A paradigm shift in the human environment by 2100
introduction:
For centuries, cities have been symbols of political and economic power in their administrative and commercial functions. But already at the beginning of Modern Times, the process of expansion and development of society became associated with the scientific and technological revolution. These radical changes in communications, transport and industry have led to a change in the role of agricultural and livestock production, given the emergence of more profitable markets besides agriculture. This provoked a process of internal migration from rural areas to cities, often massive and uncontrolled, which contributed to the organization of cities based on hygiene and health care, with the expansion of streets and infrastructure, standardization of housing, sewerage, electricity, gas and public transport.
These demographic changes ensured the supply of cheap and non-specialized labor for the nascent industries of mass and standardized production, which, with the gradual reduction in the cost of these resources, became available to the urban-factory population itself due to improved living conditions with the joint work of public institutions and an increase in wages. This has led to the transformation of cities from urban centers of the manufacturing population into centers of consumption, which has led to the complication of services to meet various social needs.
The agricultural revolution provoked the relocation of factories and factories to regions with cheaper labor, while an increase in the number of motor vehicles contributed to the development of remote areas of cities, freeing urban centers from the local population in order to provide a place for the resettling population, which transits through the city to get to cultural centers, leisure, study and work.
Currently, this third revolution, the human one, is overshadowed by the emergence of the following crises:
A. Climate change.
B. Population growth.
B. Energy crisis and resource consumption.
G. Social conflicts with increasing psychological problems.
Each of these crises was particularly prevalent in cities and their demographic concentration model, which led to the vulnerability of the population to natural disasters, the collapse of their trade networks and the spread of diseases. Several solutions to each of these problems have been proposed at many international conferences, but they have been hampered by commercial interests and real estate issues based in the same cities in which they are considering intervening, while the other alternative, which is to build new urban areas, has been questioned due to changes and destruction of natural ecosystems.
The question that arises for me after studying each of these problems is the following: which model of urban development is most useful for solving each of the emergencies that have arisen, which can guarantee the well-being of the human habitat? I found the answer in the ground, or rather, under it.
Therefore, this work aims to collect various technological developments in the fields of industry, agriculture, transport and artificial intelligence in order to complement them in the same functional scheme of underground cities as a new horizon for urban growth and human survival.
THE RELEVANCE OF THE PROBLEM:
According to the World Bank (1), about 56% of the world's population lives in cities, and the number of urban residents is projected to almost double by 2050. At the same time, about 89% of the current urban population lives in regions prone to flooding and sea level rise, in addition to the already one billion low-income people living in informal urban settlements, refugees and immigrants from countries in conflict, who make up 50% of urban residents.
Faced with this data, several countries have embarked on ambitious urbanization projects aimed at solving these problems. I will give you an example of three cases: a new administrative capital in Cairo, the transfer of the capital Jakarta to Indonesia and the Line project in Saudi Arabia.
The project of the New Administrative Capital of Cairo (CA) (2) aims to solve the problem of overpopulation in the city of Cairo with a population of more than 20 million people, given its potential doubling by 2050, if forecasts are to be believed. The proposal is a new planned development with extensive parks and renewable energy sources, which has set a goal to provide housing for about five million residents by 2030.
The project of the new capital of Jakarta, dubbed Nunsantara, is a strategy called "controlled withdrawal", which aims to deliberately relocate the population at risk when 40% of Jakarta's urban land is below sea level and is in a constant process of subsidence. This new capital will be located on the island of Borneo, and it is projected that 60,000 people will settle here next year, but questions will rightly arise about the lack of stability of the soil for its construction, as well as the destruction of local forests.
Finally, the case of the recumbent skyscraper in Saudi Arabia (4) synthesizes the same solutions to global problems with a revolutionary and utopian approach, since this structure will be a building 170 kilometers long, 200 meters wide and 500 meters high, in which 9 million inhabitants will live by 2030. The density of the building will allow for a policy of saving resources and transport.
The first two mentioned examples are aimed at solving the problem of increasing urban population and urban densification, as well as their vulnerability to climate change, while the third example demonstrates the desire for innovation, abandoning the modern urban scheme of specialized areas in favor of a single building. But despite the fact that it optimizes the use of space, this project has been called into question due to the refraction of sunlight, changing the ecosystem of the desert, as well as reducing its fauna by half.
The above-mentioned projects represent a temporary solution to an evolving problem that is being solved in a static manner based on new cities and distance from flood-prone locations. This is done without taking into account climate change in other, more diverse aspects, such as temperature, its projected increase to an average of 4.4 degrees by 2100 (5), as well as the frequency of severe frosts, tornadoes and dust storms, while the limited space available for construction leads to a compaction of the population, which exposes the lives of an increasing number of people to drastic changes.
