City of the Future

Devaansh is my 12 year old nephew, who wrote this concept paper for his class project. All of this is his own ideas, with no help form his city planner uncle, or his urban planning professor grand-uncle.

Future Cities

May 18, 2015-June 1, 2015

In the beginning of the year 2015, there was a future cities competition in which students from around the nation designed and built the cities of tomorrow. Well, that future is today, 100 years after this competition, and today we are introducing the most amazing city of the future, Moana Kulana Kauhale. Named by the creator Devaansh Singh, its name means Ocean City. It is located on a former Hawaiian Island and creates a future that resolves many of the problematic issues that have been plaguing our world for the past 100 years Plus, all of the solutions are both innovative and environmentally friendly making Moana Kulana Kauhale the ideal city to live in.

Before we start, here is a brief description of the residential, commercial, and industrial zones of the city. Moana Kulana Kauhale is like a doughnut, the hole is the industrial section, then around it is the commercial zone, and around that, the farthest away from the industrial zone, is the residential zone. The city was designed in this fashion to minimize drive time. It does so because the industries can easily transport goods to the commercial zone, and residents don’t have to go too far to go shopping. The only disadvantage in this situation is the worker who has to go from the residential zone to the industrial zone , but that is taken care of by the speedy transportation, like the Vactrains, offered in this city. There is a specific train (the Vactrain) whose only purpose is to transport the workers to the factories and back. The industrial zone is built down, not up. Meaning entrances to the factories are situated above ground and the assembly lines are all underground . The buildings that are above ground are the company's headquarters which lies on top of the factory and the solar panels, wind turbines, and PCUs that power the city and the factories. PCUs are devices that catch pollution and convert it into energy. All the pollution made by the industrial zone is managed by the company and released into underground caverns. There, the PCUs are at every five feet and produce enough energy to power the factories and headquarters.

The next zone is the commercial zone. It’s main power supply comes from the many clean power generators in the industrial zone and it receives shipments through the hyperloop train system which is underneath the ground. All the windows have solar panels installed in them and merchandise is made from clean energy produced in the industrial zone so we are independent The commercial zone is connected to the residential zone through multiple hyperloop tracks which are divided into centers, one per station. By center I mean shopping center, divided by type of store (i.e. clothing, groceries, house supplies, building supplies, arts and crafts, ect.), and stations are where the train picks up and drops off its passengers. If you are a resident going shopping. you plan your trip, you take your train, and enter into center filled with malls and stores specifying in the type of shopping you need to do. There are eateries all along the centers and food places in the stores and malls, so no shopper will ever go hungry. Then shopping is just like normal shopping 100 years ago, just more high-tech gizmos on sale and the new and latest fashions, not the weird early 2000’s stuff.

Now, that leaves the residential zone. The outside circle of the city is the residential zone. It has many neighborhoods and each neighborhood has a skyscraper to use as apartment buildings and offices for the neighborhood. To keep things fair and to have no homeless people, we have people who want a house to go to a government building in the residential zone. They go, tell them the house they want, the amount of people who are going to live in the house, and the buyer’s income. Then the government gives you a fair price. If you accept, then the government takes your money and gives half to the real estate agent managing the house and helping their clients. They keep the other half for government purposes. Extra power can be collected if needed from the solar power windows. The transportation between neighborhoods can be managed by taking an underground hyperloop or Vactrain and families of four or greater can take a hybrid car, Vespa, or van. The major source of energy for the residential area is clean, environmentally safe energy, and when you run out you can use fuel to get to a charging station. So all of the zones are as clean possible and do their jobs well.

The infrastructure of our city is truly remarkable. Our sewer system is the best we can make. The waste goes into the various pipes that run way under the city. The waste all accumulates in a big cavern with a vat in it. Their, everything that isn’t sanitized is filtered into a big tank. It will fill up around once a year. and when that happens it will be sent to a plant so that it will be sanitize enough to be reused as toilet water or will be sent to a plant where we will burn it in a PCU area and collect energy from the heat using geothermal generators. Cars are only used for short distance travel, as the train system is much more effective. Roads are only inside individual centers for people who don't want to walk or take a car. the rest is managed by the citywide train stations. Each train’s tracks are connected to each station in individual tracks that run in a circle around each zone If you want to travel to a different zone, then you just get off at one of the tran-zone stations that has a special set of tracks and trains just for shuttling people around the two zones.

