Cities

Russian Scientist Proposes Domed Cities to Protect from Nukes

Russian scientist Alexander Bolonkin has a way to protect our cities from nuclear attacks: just slap a gigantic dome over it. Of course! As an added bonus, we’ll also protect ourselves from inclement weather and the annoying tourists that airplanes bring with them when they land. When can construction start?? So wait a second, how…

[weburbanist.com] Interesting article, this idea has been written about in many SF stories-of course 😉 I believe Larry Niven wrote one about a self sustaing arcology.

World’s First Zero-Carbon, Zero-Waste City

Imagine a city built from the ground-up to use recycled materials and eschew carbon emissions. Next year, it may be real. The Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi has an ambitious project underway to create the world’s first zero-carbon, zero-waste city by 2009. They’re hoping to build this city in the immediate…

Abu Dhabi’s Shiny New Oceanfront Created via Environmental Computer Modelling

From the architecture firm that brought you Kazhakstan’s alien ship building comes a new design for the Abu Dhabi World Trade Center. Using high-tech environmental computer analysis that takes into consideration the complex climate and topography of Al Raha Beach, Foster + Partners created this bright-but-cool, airy-but-windproof, asymmetrical-but-functional, and very futuristic-looking building. https://gizmodo.com/kazakhstans-highest-peak-is-a-pyramid-shaped-alien-ship-349476 The secret…

Converting Ugly, Practical Cities to Beautiful, Illogical Utopias

What would happen if you converted the downtown of a small or mid-sized city to an eco-friendly wonderland, with open waterways and no cars to be seen? Well, you’d have an impractical fantasy on your hands, for one thing. That didn’t stop Ecocity Builders from doing some pretty sweet concept designs for how they would…

Microsoft Somehow Becomes Authority On the Best Wi-Fi Cities

We don’t know how it happened, but now Microsoft is claiming to be an authority on city WiFi infrastructure. Hey, who are we to judge? Newspapers and magazines release similar lists all the time, so we suppose a multinational corporation could do the same. Just don’t start telling us what toothpaste to buy. Among Gates’…