollution. Access to health and other services may be limited; overcrowding can contribute to stress, violence and other social problems.
People who come from countryside to cities looking for better opportunities often get disappointed at the conditions and based on information from friends elsewhere or unrealistic views of TV and social media continue their journey and try to emigrate to more developed countries. Life there turns out to not be as rosy as expected but going back is often not possible due to loans taken or due to shame because one feels of having failed in some way.
The large influx of refugees and migrants is creating destabilisation effects in Europe and elsewhere globally.
Wars and conflicts are additionally causing dislocation of people. An unprecedented 108.4 million people around the world have been forced from home. Among them are nearly 35.3 million refugees.
Refugee camps are intended to be temporary settlements but increasingly they are forming into permanent cities. However, people in a refugee camp are looking to move forwards somewhere else as these places do not provide means for people to support themselves.
A model is needed for retrofitting informal settlements and refugee camps into more liveable places.
The big issues in city planning are housing, food, energy, and transportation. The aim will be a self-standing city or micro-nation (having an economy, being able to collect taxes and fund common functions like police, health and security). So far we’ve discussed most of these (like energy, water and sanitation, communications, health, safety and security, education, finances and decision making). We’ll cover city structure and buildings in this bit.
City structure
Models are needed as template how a city plan could look like. Let’s work through one example and let the gentle reader think of better ones.
Paris consists of twenty administrative districts – or Arrondissements. Originally, they have been villages around a well and over time the villages have grown and joined the city itself. They have even today distinctive identities.
Arrondissements of Paris. by user:yonidebest CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons
To turn an informal settlement into a self-standing micro-nation, the first thing is to start strengthening the existing local squares and places where commerce is going on and to turn them into stronger local centers. The aim being that each area starts developing own identities and be part of the larger city structure.
Refugee camps may pre-built without clear city-like structure in monotonous or somewhat chaotic fashion. In that case local centers need to be retrofitted onto it. Easier said than done as communities do not organise in a top-down fashion.
For rearranging, a design is needed. One way to sketch the template would be to base on it existing well working examples. For instance look at how Cerdà planned Barclelona’s structure. It is based on octagonal blocks, where all the corners are cut. This would make plazas at each intersection of blocks with good visibility. In areas where traffic flows, there could be a roundabout in the center and restaurants and cafes on the sides. The intersections are also natural places for planting trees and other vegetation to create more pleasant micro-climate for people who sit at the cafes.
The small gardens at intersections can be connected to each other by planting trees along roads. This will create green ways in the city for plants and smaller wildlife alongside the road system used by humans. As topography of each place differs, a more natural way would be to arrange green belts around creeks and small waterways if any are in the area.
Image: By Alhzeiia - Eixample aire.jpg, CC BY-SA 2.0
The grid structure is common in many cities but it is not without its problems. Grid results with lots of intersections and places equal amount of traffic on all of them (because they are same size). This increases traffic jams. A better structure is one where there are high capacity traffic ways (could be big roads, train, metro etc.) and smaller roads joining them. Grids also tend to make the city structure monotonous (read dull).
Buildings
Once there is an idea of city structure, buildings are the next think to construct.
Local materials
Constructing buildings from local materials using tried techniques has many advantages. It’s the most resilient approach as material supply for repairs and new constructions is secured even in a volatile international environment. The logistics costs are likewise minimal with much shorter wait times.
The methods and styles will largely differ depending on climate, culture and availability of local materials.
Some books on traditional approached on this are for example:
Rob Roy’s Cordwood Building. https://www.amazon.com/Cordwood-Building-State-Art-Natural/dp/0865714754
Will Beemer's "Learn to Timber Frame". Said to be more technically challenging. https://www.amazon.com/Learn-Timber-Frame-Craftsmanship-Simplicity/dp/1612126685
Charles K. Long’s The Stonebuilder’s Primer is said to be the canonical book on building a stone house. https://www.amazon.com/Stonebuilders-Primer-Step-Step-Owner-Builders/dp/1552092984
“More Straw Building” by Chris Magwood et.al. is said to contain good overview of pros and cons. https://www.amazon.com/More-Straw-Bale-Building-2005-02-01/dp/B01F9FRELI
Or modern architects with state-of-the-art tools can design completely new building types using traditional and locally available materials. These can then be shared via open design repositories and re-used wherever climate and conditions match.
The productivity of using traditional materials and traditional methods can be unparalleled when one considers the longevity of such constructions
As an example, city of Ghadames (second link) at the edge of Sahara is still inhabited with buildings up to 3000 years old. Built completely from materials sourced from the local vicinity. Naturally the buildings have been repaired and extended, but still the original builders had enormous productivity.
The design for such houses with building instructions can be pre-created and shared with people with limited prior experience in construction to help them get started. The reason why people in informal settlements do not construct such structures is naturally due to local property laws and ownership of land. As there is no certainty on the future of the building on that lot, it makes no sense to invest properly into quality.
