Instead of painting a rosy picture of a utopian world that has homes and offices with forests on their roofs and are cent percent self-sufficient, I’d rather say that one realizes that man is encapsulated in metal for most part of the day, in either mass transit vehicles or personal cars, he lives in a concrete forest where wilderness is limited to a domestic dog and exposure to nature is for barely 10 seconds when one walks from their doorsteps to cabs or cars with SPF Billion rubbed on their face! It is therefore required that while planning cities of tomorrow, urban planners undertake some radical changes. The UN reports suggest that by mid-century 70 percent population will live in the city and hence cities should be made more natural, soft and human. The present conditions with high-rise buildings, lack of greenery and excessive machinery is not conducive to human living ergo a need for a city which is self-sufficient in terms of foodstuff and nature. If each city is well stocked with food then the need for traveling and hence fuel is reduced that automatically tackles the problem of pollution. In the words of Majora Carter, an environmental activist from New York,
“Greenery packed into every nook and cranny can bring some of that suburban appeal back into the urban landscape, people love these things, and people love the jobs that can be created through these and other clean-tech ventures.”
Such green hopes and ambitions elicit just one word out of the entire vocabulary developed hitherto and that word is Amen!
Via: ABCNews
