Jane has asked us to think about the future…

How are you, in your daily projects/thinking/work, developing a new paradigm for the future? Clearly our old patterns/habits/roles are not helping us move forward anymore. How can we make a better paradigm that everyone knows is just common sense? What does that take?

We, as the nonprofit Terreform, expect dramatic transformations, although we can’t predict exactly what they will be: visionaries are optimists, not magicians. We work on cities, esp New York. Our projects therefore seek to reinforce what is best about the city – in both its forms and its life –by speculating about the consequences of a radically new level of sustainability. We base our projects on one clarifying hypothesis: in the future cities will become self-sufficient in its vital necessities, including energy, food, water, air supply, employment, housing, manufacture, movement systems, waste processing, and cultural life.

This condition of self-reliance is both improbable and indispensable. Improbable, because the planet is shrinking, because the city must be the nexus of flows of people, resources, and information. Indispensable, however, because of the planetary crisis reflected in the misdistribution of finite resources, so well reflected in our “ecological footprint” – the actual territory needed to supply our needs. To state it succinctly: If the everyone in the world today consumed at the level we do, two additional planets would be required to support them.

For New York we propose transformation via a radical strategy: the reversal of figure and ground, of public and private property. We begin with citywide “greenfill,” the immediate transfer of half the aggregate of street space from the vehicular to the pedestrian and public realm. Later, the streets become building sites and, as new, highly autonomous, buildings grow in intersections and wind their way down streets and avenues and through vacant lots, the old, deteriorated, fabric will fade away to be replaced both by an abundance of productive green space and by a new labyrinth of irregular blocks, a paradise for people on foot. Fast movement will be accomplished underground in a superbly modernized subway and along the rivers and new cross-island channels. The city streets – extended in their length but reduced in their area – will support a marvelous technology we know to be just over the horizon, some fabulous and slow conveyance summoned with a whistle or collapsed into a pocket.

Please see Terreform.org for more….