THE PROPOSED SOLUTION:
The underground city should not be considered as a gray and poor shelter, but as an opportunity to transform the urban landscape in accordance with the same practical scheme of existence. Based on the principle of living underground, we can deduce solutions to three problems: urban planning, since space can expand vertically and horizontally underground, reducing the density of urban population on the surface, due to the burial of a significant part of its functions, such as the service sector, services and workplaces; as well as protecting infrastructure and the population from climate change due to the presence of some natural soil properties, such as granite insulation parameters, which provides another solution related to reducing energy consumption, intended largely for heating and cooling terrestrial cities.
Although this proposal is not new, it is not very popular in urban planning and architecture, as it does not strive for an aesthetic exposition of its works, and therefore there is no way to link the projected buildings and cities with the authorship of architectural workshops. But now academic currents and social movements have emerged that question these modern personalisms, arguing that the traditional urban landscape is a fundamental part of city life.
Despite the fact that the traditional urban movement does not solve most of the pressing problems, this is because in the eyes of each of them they must be integrated into a common agreement on the preservation of humanity in its aspects of physical survival, liveability and economy, as well as in its psychological and spiritual aspects.
Modern technological progress strives for the effectiveness of control, monitoring and data analysis systems, both in the social sphere and in the use of natural resources, allowing artificial intelligence to develop an ideal space in which people can only complement each of the goals proposed by the algorithm, avoiding the imposition of ideological trends, appealing to urban design and development for the benefit of society.
ASPECTS IN THE INTEGRATION OF TECHNOLOGICAL SOLUTIONS:
From an ecological point of view, the stagnation and slowdown of urban growth guarantees the prosperity of various biospheres in the process of pre-modern readaptation. Since most of the vital infrastructure is buried, problems such as light and noise pollution and various emissions will tend to reduce their impact.
At the same time, the aquatic and geological impacts of high-intensity farming will be reduced through the introduction of monitoring and control technologies on sub-vertical dinapon crops (6). This cultivation method, developed by Gregory Chow, a scientist at the Singapore Institute of Technology (7), uses high air pressure to convert nutrients into tiny vapor particles, reducing electricity consumption by 90% and using less than 10% of the water typical for traditional agriculture. Underground cultivation also provides an advantage in isolating airborne toxins that spread in large cities, allowing plants to reproduce in close proximity to consumption centers, as well as guaranteeing self-regulation of temperature and light radiation, increasing crop yields and diversity.
Energy production will also be associated with the process of reducing the impact of human habitat on the environment. As the population grows, the amount of biological waste and its impact on greenhouse gas emissions increases. The solution, implemented on a large scale underground, is to capture these gases, mainly methane, to convert them into biogas, ensuring a continuous and predictable flow of this resource for energy production. On the other hand, wastewater treatment will allow using reverse osmosis (8) to provide a treatment suitable for consumption, reducing dependence on precipitation variability and long transportation distances.
The economic aspect is divided into three parts, the first of which is focused on intelligence, the second on services and the third on the high-tech industry. In the future, the knowledge and information economy will use artificial intelligence as a means to expand various fields of scientific research, while the proposed city model is the result of a balanced application of various disciplines, given that disciplines focused on the humanities are the most relevant for ensuring social interaction in various subvertical environments of socialization. The concentration of GDP growth in these areas should be reinvested as a consequence of individual prosperity and collective well-being in order to attract and retain investments on a competitive basis.
This leads, due to automation and the elimination of many jobs, to a reduction in the working day and, as a result, an increase in free time, developing the economy of socialization services. I draw a line between socialization services and market services, as the former will be limited to guarantee and strengthen social connections in terms of customer service, such as hairdressers, cafeterias, restaurants, medicine, education, etc. Contributions to a culture focused on empathy, emotional intelligence and interpretation should be encouraged. Meanwhile, market services will become fully automated due to digital user interaction, which will increase efficiency due to fast and affordable 24-hour service (9).
By orienting society towards the service sector, the whole system strives to develop around the quality of goods and means of production, demanding profitability and quality. This leads to the fact that the industry mutates in the specialization and personalization of user demand, which is questioned in its needs of artificial intelligence (hereinafter AI). Therefore, the high-tech industry (10) will prevail in the future in the areas of production of goods, complementing it with a developed 3D printing industry, which will radically change the industrial and urban architecture of large delocalized production centers for multi-productive microfabres printing goods in accordance with individual demand. This will reduce the environmental impact and resource consumption through the use of self-learning AI programs focused on this goal.
The urban planning aspect, in addition to the above-mentioned benefits of protection from climate change, also makes it possible to increase the population in the same space without compacting it. The city is divided horizontally in the form of specialized areas such as cultural, work and university zones, as the population grows, the load on transport networks also increases, which, as their speed and distances increase, will generate a self-induced demand for their use, as well as the expansion of the housing periphery of these centers.
