This assignment was something that I was passionate about writing about as the topic that’s in it was in my interest. I kept writing and writing even though there were mistakes and errors and still kept writing. To me when I am passionate about something I know that it is gonna be good because to me it tells that I or any writer has an interest and is heavily invested in this topic. There were some roadblocks that I stumble upon that hinder my work and sometimes I would try to re-read what I have written to not repeat what I said. I would try and research other people writing and research on this topic which helped me greatly and was able to learn from their writing on how to improve. Overall this assignment was the best by far all the previous ones.

“Titan was like most planets, too many mouths not enough to go around, and when we faced extinction I offered a solution,” said the mad titan Thanos who he gave his speech to Doctor strange telling him his story, it is an iconic line and a famous scene in the Marvel Universe. Over the past few centuries, we see our world’s advances and the problems that bring when we continue to grow, our cities keep getting bigger and bigger and so as our problems we try to either ignore these problems or don’t even try to solve them and because of it will be too late to face these problems. Look at the beloved city that we live in, grand and beautiful but it comes with a cost when we created it and continue to grow. We rely on imports and don’t grow our crops, our electricity powers our city but fills toxic in the air and the supply and demand for the people of our city grow larger every year. How should we face these problems? What are ways we can rebuild our cities, save ourselves, and save our world? Having self-sustaining cities implemented in our world will help us thrive, we won’t be heavily dependent on the importation, not waste our resources on how we are wasting it now, and if any catastrophe will ever happen to any nation or the world generally cities will be the first to fall. However, if self-sustaining cities were implemented, they will not be the first to fall and the people will be safe and secure, providing clean energy and food.

    It sounds good on paper and words but it can fall apart if we don’t have examples to follow, we could try and fail but try again and again until we have something sustainable. What I’m describing to you sounds like some kind of utopia for us but it can come true. There are so few self-sustaining cities in the world that people live in that we could follow their examples on how they handle problems they face and how to maintain them. If we look at Madasar City, one of the newest self-sustaining cities in the world built in the United Arab Emirates. They aimed to be self-sustaining but also to innovate zero waste, zero carbon, car-free, fed by recycled water. People thought that it was gonna fail by the location that was being built on but because of the location, it serves as proof that any city can be self-sustaining in any environment whether be in the middle of the desert, nearby the sea, in plain fields,  rivers or even in the mountains. But yes each different location may be different from the problems Masdar City face. Imagine it if all cities were like this, clean power, no cars, and recycled water, it will be so different from the city that we are living in today. Will it be beneficial for everyone? Yes, but will everyone be on board for this change? No. There will be no doubt that everyone will have doubts about it and this change will be costly for every city to implement and follow Masdar City’s example.

    New York is a huge city to power and keeping up with the demands is difficult as we are using fossil fuels as our main power source in which we are running out of. You probably don’t bother to think about it as you have places to be and people to meet but it is something to keep in mind for a self-sustainable city. Other uses for our power source would be oil, gas, and nuclear power. However, it was given the limited resources we have and the location of our city the output of these sources is limited not just to us but to many other cities. Although, nuclear power can be a viable solution. Of course, nuclear power is dangerous, and not many people are keen on it given its devastating effects if it were to explode, it is only about a fraction of what we use to power New York the output of these plants can increase if we were to follow the united emirates power plants. The United Emirates had built a new power plant that can have an output of about 5,600 megawatts which makes half of what we need to power New York. Currently, we have about four power plants which make up about a quarter of our power supply? What does it tell you? If we were to follow their examples and set up two nuclear power plants of their design, it would be enough to power New York. Nevertheless, if we were to add up four power plants then it would power up the entire state as a whole. It’s quite fascinating how we won’t create carbon emissions,  power our city and other cities for a very long time. 

