let’s imagine that I come from one of
the many alternative futures in my
future we’ve just finished the term of
Siri our first AI president it’s about
20 years from now and in this future
edge cities those cities that have grown
up on the edge of metropolitan areas
like Tyson’s have been good stewards of
the resources that they’ve built over
time the jobs and the infrastructure and
in this future
they’ve humanized those resources
they’ve turned the streets into
pedestrian oriented streets they’ve
built great neighborhoods they’ve built
great parks and in this future they’ve
turned some of those neighborhoods into
eco districts and by creating eco
districts they’ve unleashed resilience
and equitable access to resources in the
concrete jungle
now eco districts use principles from
the real jungle and they apply them at
the scale of the district or
neighborhood so it’s bigger than an
individual green building but it’s
smaller than the city principals of the
jungle mean things like there’s no such
thing as waste all waste is food for
something else there’s equal access to
resources and everything depends on
everything else so the leopard depends
on the dung beetle and vice versa
and there’s resilience when a big tree
falls an army of small trees reach up
for the sign eco districts combine the
infrastructure and the individual
buildings the acts of individuals in the
acts of community to bring out that
resilience and they do that within a
framework of social equity that allows
them to take some of the profits and
some of the value that’s created in
infrastructure and utilize that in
social programs that deal with other
aspects of the community and it’s that
framework that kind of keeps this from
being a sort of geeky infrastructure
play right now communities that are in
your time trying to become eco districts
are following
journey that’s set out in a protocol
that’s been published by the national
nonprofit organization eco districts and
there are 15 or 20 of these going
forward around the country there are
three of them in the District of
Columbia and one of them with really
ambitious goals is the southeast eco
district but each one of those is in a
city and for a long time I thought that
was the only place that an eco district
could occur was in the city because
that’s where we’ve got the densities
that’s where we’ve concentrated waste so
there’s typically in the city a big
waste pipe full of sewage a big pipe
full of stormwater a big landfill and so
it makes economic sense to go and tap
those ways the suburbs may in fact
create more waste but it’s all spread
out so that it’s not really economical
to tap into it but then the edge cities
step forward they say well technically
we’re in the suburbs but we’ve
concentrated people and we’ve
concentrated waste couldn’t we be that
eco district and the answer is yes but
what would it look like what would be
the difference between an edge city
neighborhood and an edge city eco
district I think maybe one way to
determine that is to look through the
eyes of a resident so we’re gonna look
through the eyes of Elliot and Elliot’s
twenty years old
in fact baby Elliot may be here tonight
Elliot manages the urban agriculture for
edge city eco district and in that job
he manages the workers who are working
between the buildings raising food he
also manages the tool lending program by
which you can come and get tools to grow
food on your balcony and on your roof he
also manages the robots that are working
in the former parking decks raising food
except for the underground parking decks
those are secure pot farms and he
doesn’t mess with those elliot manages
teams that use reuse water to water at
the crops
harvest rainwater they use alternative
energy to power the equipment they use
and they compost their waste they use
that compost and vermiculture they
cultivate earthworms to grow living soil
and that is soil that actually is full
of happy bugs and beasties and they
create nutrients and those nutrients
allow the plants to grow without the
addition of fertilizers and because
they’re not using fertilizers the
streams in eco district come back to
life they also don’t use herbicides and
pesticides and because they’re not using
herbicides and pesticides the residents
are healthier and it also allows a rich
fabric of pollinators and birds and
wildlife to be infiltrate around the
buildings in fact Elliot’s friend kateri
manages the biophilic health program and
that program allows the residents of the
eco district to access the wildlife to
participate through cameras and to know
when the coyotes or the Cougars come
into town and to understand what the
birth of a species would be it’s a very
popular program subscribers there are
groupies for different animals within
the town other friends of Elliot’s
manage the harvest program and they use
surface drones and air drones to
distribute fresh vegetables fresh fruit
fish from the urban agricultural co-op
into the restaurants into the homes and
into the food trucks that move
throughout the city because of these
programs the edge city eco district
imports very little food and if there’s
a catastrophic circumstance if something
bad happens it can actually go for weeks
without having to bring food in Elliot’s
very happy there he loves his job in
fact he came to the eco district because
of that job Elliot actually is a
brilliant programmer and he could have
been at any tech hub in the country and
he does side hustles to get money
