Currently, cities are killing the sea that is increasingly near to them. Dead ocean areas are spreading. They do this with untreated sewerage, salt from desalination plants, chemicals from factories, leisure activities, marine vessels, and farm runoff of toxins and fertilizer. Instead, they must farm the sea and maintain biodiversity and create benign marine tourism and leisure activities. Methods of distributing salt from desalination without killing anything do now exist, but deployment is slow.
Smart cities are planned at sea and on reclaimed land as at Forest City Malaysia, which promises a veritable jungle with “sounds of nature” and all that greenery self-watering. You can buy a DND house on and under the sea in Dubai.
Soliculture greenhouses on rooftops and elsewhere are adopting smart glass that provides electricity for the robots as well as optimally growing the plants again with almost no water. Robotic food cultivation is integrated with human facilities in parts of China, saving space and water.
Fish farming and barley, samphire, seaweed, and other vegetable growing in saline water is a done deal back to the ancient Sumerians, but it is necessarily broadening in scope as global warming and people moving to cities makes land even more scarce. The amazing thing is that there is a roadmap of many options to go even further. For example, aquaponics uses even less land than hydroponics, and it costs less. This is growing fish and vegetables in one closed system, the fish excrement feeding the plants.
Some are planning turf that produces electricity as well as tapping and filtering rainwater for use. Xeriscaping is appearing in smart cities. It is the process of landscaping or gardening that reduces or eliminates the need for supplemental water from irrigation. It is promoted in regions that do not have accessible, plentiful, or reliable supplies of fresh water and is gaining acceptance in other regions as access to irrigation water is becoming limited. Xeriscaping is an alternative to various types of traditional gardening in necessarily frugal smart cities.
Transport systems are reinvented for smart cities, and necessarily, Hyperloop shooting passengers from city to city by magnetic levitation in a vacuum and Boring Company Loop shooting autonomous cars at high speed across cities will increasingly be tubes in sea, lake or river for at least part of the way. That even saves money. Autonomous underwater vehicles are zero-emission and they monitor offshore wind turbines, sea-floor mining, fish stocks, and more. Leisure submarines anyone – as taxis too?
