Urbanate

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An Urbanate is the name given by the Technocracy movement to their proposal for an entirely new living environment, which is envisioned to replace cities in a possible future technate. The construction of Urbanates is one of the major infrastructure plans the Technocracy movement has for the technate.

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[edit] Overview

An Urbanate is essentially an assembly of buildings, or perhaps one large building, in which approximately 14,000 to 20,000 people would live and work. These places would have all the facilities needed for a community, including schools, hospitals, distribution centres (shops), waste management and recycling, sports centres, and public areas (parks and gardens), and would also have easy access to the surrounding country-side. The exact design of an Urbanate has not been specified by the movement as they argue this would be far better done by the engineers and architects of the technate when they come to build one.

[edit] Design and proposed benefits

Technocrats propose that Urbanates (as well as the technate as a whole) be designed "katascopicly" (from the top-down) as opposed to "anascopicly" (from the bottom-up). The idea is that an Urbanate would be pre-designed to be optimally efficient in all areas, the buildings would be as energy efficient as possible, and they would be designed with safety in mind, with every building material being completely fireproof and resistant to almost all natural disasters. It is envisioned that Urbanates will be manufactured rather than constructed in the traditional sense. Standardized, prefabricated components will be produced in automated factories and transported to the desired location to be assembled into whatever design is required with a minimum of human labour used.

It is thought that people's living areas should be equally customisable, with residents being able to add or remove walls as easily as people today move furniture. Urbanates are to be designed to give each citizen the highest standard of living possible. The technocratic movement wishes Urbanates to be something akin to resorts with all sorts of leisure facilities included.

Many residents would likely work in the Urbanate as well, which would eliminate the need for lengthy and inefficient transport of workers every day, which would also eliminate any purpose for the car (other than for recreational use). Getting around in an Urbanate would be inherently easy and efficient, with every kind of major facility placed within walking distance of a housing complex (or within a reasonable distance that can be covered in elevators or moving walkways), all designed with the needs of elderly and disabled citizens in mind.

Urbanates would be connected via a continent-wide transportation network envisioned by Technocracy, which would involve a High-speed rail network (possible Maglev) linking every Urbanate, the Continental Hydrology (a massive Canal network), and air transport. These systems would also be connected to the technate’s industrial sites, consisting of automated factories, for easy transport of goods to consumers and to all recreational and vacation areas of the continent.

[edit] A replacements for cities

Technocrats propose that all cities in the technate should be gradually abandoned and "mined" for their resources over the course of a few decades. This would involve recycling resources—steel, concrete, glass, plastics, etc.—which would then go into building the Urbanates and other projects, thus reducing the need to extract and process new materials and lessening environmental damage.

The reason given by the technocratic movement for all this ambitious restructuring of urban life is that modern cities are often extremely poorly planned and built in a haphazard way (anascopicly), leading to major inefficiencies, waste, and large numbers of social and environmental problems. Technocrats believe that rather than trying to solve all these problems within the framework of existing cities, it is best to start with a clean slate and construct Urbanates. It has also been proposed that some buildings—or perhaps whole areas of the old cities—that are of historical or cultural importance be kept and preserved as a type of outdoor museums.

Urbanates would be constructed in the best possible location for their functioning within the overall scheme of things in the Technate, so that they could fit into the rest of the infrastructure easily and so that citizens would be close to their area of employment. Meaning that many of them would be clustered around strategic areas, and in cases where a large population is needed to operate a specific piece of infrastructure, they would be closely packed into a sort of City of Urbanates. For instance, to service a major port, many Urbanates might be required—perhaps up to a dozen, creating populations within the range of hundreds of thousands.

Technocrats believe there will be great environmental benefits to scraping cities and adopting Urbanates. Urbanates will take up much less physical space than cities and will not have polluting cars or industries. Roads and highways, major ecological hazards with their thousands of kilometres of concrete and tarmac cutting through natural landscapes, will be absent in this plan, and nature will be able to reclaim vast tracts of land.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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