whenever he
but what he loves is to be working
outside as part of the urban agriculture
program his expenses are low because
they’re in the eco district he doesn’t
need a car
his utilities come from the grid from
the micro grid that’s there in the in in
the eco district his water comes from
the one water facility that harvests
rain water uses reused water and figures
out the most economical way to deliver
water inside the bounds of the eco
district
sometimes when Elliot’s standing out in
the field he looks up at this one
particular tower and he tracks one
particular window and that connects him
to the other reason that he came there
to the eco district and that’s his mom
and his mom is the CEO of monolithic
monolithic relocated its world
headquarters from New York to this edge
city because about three years ago a
hurricane hit New York and when it hit
it knocked monolithic offline so
monolithic swirled headquarters were out
of touch with the world for three weeks
they lost millions of dollars his mom
says it’s never gonna happen again she’s
the one who taught Eliot about eco
district and resilience
she moved monolithic to the edge city
eco district the first thing she did was
she tapped into the grid the micro grid
that used the solar energy the wind
energy and the geothermal from the eco
district a few weeks ago a hurricane hit
the eco district and everything has
played out exactly the way Elliot’s mom
thought it would first they were able to
stay online because of that energy they
were also able to outlast everyone who
stayed online using diesel generators
diesel ran out you couldn’t get more
diesel in she’d also set it up so they
would be participating in the water
program and they would have reused water
to have the toilets working the heat and
the cooling the landscaping they would
filter rainwater and they’d be able to
continue operating but
knew that a hospital or world
headquarters couldn’t actually operate
with just energy and water it needed
people and she was concerned that
something crazy might happen like the
Metro might not work or the interstate
would catch on fire and her people
wouldn’t be able to get to her offices
to keep him going so she wanted her
people located in a place that they
could walk or bike her ride their
hoverboards to to the office so she
needed to locate not only in a mixed-use
area so that they’d be within just a
reasonable distance but she also wanted
to make sure it wasn’t just her C suite
that was coming there her business
couldn’t operate with just the C suite
just the corporate officers she needed
the communications folks she needed
folks from the daycare facility she
needed they you know the security folks
she needed all of the key personnel to
be there which meant she needed a a
mixed income neighborhood nearby as well
she also understood that when an
emergency happens even emergency
operator personnel won’t show up and
leave their family in the dark and in
dangerous circumstances so part of what
she did when she had the utilities
extended to monolithic she had them
extended to the neighborhood as well
that had two results one was that when
the hurricane hit her workers knew their
families were safe and they came in and
continued operations but it also made
that neighborhood very attractive so
lots of people wanted to be there
because there weren’t comparable
services around when the hurricane hit
in fact the neighborhood and monolithic
and the buildings within the eco
district or all a sort of Island of
operations in a sea of Darkness around
them she understood one more thing and
it was really important that there are
cataclysmic events besides earthquakes
and hurricanes and they can come from
social upheaval in a neighborhood
if there was a big gulf between the
haves and have-nots then small incidents
could set off big problems if crime was
a problem it was unlikely that a
business would thrive it might not even
survive so it was important to her that
the eco district was set up to take
profits from these infrastructure
undertakings and used them in social
programs to create social equity but how
did all of this come about the way it
happened was a bunch of people came
together and created a stakeholders
committee and that stakeholders
committee began to pull together small
projects and the local businesses
supported them in the beginning gave
them some initial funding and they
started doing spark projects those were
projects that sort of caught the
community’s eye and made him think about
what could happen different small things
like you know harvesting rainwater here
or beginning to grow things there they
did different forms of crowdsource
funding to fund those projects they did
tactical urbanism to create things that
would be temporary that would give
everybody an idea of what could happen
there and slowly but surely the
businesses started investing in
infrastructure the locality invested in
infrastructure and they attracted new
utilities that came in and put their
capital behind the infrastructure and it
didn’t happen overnight it took a couple
of decades for them to form the eco
district but the other edge cities that
didn’t form eco districts found
themselves the crime-ridden depositories
for driverless cars and I don’t know
what your alternative future is but I
can promise you that if you don’t start
working on an eco district that your
edge city will not be where the Elliotts
of the future live good luck
you
