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Dubai Ziggurat Carbon Neutral Pyramid Arcology
The Dubai Ziggurat is a concept design to be unveiled at this year's Cityscape Dubai event. The design is for a carbon neutral pyramid housing one million people.
(Dubai Ziggurat: A carbon-neutral pyramid arcology)
Timelinks, a Dubai-based environmental design firm, has designed the Ziggurat as an ecofriendly arcology. Within its 2.3 kilometer footprint, it can house 1,000,000 people entirely off the power grid.
Note that concentrating the population leaves a lot of space for nature - and for exploring. This is a key feature of arcologies.
(Dubai Ziggurat: A carbon-neutral pyramid housing 1,000,000 people)
Timelinks has patented their design; given some of the other projects under construction in Dubai, this is not that far out.
Science fiction readers have long enjoyed reading specifically about arcologies (like the one in Niven and Pournelle's Oath of Fealty, but in the concept of enormous machine cities that are self-powered.
For example, the single city of Lemnos in Silverberg's The Man in the Maze is a single, self-powered construction. It uses the movement of the planet itself for power, drawing upon it as needed.
An early treatment of the idea can be found in the town in one building from H.G. Well's When the Sleeper Wakes, published in 1899.
A thing Graham had already learnt, and which he found very hard to imagine, was that nearly all the towns in the country, and almost all the villages, had disappeared. Here and there only, he understood, some gigantic hotel-like edifice stood amid square miles of some single cultivation and preserved the name of a town -- as Bournemouth, Wareham, or Swanage. Yet the officer had speedily convinced him how inevitable such a change had been.
(Read more about Wells' town in one building)
From Inhabitat.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 8/26/2008)
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