    Cars are a huge part of our lives, we see them every day for our needs of transportation and items. If we were to implement a policy or law in our or any city that prohibits the use of cars or any kind of transportation that creates carbon there will be no doubt that there will be resistance, especially here in the U.S. Having no cars at all in the city will leave for better space of public transportation for all of us but there will be people who will reject this as having your transportation will benefit for your convenience. There will be no doubt that this will have a huge effect on not only the people who own cars and on cities themselves but also car companies, companies who use cars and trucks for shipments, and also nations as they need to fund an implement new and public transportation that does not create carbon. Here in the U.S., we could replace roads and highways with new train tracks or some new kind of transportations. Instead of writing a new law or policy that people need to follow the next day we can instead make the people and government slowly try to adapt to it while building new infrastructure and transportation for short rage travel in cities and long rage to other cities. It would be ambitious and time-consuming for everyone, it wouldn’t be impossible but we should have some examples that we should follow.

    People were experimenting with self-sufficient cities and communities before but what happened? If a project like self-sustainable cities was talked about in the past having zero waste, smokeless industry, and environmental friendly why don’t we see them in our current day? As I said before everything sounds good on paper but once things are put into place, there will be no doubt problems to occur that we didn’t think to account for. The Garden City movement was something that we covered in our class. Its goal was to become sustainable and eco-friendly but also to serve the people to be social with each other and have the city or communities be more efficient as possible. There are garden cities throughout the world but there are so few of them, we can try to follow their examples as they are the oldest project to be created so that cities and communities can be self-sufficient. They were popular during their movement but the issues that they faced were financial as governments did not want to fund this kind of project as it takes time to build these kinds of cities and communities from the ground up and some think that this would cripple their economy. Ebenezer Howard, the founder of this project and movement had good intentions but wasn’t thinking of the problems he would have to face when constructing it. Instead of building new communities and cities from the ground up, we should implement the ideas that Howard had into cities that we already have. It would have been less time-consuming however he would have had to persuade the government to do this and to make them think it was in their best interest.

    It will be in our best interest to have self-sustaining cities if we were in danger some sort way, for example, I have mentioned to you how heavily we rely on the supply chain which is very obvious that if something were to happen to that chain, we would face many outcomes. Our city will be in disarray, citizens will riot in the streets starving as we are cut out from our supply chain which many people will die when local government fall, and eventually the city will burn to the ground. We can’t rely heavily on supply chains but I’m not saying we should cut off from it if our city would be self-sufficient completely, that’s how our economy will plummet. It will be difficult to have our city be self-sufficient even if we were to have local farms, industry, water, and amenities. There is one crucial thing that we haven’t touched on and that is the population of the city. When a town for example has its population growing more than the town can produce food, they have to outsource their resources to meet their town’s demands. That’s when towns usually become cities and they keep expanding and keep outsourcing more and more instead of expanding their local farms and industry. If we want to make New York City or any city to be self-sustainable we need to find a way to keep the population in an equilibrium state which is the hardest part, the government can’t simply say to their citizens to produce less or implement a policy that prevents people to reproduction, I mean if we take a look at China we know what would be the outcome if we were to implement a policy that prevents everyone to reproduce less. Perhaps when the city or community reaches a certain limit that it can’t maintain its populations, that’s when population controls should be handled or when the government looks at the demographic of their population which they will determine if they will continue the growth of the self-sustainable cities. Another way would be to expand the cities instead of the populations of the cities going over the limit, they will expand outward creating more farms and other industries to support themselves again and set a new population limit. 

    Therefore if we go forward with this plan and create every city self-sustainable and completely independent what does that mean for us? We would have clean energy, no emissions, local farms, industry, and, clean and easy transportation but where would we go from there? We have this goal of making our cities clean and efficient but once we get up to that point we would be in this state where we are not progressing our cities and would be in a somewhat plateau, unsure of what direction to take if we have everything a city needs and make the people content. How would this impact our architecture in the future? How would it impact our society as a whole not just New Yorkers but the entire world? These questions are fascinating and important to keep in mind for the survival of humanity.