the many alternative futures in my
future we’ve just finished the term of
Siri our first AI president it’s about
20 years from now and in this future
edge cities those cities that have grown
up on the edge of metropolitan areas
like Tyson’s have been good stewards of
the resources that they’ve built over
time the jobs and the infrastructure and
in this future
they’ve humanized those resources
they’ve turned the streets into
pedestrian oriented streets they’ve
built great neighborhoods they’ve built
great parks and in this future they’ve
turned some of those neighborhoods into
eco districts and by creating eco
districts they’ve unleashed resilience
and equitable access to resources in the
concrete jungle
now eco districts use principles from
the real jungle and they apply them at
the scale of the district or
neighborhood so it’s bigger than an
individual green building but it’s
smaller than the city principals of the
jungle mean things like there’s no such
thing as waste all waste is food for
something else there’s equal access to
resources and everything depends on
everything else so the leopard depends
on the dung beetle and vice versa
and there’s resilience when a big tree
falls an army of small trees reach up
for the sign eco districts combine the
infrastructure and the individual
buildings the acts of individuals in the
acts of community to bring out that
resilience and they do that within a
framework of social equity that allows
them to take some of the profits and
some of the value that’s created in
infrastructure and utilize that in
social programs that deal with other
aspects of the community and it’s that
framework that kind of keeps this from
being a sort of geeky infrastructure
play right now communities that are in
your time trying to become eco districts
are following
journey that’s set out in a protocol
that’s been published by the national
nonprofit organization eco districts and
there are 15 or 20 of these going
forward around the country there are
three of them in the District of
Columbia and one of them with really
ambitious goals is the southeast eco
district but each one of those is in a
city and for a long time I thought that
was the only place that an eco district
could occur was in the city because
that’s where we’ve got the densities
that’s where we’ve concentrated waste so
there’s typically in the city a big
waste pipe full of sewage a big pipe
full of stormwater a big landfill and so
it makes economic sense to go and tap
those ways the suburbs may in fact
create more waste but it’s all spread
out so that it’s not really economical
to tap into it but then the edge cities
step forward they say well technically
we’re in the suburbs but we’ve
concentrated people and we’ve
concentrated waste couldn’t we be that
eco district and the answer is yes but
what would it look like what would be
the difference between an edge city
neighborhood and an edge city eco
district I think maybe one way to
determine that is to look through the
eyes of a resident so we’re gonna look
through the eyes of Elliot and Elliot’s
twenty years old
in fact baby Elliot may be here tonight
Elliot manages the urban agriculture for
edge city eco district and in that job
he manages the workers who are working
between the buildings raising food he
also manages the tool lending program by
which you can come and get tools to grow
food on your balcony and on your roof he
also manages the robots that are working
in the former parking decks raising food
except for the underground parking decks
those are secure pot farms and he
doesn’t mess with those elliot manages
teams that use reuse water to water at
the crops
harvest rainwater they use alternative
energy to power the equipment they use
and they compost their waste they use
that compost and vermiculture they
cultivate earthworms to grow living soil
and that is soil that actually is full
of happy bugs and beasties and they
create nutrients and those nutrients
allow the plants to grow without the
addition of fertilizers and because
they’re not using fertilizers the
streams in eco district come back to
life they also don’t use herbicides and
pesticides and because they’re not using
herbicides and pesticides the residents
are healthier and it also allows a rich
fabric of pollinators and birds and
wildlife to be infiltrate around the
buildings in fact Elliot’s friend kateri
manages the biophilic health program and
that program allows the residents of the
eco district to access the wildlife to
participate through cameras and to know
when the coyotes or the Cougars come
into town and to understand what the
birth of a species would be it’s a very
popular program subscribers there are
groupies for different animals within
the town other friends of Elliot’s
manage the harvest program and they use
surface drones and air drones to
distribute fresh vegetables fresh fruit
fish from the urban agricultural co-op
into the restaurants into the homes and
into the food trucks that move
throughout the city because of these
programs the edge city eco district
imports very little food and if there’s
a catastrophic circumstance if something
bad happens it can actually go for weeks
without having to bring food in Elliot’s
very happy there he loves his job in
fact he came to the eco district because
of that job Elliot actually is a
brilliant programmer and he could have
been at any tech hub in the country and
he does side hustles to get money
whenever he
but what he loves is to be working
