Viability of a dome-city.

[Knife]

We've seen them scattered through out sci-fi. Self contained cities as seen in Logan's Run or The Island. Large super buildings that house thousands if not millions, complete with work places, entertaiment, and of course housing for all.

I was curious about these pieces of sci fi so decided to ask you all about the viability of them, though for the sake of argument lets forget about the political feasibility of them and say for what ever reason people went for the idea.

So, for one; could we with our current engineering knowledge build a structure big enough to house a million people with enough room for work places and entertainment?

Would ventilation be a problem? Or even heat/cooling or would a centralized population make such things easier?

Obvioulsy some outside support would be needed, even if in the form of off site raw materials production to cart back to the 'city'. Then again, city placement would also be paramount.

Would basic infrastructure be easier, since you'd have a high pop density, or more complex due to the nature of it?


What say you, SDnet.

[Broomstick]

We already have buildings that can hold tens of thousands of people. In Chicago the Sears Tower I think has something like 50,000 person capcity, and in addition to offices has restaurants, shops, a post office, and so forth. The vertical aspect complicates the infrastructure slightly, although they worked it out in the early 70's. There aren't many complaints about heating/cooling/water, etc. A key aspect is the provisions for emergency power - there are, if I recall, six locomotive engines in the basement to supply emergency power in event the grid goes down.

The John Hancock building isn't quite as tall, but has residential as well as commercial space and also hold five digits worth of people

We probably have the tech to build a 100,000 resident building, incorporating housing, work, shopping, and recreational needs, wants and desires. Not so sure about 1,000,000.

Now, a domed biosphere might be more complicated. The earth-based structures I've mentioned can use the exterior atmosphere and the temperature extremes are too bad, although the Sears Tower needed some engineering to prevent and wind temperature differentials between the ground floor and the top from causing problems in the elevator and ventilation shafts.

[Big Orange]

Japan is dreaming about building self-contained cities:


Skycity


Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid

[salm]

Paolo Soleri did theoretical stuff on Arcologies in the seventies.

The Chinese are apparently looking into something like this with a planned eco city in Dongtan which is supposed to open up in 2010.

[General Brock]

To do them as seen in Logan's Run would be difficult, even impractical. Most of the proposed designs mentioned are essentially mega-buildings, whereas if I recall Logan Run and other domed SF cities, the domes were empty vaults substituting the sky over a conventional metropolis.

Not being an architectural or materials engineer, I can't say for sure, but it does not seem likely that the materials for that will ever exist cheaply enough to do. Even the inflateable domes of sports stadiums are prone to failure, and they are not hermetic biospheres.

The world's largest terrarium, Biosphere 2, provided a lot of useful information on the potential of such communities, though some considered the experiment to be a failure.

Given the pollution and corruption problems in China, I couldn't be surprised if they were the first to experiment with enclosed cities and let the natural environment continue to go to hell.

[The Grim Squeaker]

We've seen them scattered through out sci-fi. Self contained cities as seen in Logan's Run or The Island.

Bah, how dare you mention that without giving the Example of the 200AD/Judge Dredd Mega cities (Each holding hundreds of millions of citizens). .

That aside, there should be a distinction between "Dome cities" (That is self contained "Domes" over areas, such as that in Logans runs or even many "orbiting bubble glass space colonies" type ideas) & Mega-buildings ( such as the Sky-city) or Megalopolis's (Such as Mega-cities, that is cities composed of large amounts of extremely tall & packed towers/mega buildings that are mainly self sufficient for a short period but do require to a certain degree outside supplying).

One "odd" problem is the political spectre of 9/11 in todays environment, and indeed blasting such a buildings foundations could easily create massive casualties (Or even something as mundane as a fire or Earthquake).
I'm curious as to how the designers of these and even modern "Super skyscrapers" (Such as the 666 building in Japan in an Earthquake rife zone) built to deal with these problems?

My own view on the matter is that while "Building up" is inevitable and essential for conserving living space while using public infrastructure & resources more efficiently, there is the problem of "all your eggs in one basket", still such buildings to the scale of tens or hundreds of thousands are possible today and should be mass built Especially by governments in countries lacking housing or infrastructure, imagine something like this in India replacing tiny packed mud huts, ensuring education & forcing medical care on the citizens.

I can't help but notice that most cases of "Super-skyscrapers" that I've heard of are built by private enterprises and not the governments, even in cases with pressing housing issues, is this a technological/investment problem or one of political will?
Surely something like this is an exemplary example of "Economy of scale", especially if you're also taking care of electricity, water & cheap subsidized housing . (Waits for Sikon to answer in 3.2.1)

[Big Orange]

Instead of having "superdomes", why not build the self-contained megastructures mostly underground, with small domes sticking out above the very deep underground chambers?

[Broomstick]

Excavation can be costly.

Also, there is the problem of potential floods. Not all areas are suited to burrowing.

[Knife]

Instead of having "superdomes", why not build the self-contained megastructures mostly underground, with small domes sticking out above the very deep underground chambers?

