“We exist, and life exists on Earth, due to 12 to 14 inches of topsoil. When that goes away, we go away,” said James Ehrlich, director of compassionate sustainability at Stanford University. It was an offhand and exasperated tangent greater than an hour right into a lengthy interview for this text and certainly one of many sobering observations made throughout the conversation.
It’s no secret that our relationship to the natural world is under tremendous strain today, and in keeping with Ehrlich, lots of the emergencies we face might be traced back to how we design and manage modern communities. Simply put, the best way we construct and operate our living spaces is destroying the environment and fueling a world mental health crisis of loneliness. Ehrlich’s work focuses on each. Because the world continues to urbanize, this can be a recipe for chaos, he says.
In our discussion, he identified that humanity has experienced a dramatic shift up to now 70 years. Before 1950, about 70 percent of the worldwide population lived outside cities, many in small communities with various degrees of self-sufficiency. Since then, rapid urbanization has transformed societies around the globe, with over half of humanity now living in cities.
“My thesis has been and can proceed to be that cities are brittle and that urban infrastructure is able to experiencing, like a domino effect, a cascading set of failures,” he says.
Ehrlich emphasizes that we will’t only retrofit modern cities with more sustainable infrastructure but must also develop recent communities that more closely resemble the lifetime of our ancestors.
He doesn’t seem like alone in that considering.
VillageOS
In recent many years, there’s been rising interest in self-sufficient, environmentally sustainable, and socially and economically resilient communities, often called ecovillages. Today, there are greater than 10,000 such communities in quite a lot of forms starting from the secular to the spiritually oriented, each in search of to create thriving spaces aligned with their environment.
While designing and operating an ecovillage is complex, Ehrlich’s startup, ReGen Villages, a Stanford University spinoff, is developing software tools to make the duty easier.
Their core planning tool, VillageOS, might help conceive residential infrastructure incorporating every thing from clean water systems and housing to renewable energy, organic food production, and even robotic and autonomous systems.
It’s like an industrial SimCity for regenerative living spaces.
“Fairly often, architects, engineers, and planners prioritize maximizing constructing density or minimizing costs which focuses on profit quite than environmental impact or sustainability. VillageOS takes a distinct approach by first asking, ‘What’s the land telling us?’” says Ehrlich.
In that sense, VillageOS is a high-tech listening device that may assess the land’s natural capability and resource flows. It really works by pulling in geospatial maps after which aggregating every thing from historical data about climate and weather to soil maps and an array of local regulations, constructing codes, and permitting information. With the info, VillageOS uses generative design to blueprint community spaces that maximize any variety of intended outcomes while minimizing its environmental footprint.
The goal is to design flourishing spaces that embed sustainable practices from the beginning.
A user who wants to boost water resilience, for instance, can set objectives like “maximizing rainwater storage” or “reducing runoff.” The software can then discover one of the best location to put a reservoir on an actual parcel of land. It could possibly do the identical when designing housing and energy systems or selecting appropriate climate-resilient crops and where to reap them.
The software’s user interface is essential to the project. In-built Unreal Engine, it pulls 3D map data from Cesium and makes use of photorealistic, 3D visual renderings. By incorporating a game-like design with slider bars and controls, even non-technical users should have the opportunity to make use of the tool as easily as playing a video game.
“I get joy imagining that we will sit down with elderly farmers who own a chunk of land, and without instruction watch them type of their address to load their land, begin to get the climate data, after which explore the probabilities for what may be possible for that piece of land,” says Ehrlich.
One good thing about Unreal Engine is its ability to generate realistic lighting conditions in real time, a comparatively recent breakthrough that’s already having a dramatic impact on industries like real estate and film production. Which means VillageOS users can plan and visualize exactly how an area would appear and feel during different seasons and times of day or how foliage might forged shadows and alter lighting conditions. It could appear trivial, but architects spend significant amounts of time exploring how lighting changes our use of public space.
The photorealism allows planners to speak exactly how a resident can expect to experience a living space. The system could even allow customization, like setting a user’s height to that of a baby so designers can take quite a lot of stakeholders under consideration.
One other element of VillageOS is its potential to function a digital twin and power for managing a community’s ongoing operations. Digital twins, as I’ve written elsewhere, use a virtual replica of an actual system to interactively engage with, ask questions of, or make predictions about that system. This might prove useful when deploying and managing autonomous robotic systems designed with ecovillages in mind, like drones or robotic fruit pickers.
“We’re going to see all types of robotic interventions able to redirecting water, redirecting solar panels, and doing different sorts of autonomous interventions for the good thing about improving and refining the living conditions of those communities,” Ehrlich says.
The VillageOS software continues to be in development, but Ehrlich plans to release the climate data aggregator as an open-source API as soon as its ready. Within the meantime, ReGen Villages is working with landowners and developers to coach the VillageOS software.
System Reset
The scope of Ehrlich’s mission touches almost every aspect of how a society functions and addresses nearly all the UN Sustainable Development Goals. One in every of his work’s clearest ambitions is to curb the potential disruption from climate-related displacement and migration. Ehrlich sees a future where flourishing communities with socially reasonably priced and climate-resilient housing developments reduce burdens on governments around the globe and foster a mentally and physically healthy society—a giant goal of his work at Stanford.
“Compassionate sustainability is about mindfulness—reducing the amygdala’s response related to cortisol release. How we live and where we live can actually improve health outcomes. There may be a definite correlation between my work at Stanford and health outcomes based on this sort of design considering.”
Living in small intentional communities won’t only be an environmental solution to global challenges but could also make us happier and healthier. VillageOS might in the future help us get to that higher future.