outside as part of the urban agriculture
program his expenses are low because
they’re in the eco district he doesn’t
need a car
his utilities come from the grid from
the micro grid that’s there in the in in
the eco district his water comes from
the one water facility that harvests
rain water uses reused water and figures
out the most economical way to deliver
water inside the bounds of the eco
district
sometimes when Elliot’s standing out in
the field he looks up at this one
particular tower and he tracks one
particular window and that connects him
to the other reason that he came there
to the eco district and that’s his mom
and his mom is the CEO of monolithic
monolithic relocated its world
headquarters from New York to this edge
city because about three years ago a
hurricane hit New York and when it hit
it knocked monolithic offline so
monolithic swirled headquarters were out
of touch with the world for three weeks
they lost millions of dollars his mom
says it’s never gonna happen again she’s
the one who taught Eliot about eco
district and resilience
she moved monolithic to the edge city
eco district the first thing she did was
she tapped into the grid the micro grid
that used the solar energy the wind
energy and the geothermal from the eco
district a few weeks ago a hurricane hit
the eco district and everything has
played out exactly the way Elliot’s mom
thought it would first they were able to
stay online because of that energy they
were also able to outlast everyone who
stayed online using diesel generators
diesel ran out you couldn’t get more
diesel in she’d also set it up so they
would be participating in the water
program and they would have reused water
to have the toilets working the heat and
the cooling the landscaping they would
filter rainwater and they’d be able to
continue operating but
knew that a hospital or world
headquarters couldn’t actually operate
with just energy and water it needed
people and she was concerned that
something crazy might happen like the
Metro might not work or the interstate
would catch on fire and her people
wouldn’t be able to get to her offices
to keep him going so she wanted her
people located in a place that they
could walk or bike her ride their
hoverboards to to the office so she
needed to locate not only in a mixed-use
area so that they’d be within just a
reasonable distance but she also wanted
to make sure it wasn’t just her C suite
that was coming there her business
couldn’t operate with just the C suite
just the corporate officers she needed
the communications folks she needed
folks from the daycare facility she
needed they you know the security folks
she needed all of the key personnel to
be there which meant she needed a a
mixed income neighborhood nearby as well
she also understood that when an
emergency happens even emergency
operator personnel won’t show up and
leave their family in the dark and in
dangerous circumstances so part of what
she did when she had the utilities
extended to monolithic she had them
extended to the neighborhood as well
that had two results one was that when
the hurricane hit her workers knew their
families were safe and they came in and
continued operations but it also made
that neighborhood very attractive so
lots of people wanted to be there
because there weren’t comparable
services around when the hurricane hit
in fact the neighborhood and monolithic
and the buildings within the eco
district or all a sort of Island of
operations in a sea of Darkness around
them she understood one more thing and
it was really important that there are
cataclysmic events besides earthquakes
and hurricanes and they can come from
social upheaval in a neighborhood
if there was a big gulf between the
haves and have-nots then small incidents
could set off big problems if crime was
a problem it was unlikely that a
business would thrive it might not even
survive so it was important to her that
the eco district was set up to take
profits from these infrastructure
undertakings and used them in social
programs to create social equity but how
did all of this come about the way it
happened was a bunch of people came
together and created a stakeholders
committee and that stakeholders
committee began to pull together small
projects and the local businesses
supported them in the beginning gave
them some initial funding and they
started doing spark projects those were
projects that sort of caught the
community’s eye and made him think about
what could happen different small things
like you know harvesting rainwater here
or beginning to grow things there they
did different forms of crowdsource
funding to fund those projects they did
tactical urbanism to create things that
would be temporary that would give
everybody an idea of what could happen
there and slowly but surely the
businesses started investing in
infrastructure the locality invested in
infrastructure and they attracted new
utilities that came in and put their
capital behind the infrastructure and it
didn’t happen overnight it took a couple
of decades for them to form the eco
district but the other edge cities that
didn’t form eco districts found
themselves the crime-ridden depositories
for driverless cars and I don’t know
what your alternative future is but I
can promise you that if you don’t start
working on an eco district that your
edge city will not be where the Elliotts
of the future live good luck
you
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