Good idea, however it is cheating a bit. One of the questions I'd like to expand on is if it is possible to build a super building for hundreds of thousands/millions.

[Elheru Aran]

Instead of having "superdomes", why not build the self-contained megastructures mostly underground, with small domes sticking out above the very deep underground chambers?

Good idea, however it is cheating a bit. One of the questions I'd like to expand on is if it is possible to build a super building for hundreds of thousands/millions.

Is it possible? Sure. I wouldn't want the job of designing it, but I'm certain it could be done. I doubt it would be a *single* building per se though; it'd probably be much more like a contained city unto itself, several buildings glommed together into one huge building, more or less. Think New York, with all the buildings connected at every floor...

[LadyTevar]

And yet again, we get one step closer to ShadowRun's vision of the future, where salarymen live, work, sleep, and play inside a self-contained company-owned Arcology.

At least ShadowRun had the idea of Arcologies still needing outside support: food and stock delieveries, trash pickup, 'Net access. They were not as fully contained as other SciFi/CyberPunk stories have deplicted similar enclosed 'cities', yet a typical salaryman would never have to go outside the Arcology in his/her lifetime.
Which was what the Corps wanted.

[SyntaxVorlon]

Instead of having "superdomes", why not build the self-contained megastructures mostly underground, with small domes sticking out above the very deep underground chambers?

How about hollowed out vaults inside mountains protecting small groups of colonists from the oncoming nuclear destruction of the planet? Remember to stock up on water chips, just in case.

Mega structures are cool in my mind and offer a chance at centralizing and housing of large populations more efficiently, thereby reducing human impact on the environment.

I think part of this question that hasn't been addressed so far, in this discussion, is the viablity of a self-contained environment. Biosphere 2 is a major reason to doubt that we could create an environment capable of supporting us very easily. On such a large scale, population density would still be so great as to make production of air, food and water not self reliant. Such mega buildings and sky cities would require influx of materials and would output enough biological waste as to require much larger facilities to deal with it. Another problem is the psychological affect that living in such a structure would have on people. Many find living inside a submarine for 6 months a strain on the psyche. How do you think a homeless population would deal with being in the depths of a structure so immense that it is impossible to see the sun without going away from shelter and food and warmth(in winter)?

The number of ethical considerations alone for this sort of endeavour is staggering. On top of engineering, optimization, government/political structuring, economics, etc. it would require an immense effort by a major superpower, contracting hundreds of thousands of highly trained scientific and social engineers to figure out how to get one off the ground, so to speak.

[CaptainChewbacca]

W/ regards to super-buildings and earthquakes; In general, a building such as the 666-building would be too large or massive to be affected. The building's wavelength would be so large, and the supports so massive, it would be like trying to shake down the Great Pyramid.

[Big Orange]

W/ regards to super-buildings and earthquakes; In general, a building such as the 666-building would be too large or massive to be affected. The building's wavelength would be so large, and the supports so massive, it would be like trying to shake down the Great Pyramid.

How would earthquakes affect the underground ecologies? Japan is building subways and buildings into the ground (and they're over a faultline).

[Master of Cards]

W/ regards to super-buildings and earthquakes; In general, a building such as the 666-building would be too large or massive to be affected. The building's wavelength would be so large, and the supports so massive, it would be like trying to shake down the Great Pyramid.

How would earthquakes affect the underground ecologies? Japan is building subways and buildings into the ground (and they're over a faultline).

Underground structures unless their right on the fault, will not be harmed much because the ground on all sides on it support it, the buildings above ground only have one side of support (the ground)

[Sikon]

Although this is an old thread, it seems worth adding a very relevant article written by R. Buckminster Fuller forty years ago, which has some arguments in favor of an interesting domed city concept.

[...]
The energy conservation of a closed local system improves twofold each time the system's linear dimensions are doubled. This principle is demonstrated in stars and in icebergs. Icebergs can melt only as fast as they can import heat from their surrounding environment of air and ocean through the surface of the iceberg. The larger the iceberg, the lower the ratio of surface area to its volume or mass. However, as icebergs melt, their mass gets smaller at a mathematical velocity of the third power while their surface area decreases only at a velocity of the second power. This is to say the volume decreases much more rapidly than does the surface area, so, as icebergs get smaller, the amount of surface area for each unit of volume of its interior mass increases at an accelerating rate.

Therefore, icebergs melt faster and faster and when the final piece of ice dwindles to pea size it can be seen, by the human eye, to accelerate to extinction. Due to the principle of energy conservation improvement with size, the larger the domed-over city the more stable its atmospheric conditions become, and at ever-decreasing cost per unit of volume.

[...]
There is no structural method of enclosing the circulation space of the city's dwellers that is more effective in wasting heating and cooling energy than that structural system employed by New York and other skyscraper cities of the world. Spheres enclose the most volume with the lease surface and, as we have seen before, the larger the sphere the lower the ratio of surface atoms to enclosed atmospheric atoms.

