Looking at the Problems of the Past

There is an expression, “Generals prepare to fight the previous war.” It is meant to emphasize that when building an army, while generals may have new technology and new strategies to draw upon, they’re still trying to solve the problems they faced when they were young. It would be as accurate to say that companies prepare for last years market, the government deals with problems senators had before they were elected, and teachers prepare kids for the world they grew up in.

Designers of homes and living space fare no better. But by understanding why they design the way they do, we can see how they view buildings, homes, and the way people interact with them.

This is Babcock Ranch. Self-proclaimed “city of the future”.

Currently under development by independent investors backed by the State of Florida, Babcock Ranch is intended to be a model of efficiency, convenience, and environmental friendliness. It is designed to run entirely off of renewable energy, to be easily accessible by bike or on foot, and to feature complete computerized management. Every building in the city (its backers claim) will contain smart grid systems monitoring its power usage, enabling them to save energy, eliminate waste, and cut costs for everyone involved.

Now, there is a fine history of people trying to build “cities of the future” with technology that does not, in fact, exist. Mile-high buildings, atomic elevators, and 500 mile per hour trains have all featured in plans for “future living” that expected themselves to be taken seriously. But for a moment, lets take it as an assumption that the creators of Babcock Ranch can actually do what they claim — and see just how people would live in that city.

Generally, when people look at pictures like this, you get one of two knee-jerk reactions. “That’s very progressive and green!” or “That’s a rich-hippie vanity project.” Knee-jerk reactions aren’t very well thought out though, so lets take a closer look at that picture and see if we can make a more insightful observation.

For instance, we could ask, “What exactly is all of that green stuff on the roof for?” We could go to their website and look it up, but lets see if we can figure it out. There’s a few things it could be useful for:

• It could be there to make the buildings prettier (beautification).
• It could be a garden intended for use by people in the building (relaxation).
• It could be there to absorb carbon dioxide and make the building more environmentally friendly (greenification).
• Useful fruits and other crops could be grown there to be sold later (agriculture).

Now, imagine how people would have to live in this city, and interact with the buildings inside it, for any of these to be true. Beautification seems very straightforward, until you realize that these are 8-10 story buildings, so the roof isn’t visible from the ground. All we’d see if we looked from ground level is a strip of green. Babcock Ranch’s designers seem to be aware of this, as you can see the effect in their own promotional pictures.

See the little strip of green up there? Still — that is a benefit, so we can understand what interactions would make it worthwhile.

• If the rooftop gardens are there to make the buildings prettier, people must take a lot of pride in living and working in buildings with the “strip of green” effect on the roof.

Of course, it would be much easier for people to appreciate the gardens beauty if they were standing in it, surrounded by the plants, so perhaps relaxation would be a better use. People don’t go up to the roofs of their buildings very often now, but, if there was a beautiful, warm garden up there, they might go more often. That lets us see very clearly how people would have to interact with the buildings around them for that to be a good idea.

• If the rooftop gardens are there for relaxation, people must enjoy relaxing on their buildings roof more then they would visiting a nearby park.

Of course, if the gardens are just there to absorb CO2, nobody needs access to them but the staff. Then again, plants can absorb CO2 anywhere — they don’t have to be right on top of the building itself, and it is certainly much cheaper to build a garden outside the city then on a high-rise roof. But maybe there’s some kind of benefit to having it on hand — it might make the air quality in the building more pleasant, or prevent smog from accumulating. We can stop, and think about what might cause people to immediately care about that sort of advantage.

• If the rooftop gardens are there for greenification, people must be concerned about the air quality in the buildings they work and live in.

Finally, the gardens could be there to grow fresh fruits and vegetables. Certainly, that sort of healthy eating is becoming more popular. But as you can see:

The cities stores, malls, and grocery stores have perfectly functional road access. There’s no reason fresh food couldn’t be brought in from outside — and if growing food on rooftops really was cheaper and easier, you could do it in existing cities, instead of building a new, planned community. Thus, we can see how people would have to interact with their buildings for this to be a sound solution.

• If the rooftop gardens are there for agriculture, people must take pride in “locally grown” food from their own rooftops.

Babcock Ranch is preparing to fight the previous war — it has been under development for years and was designed by older, “veteran” environmentalists. It’s trying to solve the problems of decades past, not the problems of the future. So stop, take a second — you were alive in the past (we presume), and so you remember what people were most worried about then. Without going to wikipedia and looking up if rooftop organic gardening is popular or if buildings with green roofs sell for more — take a second. Which one of these four options do you think is the real reason? The answer is given below.

If you picked greenification for building air quality, you got it! Organic food, “green” living space, and environmentalism as a selling point for buildings are all relatively new, but people have been worried about urban air quality for ages. In cities that are subject to heat waves — and remember, this is in Florida — even the greenest of cities can develop clouds of “urban heat” and smog. Covering the roofs of buildings with plants helps prevent this, and gives the people living inside the buildings more pleasant air.

While they may use new technology — solar panels, fiber optics, computer management, and more, the designers of Babcock Ranch are looking at the problems cities faced in the 50′s and 60′s (smog and rolling heat), and the environmental concerns of the 80′s and 90′s (the need for clean solar power).

We actually like Babcock Ranch — it’s not the city of the future, but if its designers can deliver what they’re promising, it could be a very good city of the present. But it’s also a very good example of our ideas about how buildings are used and how we interact with them subtly biasing us. Without knowing a thing about air pollution, plant behavior, or environmentalism, we were able to determine the purpose of a very expensive feature, just because that’s what people were worried about when the designers of this system were young.

Any of the other three answers could have been correct. They could still be correct, 10 or 20 years from now, when the kids and teenagers growing up with today’s environmental concerns get older. If you enjoyed this article, stop and leave a comment about what that world would have to be like for one of the other answers to be correct — or tell us how you think future generations will interact with their buildings.