Image: city of Ghadames, by Robert Bamler, Gnu Free Documentation License
Many older constructions omit the use of electricity and use ingenuity instead. For example, this thread also from @wrathofgnon explains how Romans used shallow pools in buildings to have cool indoor climate when it is hot outside and at the same time supply themselves with fresh indoor water far away from wells or aqueducts.
Modular, movable approach
In posts on construction we discussed about modular building concept. Such concepts can be naturally built from local materials but a different starting point are containers as they are well suited to act as a low-cost “building blocks”. Containers are relatively inexpensive as they get produced in such large quantities (a used container went for about 1500 euros – at least was before the current shortages), they are everywhere and all types of transportation equipment like trucks, trains, cargo ships have been adapted or built just for the purpose of transporting them. Containers are also structurally strong in the vertical orientation so they can be stacked on top of each to create higher buildings. On horizontal direction they need additional strengthening.
Also, all aid material arrives to refugee camps often in containers and transporting empty containers back is wasteful.
Why not turn these containers into commercial and residential buildings by small modifications and equipping them inside with the proper interiors? Putting solar panels on rooftops and/or integrating wind turbines on top . The interior size is fixed leading to economics of scale in interior design and integrating infrastructure like plumbing, electricity into the structure.
Differently equipped container can serve many basic needs and act as health clinic, school, library, office, groceries shop, barber, hairdresser, saunas and Turkish baths, laundromats, cafes, bars and discos.
The downside of this approach is that such approach easily leads to building industrial looking boxes – all similar, ugly to the eye, reducing the wellbeing of residents. With proper design naturally avoidable.
Building do not have to be made of containers. Architects do design light-weight, easy to setup small dwellings in a sub-field called micro-architecture. These will fit the same need.
Buildings made of plastic is yet one option. As example in Aso Farm Village in Japan buildings are made of polystyrene and look like from a hobbit village. Futuro is an old flying saucer look-alike design from Finland.
Property
As discussed in earlier in posts on property, legal title empowers people in numerous different ways and stabilises societies.
If the community themselves builds the houses, lays down roads and city infrastructure, and successfully manages them, this value add needs to be fairly appreciated when they want to also legal ownership. Once ownership is transferred, this opens up all the capabilities of modern world to the residents. They can get loans, take insurance, have collateral for needed for starting companies etc. This is essential step in making the transformation from a unit where people do not have autonomy to a real community.
Rent-to-own model could work so that people pay a little bit extra fee for electricity and water and over time the ownership is smoothly transferred to them. To be able to pay rent people naturally need some kind of income i.e., job opportunities. We’ll discuss that later, but basically they need to be part of global value networks in some manner.
Rise, Replicate and Shine
Over time the micro-nation gains self-sustainability and integrates to the global value networks. Its expected to pay back the debt of initial construction. This is when the community redeems true independence. This creates self-confidence and earns the respect and admiration of the international community who originally paid or at least subsidised the initial investment.
Once the community is on its feet, it can act as mentor and funder to help additional settlements and help them turn to micronations. All communities have the same difficulties in the beginning but the successful have practical knowhow and income stream to help recent settlements. Earlier we discussed the Miethäuser Syndikat model in an analogous context.
There is again the risk that projects with good economic standing would forget all the help received and decided unilaterally exit the system and stop paying solidarity transfers. To prevent this we can turn to the Syndikat model where assets are owned by a shared legal entity where the Syndikat owns half of it having one vote and the micro-nation association owns the other half having one vote. Neither side cannot unilaterally change the rules. The model is in essence the same with the biggest difference that the micro nations have a very large operations side – providing all the services to its members.
Nothing requires that a micronation restricts its replication operation to other informal settlements and refugee camps. If the models work well, they can use the know-how and assets to replicate the model in their old home area, especially if they left due to bad economic conditions.
If the micro-nation is constructed using modular construction concept, the residents could take their apartment with them when they move back to home. This is especially feasible if containers were re-purposed for housing as the entire global logistics chain is optimised for moving them around.
When good models emerge, they can be transferred to more developed parts as well. There is plenty of less affluent rural and remote communities in the more affluent world as well. In fact, the whole Syndikat model is from Vienna originally.
That’s the model for transforming informal settlements into more liveable areas.
For refugee camps there is one additional problem. Most governments do not grant refugees permissions to work. Reason is that governments would like to see such camps as temporary solutions. Uganda is one of the few exceptions of a country that has long allowed refugees to work and start companies.
A micro-nation built out of mobile housing units would allow governments to collect taxes, get foreign currencies if people work through the Internet for overseas customers and still maintain the temporary nature of it. When situations change and refugees return, they could then take their housing units and companies back to their home countries.
Summary
Same problems get solved at every level of scale on issues like energy, information processing, key services but as scale changes, completely new topics rise up and rise in importance. City planning is very different from designing on-body computing solutions for health even both need energy, information processing and are there to help people live better.