New city China
Internationally renowned designer, sustainability architect and author of Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough, argues that we can only think of our future cities if we think about what our intention is as a species.
The question for designers of what is dubbed the Next City is how to love all species all the time.
Mr McDonough's ideas for the Next City are about to be played out in China where his company has been charged with building seven entirely new cities.
His book has been adopted as government policy in China, which needs to house 400 million more people in the next 12 years.
The cities he has planned are a far cry from Milton Keynes.
Everything in his cities is designed from the molecule up. They meet the usual requirements for cost, performance, and function. But they also mean business when it comes to ecological intelligence and social justice.
"The goal is a safe, healthy, just world, clean air, soil and power, that is elegantly enjoyed.
"In the 70s we saw the hegemony of fossil fuels. So what would be the next design philosophy we would want to work with?"
He looks at the Next Cities as objects of human artifice. They can grow, they can breathe, and they can be ecologically sound, just as trees, forests, and gardens are.
They can use energy, expel waste, and reproduce in ways that nature intended without destroying everything else around them.
"In biology, growth is good. If we could do something where growth is good, that would be a way of thinking of a good operating system for design," he says.
Waste as energy
The images he shows of what he plans look like gardens of Eden.
"We lay the city out so everyone can move in parks without crossing traffic, the buildings have daylight lighting, the university is at the centre, and with hi-tech connectivity."
The buildings and all around it work like biological, growing beings, photosynthesising and producing and re-using their own energy.
Waste is energy in Mr McDonough's Next City vision; methane is used to cook food. A quarter of the city's cooking will be done with gas from sewerage.
"The energy systems will be solar energy. China will be largest solar manufacturer in the world," says McDonough.
To top the Next City in McDonough's thinking, the soil will be moved onto the roofs. The city will be inhabited by species and the top of the city will be green.
His approach to city design may be the stuff of some people's eco-science fiction novel. But it shows that cities can change - humans can change the way they do things.
It may not mean the city is transformed magically into a just city that is a cure-all for global warming.
But, he says, the Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.