I want to see a “green city” that works. Maybe try to find some optimal templates.
We don’t have to call it that. But I would like to see more attempts at a few things I have yet to see players acheive:
Urban farming - a city that grows a lot of crops and has its own food factory. I have a template I am experimenting on for this but it is hard to keep everyone’s needs in walking distance. I don’t think it all needs to be grow in the city but the more the better. I currently am experimenting with small fields in residential areas to boost crop production. IMO if there is one industry that should be somewhat decentralized it is food. Greenhouse mods are acceptable although they are not up to date.
Cleaner(er) energy - making a power grid work with only renewables will be a huge challenge that I would love to see. Maybe there can be a limit for one nuclear power plant and bonus points if it’s a single reactor, that way there is baseline power but I think you must have your own waste facility.
Waste obviously - recycle as much waste as possible. Incinerator power plants can be acceptable as a ‘necessary evil’ because, although they are big polluters, you still need a ton of trash for it to run at baseline and it would be irresponsible to export waste and make someone else deal with your trash.
Other than those 3 perameters it is up to the player what goes on in this green city, but the more self sufficient the better.
Please add any suggestions to this idyllic city challenge. I will work on my experiment as I have time and post about it when something is working.
I appreciate your comment but my post is more in the context of this game than the context of international development (which is ripe with a variaty of problems) or environmentalism (which is basically replacing Christianity as the justification for colonialism). I mean “urban farming” is (usually) just gentrification in the US.
What im trying to do here is plan land use and be able to track crop/food needs for a video game city builder. In my head canon I can pretend all citizens have access to land and grow crops for food, which is certainly more food sovereign than reliance on the global market, or centralizing massive farms that have huge distribution needs.
Yes, I am sorry, knowing very little about games I didn’t realize at the time this was actually a game, the content though is politically interesting.
I like your comment about environmentalism approaching religion, I hope not all, but one should take account of the process that derailed environmentalism to this stage (apolitical and irrational non-scientific). Even X-ianity as a vehicle to colonialism didn’t do the damage “environmentalism” has. I remember long ago in my university days, I read this study this guy did for the world-bank to evaluate the possibility to convert rain-forest into farm land near the Amazon. The study as a whole came out very negative, predicting the land would turn to sand and nothing will grow or be able to live on this land in X years (single digit number). The WB fired him after, although in the fine print they had to have this study published as they paid for it, and the executive summaries presented was to go ahead and recommend to Brazil deforestation, use of land as farmland, population moved to the areas to increase development, if the WB/IMG/IBRD was to help Brazil out to get from the hole of bankruptcy. So the eco-disaster started under full knowledge of it becoming a disaster, so Brazil yet again would go bankrupt and default on loans, so banking sharks can go in and privatize all resources, sentencing the population to eternal poverty and the land an ecological disaster, from which they can profit.
Some decades later, w.europeans “environmentalists” decide to promote Bio-Diesel, nearly at every fuel station in DE, FR, NE, BE, LX … now. So these environmentally minded companies go down to SE Asia jungles and acquire unimagineable right to exploit the forest, cut it down to create land for growing this seed that is not eatable by any animal, but yields maximum oil for biodiesel. The cost of this tropical wood produced by deforestation went so low that the cost to take it to the nearest ports became higher than the wood itself. So what do they do? They gather the logs into hills of logs with their automachinery (3’ for strippting and uprooting a tree that is 50-100’ high) and set it on fire. The fires were so big the smoke clouds could clearly be seen by satelites showing the entire SE Asia corner as zoom area. The same bozos are occupying seats on world conferences on climate change discussing CO reduction! This makes biodiesel extremely destructive for the earth ecosystems. In numbers, it can never add up to a significant fuel if the entire earth was used to plant it - no food! But euro-environmentalists will pay even more for a biodiesel mix than straight diesel believing they are paying to help the environment. Whose environment? SE Asia’s?
It is one of those things where you ask whether you have lost your marbles or has everyone else around turned to a matrix zomby.
Yeah in such a case it is safe to say humanity has been completely usurped by capitalist relations. Not to mention the world bank is reasonably described as the child of the Pentagon/DoD. It’s is all treated as normal and justifiable.
I saw a documentary about trains and rail maintaince recently. One of the featured trains was hauling thousands of tons of grain to be used for biofuels. All I can do is shake my head.
The WB/IMF/IBRD was a byproduct of a historical event in midst of ww2 in Breton-Woods (an agreement). In this instance it became public that governments under pressure of war, released their power to regulate currencies, debt, interests, by allowing private banking to cross borders and regulate itself as a market. From that 1st public step of a slide, governments kept passing their jurisdiction as regulators of public life to private interests. Constitutional violations were easily manipulated by propaganda to sweeten the sell out. So global capital formed a global superstate within the banking system, where now state/nation governments are subordinates to this autocratic superstate.
As long as the superstate remains nameless it has no enemies. It is the dictatorship of the anti-proletariat if you want to think of it in Marxist terms.