Our city has one main transportation mode: Our trains. They transport our people anywhere they want in super high speeds. We have two main types of trains; the Vactrain and the Hyperloop. The Vactrain is like a normal super fast magnet train today, except it is in a vacuum tube. The vacuum tube sucks all the air out of a place so their is no resistance. This allows the train to go many times faster than a normal magnetic train and is great for long travels, but can be used to transport humans and goods a short distance. The Hyperloop works a similar way. the train is a magnetic train, shaped like a bullet, in a long tube which contains the tracks. Once the passengers board the train, everything closes off. Then a huge burst of air comes in and shoots the Hyperloop through the tube like a very big bullet. It is best used on straight tracks or in transporting goods. The system is fairly straightforward. There are tracks connecting to each other that is in a never ending square in each zone and a set of tracks in each station that connects to it's counterpart in another zone, so everything is nice and connected. Another transportation perk is that these methods are all very eco friendly and do not harm the environment. But for those people who insist on private transportation, cars are available, though they are not widely popular. These trains are also used for long distance travels with other cities and countries. Instead of an airport with airplanes, we just ship people and goods out with the trains.

We keep the water in our city nice and sanitized using various methods we have developed. One of the major things we are using is desalination. It is the process of taking salt water and turning it into freshwater by taking the salts out of it. We then take the water in pipes and lead it to other places. We also collect stormwater and rain directly. We collect this rain because all of our pipe openings lead to the clean water pipe. The water stays clean because it passess through multiple filters on the way to a plant. At the plant, it is distributed to the civilians for everyday use.

One of our cities biggest strengths is its power generation. Our city is on a geothermal hotspot and so we have geothermal power generators in all the underground areas of our city. All of our pollution is redirected into chambers where they are sucked up into Pollution Capture Units, or PCU’S. These units capture pollution and convert it into electricity, so it is good for the environment and helps power our massive bustling metropolis. There are multiple solar panels, wind turbines, and geothermal generators in the middle of the city and power is distributed through that. The coast gets most of its energy from the multiple hydroelectric generators on the coast. All of the windows are solar panels, so that also generates lots of energy. On top of that, almost all the industrial buildings are self-sustaining from the many solar powers and PCU’s they have. All of these factors invariably make our city extremely self-sufficient.

The educational system of our city is quite comprehensive. Everyone is homeschooled and can go to a big virtual classroom software. One room in each house is completely dedicated to this for the children, and each can be installed for free if anymore kids show up, but their is a $30 fine for all the children after the fourth one. Each child is sorted into a classroom where a teacher will help them if they need help on the work assigned to every child in the grade. The course is extremely vigorous and the workload very tough. The students who can keep up with the program, that we call TOOLS, often go to top universities and become extremely talented in their field of expertise. That is the average. The students who mess around on purpose and don’t care for their studies are given a basic education and are left to find a job among talented people. The students who really try hard but aren’t blessed with the brain to keep up are taken to a separate, slower paced course until the caught up. That does not make them any worse than the others, it just means they needed help, and everyone needs help in their studies at one time or another.

Our city also has many recreational and entertainment facilities. The islands classic tradition of hula dancing is kept to this date and many shows are performed in our centers. We have one center on one side of our city, so two a zone. We also have a center in the middle of each zone. We have made sure that all of the centers are close to a train center, so that that will be easier to access, and will be cleaned by the dropouts who don’t want to learn I mentioned earlier. We present many shows other than hula dancing in these areas.We have many dramatic arts kids. We have them put on shows and make movies. We also have a five star movie industry from stars around the world whose movies play at these locations and theatres scattered across the commercial zone. All in all, if you can think of it as entertainment, we most probably have it.

And those are most of the facts about our amazing city, Moana Kulana Kauhale. It is extremely environmentally clean, it has marvelous transportation, and most importantly of all, we have an awesome educational system. With all these great minds being trained and going to the job everyday, our city evolves a bit every day. Soon, when Devaansh Singh sees his city again, he won’t recognize it because of how much it evolved, and it will make him happy, because his goal and mission would then be complete.