official-kircheis:twinkcommunist: unrestedjade: meanderings0ul:stra-tek:Crikey what happened to Pari

official-kircheis:twinkcommunist: unrestedjade: meanderings0ul:stra-tek:Crikey what happened to Paris between Discovery and Next Gen? Ok. Ok this is probably one of my biggest modern Trek peeves. The complete failure to do any futuring or research for what a major metropolitan area is going to look like on a post-scarcity planet that places high value on science and ecology and human health.Because. Why do that when we can just reuse the same, tired 1927 Metropolis imagery. Why do that when we can grab the same used-to-death hyperdensity? Why include green infrastructure on planets that are meant to be examples of a better future?Nah. Let’s just go with some blade runner/fifth element style cities for a *completely different culture* and call it a day. Or lets just make sure all the buildings are silver and shiny cause that’s futuristic, right? (Star Trek Into Darkness creators: Right! It’s silver and concrete so it’s the future!) It’s not like we have literally a century of research already on why megastructures and hyperdensity are not the most efficient or healthy way to go with urban design. Yeah. Sure.You’re telling me in the 23rd century we haven’t gotten light pollution under control? Look at all that glare!! Look at all the different light temperatures being used outdoors!! Look at the amount of uplight!! They would NEVER be doing this on Earth in the 2200s. They aren’t doing this on any self-respecting Federation planet! They won’t allow terraforming if there’s so much as a microbial life form to be disturbed, and you’re telling me they’re fine with decimating insect populations, frequent bird strikes, and damaging peoples’ circadian health? BULLSHIT!And do you see a single greenspace? Street tree? Bioretention area? Green roof?? (Here or shown in Into Darkness.) I might see one park - mostly lawn. We still need giant concrete boulevards for what, all the groundcars commuting?? We’re still building giant heat islands left and right? You’re telling me the River Seine is not daylit in the future?!?Now most of the influence with older Trek was coming from a more utopian, get-back-to-nature perspective, but still look back at the first “future Paris” and see how the towers are well spaced so you don’t have places on the ground that basically never get natural light, see the transit line still lined with trees, the river water with greenspace near it, how most of the development is midrise and human scale, how historical preservation has clearly taken place along with some rewilding. They were doing a better job when their future cities and alien worlds were paintings.The IOT is a failed panopticon-esque experiment, but smarter cities are inevitable. There is going to be a lot of real-time monitoring in those cities, but for things like transit and forestry departments not corporations trying to sell more stuff. I think about how much more user-friendly and universal stuff like ArcGIS Urban is gonna be by this point and could just. Drool a little. But there’s going to be n o t h i n g that doesn’t include green infrastructure. There’s no future without it. There’s no sustainability without it. This is the same fallacy as the idiots who think we could replace our planet’s pollinators with *drone bees*. Not everything needs a high-tech solution. Nature is not an idiot. Anyways… No Federation city is going to look like that second image. Enough. Sci-fi needs to start doing better with this and stop reusing the same outdated imagery where it doesn’t belong. And people who study this stuff and are Trek nerds are available just like every other scientific and social-sciences field! FFS! As much as I love a good city hellscape, it doesn’t fit earth in the trek universe. Everything shown in the older series was green, walkable, and looked lived in and cared for by actual people. It made the planet this refreshing garden compared to the ship interiors. Just from an aesthetic standpoint it was more effective at communicating what it means to live in the federation than the newer series chrome washing everything. They should let Kim Stanley Robinson write an episode I get where you’re coming from butIt’s not like we have literally a century of research already on why megastructures and hyperdensity are not the most efficient or healthy way to go with urban design. Yeah. Sure.