Elven City by OtherworldGallery on Etsy

By making the environment a part of the city, and the city a part of the environment, we can create urban ecologies. The idea is to intentionally and rigorously design and build just about every aspect of a city to meld with the local wildlife. Here’s some high-level ideas on what that might look like:

• Buildings could be built to ‘float’ above the ground or even under the ground in order to leave the actual ground for the vast majority of creatures that need the space. We could have the bottom floors of high-rise buildings dedicated to permaculture or at least greenhouse-style spaces to create this ‘floating’ effect.
• High-rise buildings specifically should have less glass to reduce air-conditioning energy costs, heat-island/light reflection effects, as well as wind tunnel effects. They can also be decked out with large nets that span across any glass windows they do have to reduce bird strikes, and even create roosting habitats (this can also cut down on heat/light reflection effects). The roofs of these buildings should have water-capture and filtration systems as well, in addition to solar panels, windmills, and other renewable energy systems.
• Pedestrian bridges, blimps, and raised rail systems could all be utilized to raise (or lower) the human built environment above the natural environment. This would mean our cities can convert all these traffic-jammed roads back into rivers, game trails, and other indigenous landscapes. You could explore these areas on foot, on bikes, or even fun ziplines and cable cars.
• If you can’t wholesale re-wild the ground-level of a city, they could at the very least have green belts, bridges, tunnels and so on that enable wildlife to get around or through cities safely. Some of these could double as public parks, trails, food forests, and campgrounds, but some of them should be reserved for wildlife only. Their existence could further identify cities in unique ways too, since they should be designed around and for native species.
• Waste must be closely guarded to ensure a city’s productive facilities don’t pollute the area. This will require clever and innovative ways to handle pollution as well as extraction. Pollution should also recognize sound, light, and other ambient elements too! So things like street lights and such should be designed to only be seen from certain angles or within a certain distance. This will ensure that we all may benefit from the beautiful vista of our cosmic night sky!

Living City by Dustin Jacobus

Let’s dive in deeper!

Taking the idea of ecological cities to its ‘extreme’, we could have cities that are ‘one with nature’. Think Rivendell and other famous Elvish or Fairy fantasy cities! Instead of using highly processed and artificial materials, we could learn how to grow buildings and amenities directly from nature itself!

We could live inside of giant sequoias, out of chiseled mountains, and within rolling hobbit hills. We could create vast mushroom farms that allow us to tap into mycelium networks to directly communicate our needs (and offers) to the plants around us. (Obviously we’ll have to come up with ways to resist any potential cordyceps ;)

This can start off with humble tree houses and naturalist lifestyles. Learning how to build structures in a forest without actually cutting down any healthy trees or brush. Perhaps figuring out how to only utilize dead/dying materials; and even then figuring out ways to do so in a non-extractive manner, perhaps taking cues from the rich ecosystem of fungus, insects, and animals that can live in dead trees for decades as the tree decomposes.

This would likely require us to sacrifice ‘perfect’ mass-produced items for organic one-of-a-kind ones that can be made with some sense of scale, but not at a cancerous rate. Maybe we’d figure out how to stimulate the growth of plants into specific shapes and sizes in a way that maintains or even lengthens their lifespan. We already have examples of this from ancient times all the way to modern day gene-editing and garden techniques.

It may be slower, but it could be far more durable and adaptive since these structures could be built with long-lived trees that live for hundreds or even thousands of years. Once again, even when they die, the structures built with them could themselves become new types of structures that are decommissioned and slowly scrapped to help build countless new ones.

This creates a culture that is far more forward thinking than the current profit-first, quarterly ‘projection’/annual GDP mentality that almost never considers where future generations will get their resources from if everything is being mined and used up today.

Just sit and really imagine for a second what your life could look life if all of our amazing technologies of today could be turned towards building out these fantastical built environments!

Geodesic Dome by Dustin Jacobus

Some may even go so far as to become more transhumanist, adapting their own biology to better thrive within wild environments. People could choose if they wanted to harden their skin to become temperature and bite resistant. Or to strengthen their gut bacteria and stomachs to be able to eat a wider range of food. Or maybe even to photosynthesize and cut out eating altogether!

Even if that seems too extreme for you, I’m sure most of us would at the very least want to make ourselves more resistant to parasites and harmful bacteria.

Either way, we need to put our minds and societies to the goal of learning how to live with nature rather than seeing it as just a ‘resource’ to use or even a ‘primitive’ environment to colonize!