
Self-Sustaining Buildings - ph0rque
http://hacking-shindyapin.tumblr.com/post/96569243/self-sustaining-buildings
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tjic
Transportation costs are incredibly cheap.

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.

~~~
kiddo
Transportation costs my be cheap now, but consider what would happen if fuel
prices rose or the cost of containing the pollution produced through the
transportation increased.

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.

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ph0rque
Wow, tough crowd today... this blog post wasn't meant to be a comprehensive
design, just a high-level idea I wanted to capture/jot down. The subcomponents
aren't original, so I didn't spend too much time explaining them.

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.

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swombat
It takes more than a 5-minute 3D diagram and a passing thought to design a
building.

"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.

~~~
derefr
Sure, but if you're using the idea of this start-up to introduce capitalism to
an Amazon tribe, maybe that's the level of abstraction you need, at first. For
people who have never considered a self-sustainable living space, this level
of abstraction is a good place to start before moving on to specific examples.
It's like reading a dictionary entry before an encyclopedia one.

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GHFigs
We have a word for this. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology>

