Houston 2121: The City As An Ecosystem

The Ecotopia 2121 project sets out to explore the futures of 100 cities worldwide, as inspired by the concept of 'Utopia'.

Utopia is a centuries old concept, of course. The English statesman Thomas More coined the term in the early 16th Century to refer to a fantastic idyllic island in a book he also titled 'Utopia'.

To design a utopian land often means to be at once imaginative and optimistic but also critical and subversive. Thomas More set up this enduring pattern when he drew his optimistic account of an idealistic Christian Utopia within which was embedded a subtle and subversive critique of King Henry VIII’s reign in England.

Subsequent to Thomas More’s 1516 book, whenever utopian writers have set out to design or discover a socially-ideal place, they’ve also set out to attack certain aspects of their own present day society -- cloaking their visions in both hope and satire. I dare say this may be the same impulse that flows through much of the utopian scenarios of The Ecotopia 2121 Project, including the one presented here below which seeks to imagine Houston in the year 2121.

The City As An Ecosystem?

Houston 2121 is the world capital of industrial ecology. Here, all the industrial elements of the city are arranged into an intricate union so that the waste that comes from one factory is used as a resource for another factory. In fact, in Houston 2121, this is done so well, that there are very few wastes and each by-product, be it solid, liquid or gaseous, is recycled by other factories over and over again using minimal energy and producing zero carbon emissions. This is the perfect industrial ecosystem. Even the waste heat can be used to power the offices of the industrial bosses.