When I was a first-year high school student, I was part of a group project to conceptualize a city of the future. Working with three other students, I helped bring Trouetel, a sustainable independently governed city on the border of Namibia and Angola, to life. The city was set in a post climate change world and was focused on being a technological powerhouse, representing the peak of human ingenuity.
The project covered a wide array of facets, just as real city design does. How would we generate our electricity? How would we supply water? How would we provide mobility to our citizens? What would we do to make our city culturally vibrant? How would we deal with solid waste? Since our city would be independently governed, what would the governmental structure be? What agencies would be needed to operate our infrastructure and implement and enforce appropriate policies? How would we provide food? And how would we do all of those things in an emissions-neutral and equitable fashion?
Final deliverables included an essay and physical model. Armed with the power of 3D printing, we used CAD to develop unique buildings and city blocks for the model. Using a miniature air compressor, some pipe fittings, some vinyl tubing, and a lot of WD-40, the hyperloop on our model actually functioned, which led to great fascination when members of the school community came to tour the projects.
My primary role in the project was imagining the technical solutions for the electrical grid, water grid, heating, ventilating, and air conditioning, energy efficiency, and transportation. Some of my ideas have aged better than others, as you will see in the paper, and it is amazing how far I have come even just since 9th grade. One idea that did age particularly well was the wall-integrated passive cooling system. I was delighted upon a future visit to Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Building Technologies Research and Integration Center to see a similar idea under development in a project called the Empower Wall.
My group's essay