Self-Sustaining Buildings
hacking-shindyapin.tumblr.com
hacking-shindyapin.tumblr.com
For example, the "eat locally" folks are anti-scientific, and don't acknowledge/realize that you can move a cargo container full of food across an ocean of 1% of the cost of raising the food.
Moving sewage is even cheaper, by several orders of magnitude. Shit rolls downhill.
These two things being the case, why would we POSSIBLY want to put housing, waste processing, and agricultural land all in the same place?
The New Urbanists tell us that density is the key to interesting places, and they get all upset about folks in the suburbs daring to want and have large yards and swing sets, when they could live more densely and share parks.
So, if YARDS are a waste of precious urban land, suddenly we're supposed to import FARMS into our residential areas?
This is a crack addled idea from start to finish.
New Urbanists aren't saying yards are a waste of precious urban land. They don't really even say urban land is "precious". They mostly just think living in closer proximity to others is good for the economy, the environment and people's social lives.
We can all acknowledge that importing water from Fiji is silly though, right?
The urban greenhouse component is better known as vertical farming (http://www.verticalfarm.com/); much analysis has been done on the idea, including advantages to having farms in the city, near the populace.
The waste-treatment idea is better known as living machines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_machines), also widely analyzed and implemented.
"I have this interesting idea for a start-up. People give it money, and it spends some of that money on costs, and overall makes money, according to the formula:
profit = revenue - cost
I'm sure we could make that work"
^-- this is roughly the level of implementation of the idea in this blog post at the moment.