I was surprised to see a particular name pop up in a recent article in The New Yorker from January 2024, “Dickson Despommier Wants Our Cities to be Like Forests”. Many, like myself, know of Despommier from years back as a vocal advocate for vertical farming, and his 2010 book “The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century” helped spawn a growing industry for dense urban farming solutions. I guess with a name like Despommier (aka Apple Trees), the idea of trees as food and plants as solution does seem too much of a stretch.
The New Yorker article builds off a new book “The New City: How to Build Our Sustainable Urban Future.” published in late 2023, in which Despommier takes up the tree metaphor again. Per the blurb on Amazon, he:
“…argues that we can find solutions through the concept of biomimicry: emulating successful strategies found in nature. A better city is possible if we heed the lessons that forests and trees teach about how to store carbon, grow food, collect rainwater, and convert sunlight into energy.”
The article covers a range of topics such as urban and vertical farming, as mentioned above, and spends a good amount of time on building using wood (specifically cross-laminated timber) over more carbon intensive materials like concrete and steel. Other topics include renewable energy, and rainwater harvesting, with an interesting aside into “harvesting water from the air.”
As explained by Despommier, beyond merely capturing rainwater, capturing the water vapor in the air by “…harvesting from fog. They have devices that look like nets, nets on poles. And, if you look closely at the net, it’s a collection of water droplets. All of those droplets filter down into a collection device, and eventually you’ve got big buckets of water. You can supply a whole village like that.”
The example shared in the article, Foster and Partners “rainwater harvesting skyscraper from Shenzhen” (seen below) doesn’t seem to use fog capture, just more traditional rainwater harvesting although details are scant. There are are questions about whether this is only a strategy that works in humid climates, but Despommier makes the case that in all climates, even low-humidity desert environments, there’s some water vapor, and coming up with ways to maximize resource extraction is good - so it will be good to see how research and technology can be employed to make these solutions cost-effective.
The idea of governance (how to get it done) and environmental justice (who is served) are also maybe worthy explorations. The phrase he employs “… cities to the planet are parasitic” line is now a bit of a cliche, but the ideas around how commerce drives bad urban development that only benefit the wealthy, as he adds in the conclusion;
“My biggest gripe about urbanization is it’s essentially unplanned except for one thing: commerce. That’s planned. Poverty is a design issue. It’s a failure to accommodate everybody. By design, cities should include every single individual who lives there. What I would like is the framework of the city at least, to reflect a respect for both the city and the natural environment. The real undercurrent of this is that, if you don’t think integrating human activities with a compatible, natural landscape is important, just keep doing what you’re doing. You’ll see the result. You’ll find out what the natural world actually does for you. But it’ll be too late. It’ll be gone. And when that happens, we will be gone.”
The idea of the overarching theme of adopting natural systems approaches to cities is nothing new, but this seems to lack an overarching systemic viewpoint that draws from ecology, versus more of a mimic nature to perform a function. The book promises to be a good reminder of rethinking our cities in terms of the cycles and flows of waste equaling food, and innovative ways to capture resources, all of which are good. If the article topics covered here are the sum of the approaches, it doesn’t seem like there are many innovative solutions or approaches to how the City as a Forest idea could be expanded — just a repackaging of good ideas that folks are doing (CLT, rainwater harvesting, renewables). These ideas being shared in a mainstream publication, however, is a positive to expand the conversation outside of the building industry.
I’m also bugged by the use of sustainability in the book title - which should really be deprecated as a term. The ideas we need are post-sustainability, and the forest metaphor seems like a really powerful term to focus on strategies that are regenerative.
I will definitely put it on the reading list. If anyone has read the book and has more information would love to hear!
It is a zero sum game. Think of it this way... urban planners need to think as if a giant bio-dome covers a city, and the city is in deep space. Self reliance. How do you manage population growth in a self contained urban biodome????
Not a fan of his idea to use nets to capture water... this to me is the ecological equivalent of dams in a river. It’s just another bad idea.
There not enough soil, air and water quality in urban environments