[citation needed]; the IPCC and other UN organs recommend dense cities, like central Paris: that’s how you minimise the area used for humans and leave as much nature as possible outside cities.You’re telling me in the 23rd century we haven’t gotten light pollution under control? Look at all that glare!! Look at all the different light temperatures being used outdoors!! Look at the amount of uplight!!fair but also these people can beam to a hyper-tech observatory in the darkest spot on the planet whenever they want to, or travel into actual outer space, You want some more clarification, sure I can do that. To start off with “high-density” and “hyperdensity” are two different types of urban development and should not be used interchangeably. The IPCC is rightly recommending high-density, walkable urban development as better for human health and the environment. This is one of the reasons the concept of “the fifteen minute city” keeps popping up in the news. Cities need a certain density of people living per acre to support mass transit, X amount for a good bus system, a larger number for good light rail. Low-density sprawl (whether seen through the lens of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City fantasy, Levittown, or the unending suburbia of ailing lawns and two-story houses) is hard on budgets for infrastructure, cannot support mass transit, and reduces both housing availability and housing choice. You can have good low-density. You can have low-density spaces in a dense city. You cannot have miles and miles upon miles of low density sprawl without having negative effects on the environment and the IPCC knows that. So does the USGBC and (most of) the APA and any other urban planning organization living in the 21st century. The book Happy Cities by Charles Montgomery is a very accessible read and found around 30% of the people in suburbia right now would actually prefer other housing options. We need to start building them.Ideally (for so, sooo very many reasons but this is a tumblr post), you will have cities of mostly high-density and mid-density development (your four to ten story stuff), with some low-density areas and towers/skyscrapers mixed in. A lot of this needs to be Missing Middle residential for most places. Much beyond 7 stories, especially for residential buildings, you start to lose that “human scale” that helps us stay comfortable in our surroundings and connected to our streets and neighborhoods. At the end of the day we’re all still animals. How our senses communicate our perceptions of our surroundings to our brain would not be so frequently ignored in that Federation future. The Gehl website on making cities for people has tons of information about human scale and perception. (Jan and Ingrid Gehl also turned their research into wonderful books, but ooof expensive.)That’s what you see in the first image, essentially. That variety of densities, but mostly dense. None of that is hyperdensity, which is what is shown in that second image. Hyperdensity essentially takes almost every piece of land in a city to its maximum possible density. Tower after tower crammed together with narrow spaces in between, mainly taken up by transportation uses. Skyscrapers are not the greenest solution, though they can be built well. Too often they end up just being an architect’s dick-measuring contest. Hyperdensity also reduces the amount of green space in people’s neighborhoods, reducing human’s access to fulfill their need for biophilia (essentially time feeling connected to nature, term coined by E. O. Wilson).And that’s not some subjective thing on whether you like the great outdoors or not. Green space exposure can reduce stress measurably through measuring the amount of cortisol (stress hormone) present in saliva. As far as the rampant light pollution showing in that city - I’m really not sure why you cut off my next sentence about how damaging light pollution is to the environment (completely irregardless of astronomy) in order to tell me why they can just travel other places to do astronomy… but lets work on that one too.Light pollution is probably the most widely ignored source of catastrophic human damage to the environment right now. It’s not an astronomer’s problem. That may be the main point of origin for the International Dark Sky Association, but it’s not just about astronomy and they know it. This could become another extinction level problem. This is particularly maddening because it would be one of the easiest things to rapidly improve. There’s no lingering contamination. Until we can get the problems with LED lighting under control and fix the bad fixtures just turn off some fucking lights. The Xerces Society for Insect Conservation has been borderline screaming about this for years. Here’s an article on what we’re doing to fireflies. Here’s a recent one from the BBC on our loss of bugs in general. People wanna help save the bees? Get on your local govs ass about not putting in garbage lighting. volt.org and the IDA have lots of resources. Jane Slade’s writing goes into more detail about how we’re effecting animals that use astronavigation like whales and dung beetles. We’re effecting bats. Moths. Amphibians. Phytoplankton. And yes, baby sea turtles that walk into traffic cause they’re trying to follow the moon out to sea (the Cities episode of Planet Earth). I can recommend the podcast Starving for Darkness, which is on Spotify. A video is worth a thousand words on what good lighting and bad lighting look like these days, so here’s a short one. All this to say again what a pathetic excuse for a Federation City that second image is.I think it’s obvious I could go on, but this is probably… more than enough from me for now. -- source link
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