![]() ![]() And, once you’ve made the I-beam, the I-beam is good for only one thing, and that’s the building that it was measured for. There’s a tremendous release of CO 2 in making concrete, and there’s a tremendous CO 2 release by melting iron to make an I-beam. It takes a lot of energy to make those things. The concrete and steel industries have huge carbon footprints. Yeah, like concrete and steel, for instance. Why build out of wood when it is more susceptible to fire and decay than other construction materials? And this summer we’ve seen the devastating Canadian wildfires. There’s a history of fires burning down cities such as London and Chicago. Helens! So that’s only forty years from a catastrophic event back to a harvestable forest. The great majority of the trees got knocked down by the shock wave from the explosion. Hubbard Brook has been continuously studied since then, for how trees and how a forest recovers from a catastrophic event, like clear-cutting. He started those experiments in the nineteen-sixties in New Hampshire, a place called Hubbard Brook. You leave it all in place and just watch it regrow. named Gene Likens studied what happens to a forest when you cut it down-all of it. I want my city to be as resilient as Earth’s hardwood forests. ![]() And that’s the reason why I picked forests as my biomimic. The resiliency of forests is to be emulated. Those are the four characteristics I would love a city to have. Trees sequester carbon, harvest water, produce food, and convert sunlight into energy. Why is it important to build cities out of wood? It seems counterintuitive to build a city out of wood when we have a deforestation problem. Another pillar is the idea that cities should be constructed from wood. Vertical farms and other forms of urban agriculture are one of the pillars of this vision you’re putting forward for transforming the way cities are built and managed. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. At eighty-three, he remains a lively, charismatic presence, even onscreen, punctuating his answers with dramatic hand gestures, rhetorical questions, punning asides, and laughter. On a recent morning, I spoke with him over Zoom, where he joined from his apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Last summer’s seemingly endless wildfires and extreme heat events have made Despommier’s ideas seem especially urgent. ![]() It is estimated that, by the middle of this century, sixty-eight per cent of the world’s population will live in urban areas (up from fifty-seven per cent in 2021). And cities are likely to continue growing. As Despommier notes, the world’s cities make up two per cent of the Earth’s surface but produce sixty per cent of the planet’s greenhouse emissions. His latest book, “ The New City: How to Build Our Sustainable Urban Future,” which evolved from a course that Despommier taught at Fordham University, is a manifesto for the future of cities on a warming planet. Though retired from full-time teaching, Despommier is still thinking about ecological problems. alone, with a market value estimated at $5.6 billion in 2022. There are now more than two thousand vertical farms in the U.S. Throughout the next decade, as he continued to teach the class, Despommier and his students developed this idea-including the use of cultivation techniques that required little or no soil-culminating in the 2010 book, “ The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century.” The concept proved popular and has been widely implemented. ![]() “What’s wrong with putting the farmer inside the building?” he asked them, remembering that at the time there were “hundreds to perhaps thousands” of empty buildings in New York City. Urban farming was a good idea, Despommier thought, but his students hadn’t taken it far enough. Despommier, then a professor of public health and microbiology at Columbia University, was teaching a class on medical ecology in which he asked his students, “What will the world be like in 2050?,” and a follow-up, “What would you like the world to be like in 2050?” As Despommier told The New Yorker’s Ian Frazier in 2017, his students “decided that by 2050 the planet will be really crowded, with eight or nine billion people, and they wanted New York City to be able to feed its population entirely on crops grown within its own geographic limit.” The class had calculated that by farming every square foot of rooftop space in the city, you could provide enough calories to feed only about two per cent of the 2050 population of New York. ![]()
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