Since these areas are organized as a series of underground levels, access to them will be provided in a multi-spatial manner through a combination of vertical, diagonal and horizontal access roads with autonomous and electric vehicles, which reduces restrictions on their access due to the frequency on demand of the peak hour typical for public transport, as well as the agglomeration that this generates. Reducing the distance and time of end-to-end access and, as a result, sub-vertical housing construction guarantees higher energy efficiency of transport per capita, as well as a lower concentration of the population, which reduces the rate of pathogen transmission and improves control over the medical situation.
Multi-spaciousness represents another advantage in the service infrastructure, linking the new urban aesthetic with its functionality. At first glance, cities have transformed in accordance with various aesthetic trends, presenting modern functionality and minimalism in conflict with classical ornament, seeking to compensate for this decorative element by installing, for example, gardens in buildings and on roofs. Technological evolution tends to develop digital, hygienic and practical buildings, but with an exterior design that often seeks to symbolically overshadow old buildings, inclining cities to build buildings similar in style to the so-called "futuristic models". Faced with this aesthetic monotony and without abandoning reasonable plans, we will be destined to maintain a subvertical city by subjecting its elements to more efficient and automated maintenance (11), as well as forming an identification connection with the citizen through awareness of the elements of our own environment. On the other hand, surface cities, in the process of their growth, will recycle modern buildings in order to take advantage of their resources, and thus hegemonize the traditional aesthetics associated with the history and culture of the population, with two differentiated spaces where the two aesthetic currents mentioned above can coexist in complementarity.
On the technological side, the changes will be related to the adaptation of the population to the new habitat model. Since most of their production and supply functions are digitized and automated, there is no human intervention in them, provided that they fulfill their duties by subordinating to state bodies. Jobs related to the operation of a vehicle or machine will disappear in favor of self-learning AI programs that take care of it, so bureaucratic control functions will be replaced by social behavior monitoring functions.
But such behavior, since it is not determined by any computer program, must be convinced by individual, private and personalized means. Data analysis and accounting of economic and cultural activities of each person will ensure public administration by means of social control, thereby avoiding racial, ethnic, sexual and age segregation, since a citizen is considered on the basis of registration of consumption patterns and behavior, allowing some freedom of human action, leaving on his conscience the results of certain actions and consumption.
Within the institutional framework, this allows us to solve another problem of large cities - crime and psychological problems. Both problems are solved in institutions that are separate from society as a whole, since they are home to a population that, in accordance with legal and psychiatric methods, is concentrated in rehabilitation spaces. But separating these people from society, after the verifiable facts determining their danger have been established, is an ineffective approach that does not address the original causes of these actions.
Since a citizen's daily life is monitored, this can be indicated in the form of suggestions and personalized help when it can be noticed that his behavior tends to be antisocial. This gives a person freedom of action when it comes to changing habits that are harmful in themselves, or, realizing their inability, the opportunity to seek individual help, guaranteeing their privacy at any time. The human presence in these types of care should not be replaced by artificial intelligence, because, although it is a useful tool that will tend to improve, it affects the obstruction of the processes of socialization and empathy, guaranteeing through technological means individualism in the treatment of problems caused by an individual's conflict with his own environment.
The development of artificial intelligence and management systems also guarantees a greater degree of autonomy at the institutional level, since successful developments will be replicated, and those that do not deserve to be implemented should avoid the mediation of control and evaluation bodies that intersect between different regions, in turn, consolidating together with the processes of autarky and economic self-sufficiency, the formation of sub-vertical city-states. This process of autonomy, combined with urban population growth and technological improvement, reforms the order of political and institutional responsibilities, allowing central governments to have a scientific bureaucracy focused on planning and executing large-scale investment works such as reforestation, disinfection and fertilization of soil, scientific and technical research, space exploration and colonization. expanding the control of the federal state in new paradigms of geostrategic security.
conclusion:
The simultaneous occurrence of several social, economic and environmental problems requires large-scale changes in the habitat paradigm. In the past, wars have contributed to these changes, allowing engineers, architects and urban planners to apply the scientific achievements of their time to the task of rebuilding cities. But the development of data processing technologies and forecasting of future events gives us the means necessary to point out the cause of current problems and their possible solutions, preventing the destruction of war from being the cause of innovation, and even more so when the destructive force we face, Pandemics, natural disasters, lack of resources and social anomie threaten to all mankind.
The supply of sub-vertical cities is not new, but it is inevitable, as problems accumulate in the same places where solutions aimed at overcoming crises already completed in specific sectors are applied. The new underground habitability solves not one or two crises, but the cause of all these crises, organizing society in the next urban revolution of communal, self-sufficient and free space, as opposed to the processes of industrial and social displacement of modernity.
This proposal will not be revolutionary, because its value lies not in the means that make this proposal possible, but in the integration and organization in the same scheme of current and future scientific and technological achievements for the habitat and well-being of the future of mankind.

The original is in the application

Files:

• HABITAT_SUB-VERTICAL_1.docx