A dome over mid-Manhattan, reaching from the Hudson to the East river at Forty-second street, on its east-west axis, and from Twenty-second to Sixty-fourth street on its north-south axis, would consist of a hemisphere two miles in diameter and one mile high at its center. The peak of the Empire State building's television tower would reach only a third of the distance from the street to the domed surface above it. The total surface of the dome is just twice that of the base area of Manhattan that it would occupy.

[...]
Using such calculations and taking an inventory of the building heights in each of the city blocks of midtown Manhattan that would be covered by the dome, we find that the total surface of the dome is only one fiftieth of the total exposed surface areas of the buildings which it would cover. The energy losses of midtown Manhattan, under such a dome, would be reduced approximately fiftyfold and the energy lost through the building walls, during both the heated winter and air-cooled summer conditions, would not be lost to the outer atmosphere but lost only to the controlled interior environment of the dome, and therefore could not be considered as lost. We have already learned of the extra-ordinary energy conservation of big domes, so that the very moderate temperature level the dome would be effectively maintained, with energy savings to the city and its inhabitants of probably better than 90 per cent as against the undomed conditions.

The cost of snow removal in New York City would pay for the dome in 10 years.

[...]
Studies made at the Snow Institute of Japan and by Mitsubishi Co. (the General Electric of Japan) indicate the cost of heating the surface of the domes. With electric resistance wires bedded in the skin, to maintain a temperature sufficient to melt snow and ice -- with the electric heat turned on only during the time of snow and ice formation, for cities in the snowfall magnitude of New York -- would be far less than the cost of amortizing the expense of the additional structure necessary to support the cumulative snow loads throughout the winter months.

When rain falls on New York City and its counterparts around the world, it runs down the buildings into the streets, then into gutters and on to the sewers to be polluted with all the other waters. Year after year New York and other cities have suffered water shortages, though they are deluged with summer thundershowers when enough water falls to take care of the city for days. With a domed-over city, both the melted snow water and the rain would run neatly to a guttering, clear of the pollution of the streets, down into a canal around the dome's lower rim from whence it would flow to great collecting reservoirs. There would be enough attitude in the dome to cause the water to flow gravitationally back to the storage reservoirs in Westchester.

Because the energy losses would be so greatly reduced for the covered portion of the city, the heating and cooling could be handled most economically by electrical energy wired in from generators, far from the domed-over city.

[...]
The dome would also be able to umbrella away the fumes occurring outside the dome and originating inside the satellite industrial areas.

Those who have had the pleasure of walking through the great skylighted arcades, such as the one in Milan, Italy, are familiar with the delights of covered city streets in which it is practical to have outdoor restaurants and exhibits. They will be able to envision the arcaded effect of a domed-over city in which windows may be open the year round, gardens in bloom and general displays practical in the dust-free atmosphere. The daylight will be bright inside the domes, without direct sun. All the part of the dome through which the sun does not shine directly will be transparent. These domed-over cities in the northern hemisphere will have the southern part of the dome, which receives the approximately perpendicular rays of the sun, protected in summer by polarized glass so that the dome will not gain heat during the sunny hours. In the winter the sun will be allowed to penetrate, to impound the sun's energy.

Structural calculations on the two-mile dome for mid-Manhattan indicate that the individual structural elements would have a girth less than that of the masts of the S.S. Queen Mary. In the accompanying picture of this dome, hypothetically imposed on an aerial view of Manhattan, the Queen Mary is to be seen through the lower left part of the dome, lying at her dock at Fifty-eight street and the Hudson river. The smokestacks of the ship can be discerned but the masts, which are just a fraction of the diameter of the funnels, are invisible from the height of the photographing airplane. For the same reason, the structural members of the dome also are invisible. They are as invisible as are the wires of a screened-in porch when viewed from 100 feet distant. For this reasons the appearance of the dome would be as seen in the picture -- that is, as a glistening translucent form. One would get the same effect if he photographed an ordinary kitchen wire strainer, turned upside down and placed 100 feet away.

Such a shielding dome would also, very effectively, exclude the sound of passing jet planes. The lower edge of the dome over the city would be at such a height above the city as to make it appear as a high umbrella, with plenty of blue sky visible under its rim. The dome would appear from below as a translucent film through which the sky, clouds and stars would be visible. It would not create a shut-in feeling any more than carrying a parasol above one's head on a summer day.

[...]
City-covering domes of prestressed and poststressed steel and concrete could be made so powerful that they could be covered with earth and become man-made earth mountains, completely air conditioned. When such large domes are made the captive atmosphere in itself is enough to support the structural shell, as does a large pneumatic tire. The larger the dome, the lower the pressure necessary to carry a given load. With such very large domes, the air introduced with the air conditioning would keep up the shell-sustaining structure.

Source

Theoretically, a domed city could be attractive to businesses and residences in locations with weather such that the natural temperature outside is otherwise uncomfortable most of the year.

After all, in some geographical areas, people end up spending most of their time indoors due to the temperature outdoors, but a concept like Fuller's domed city could change that, taking advantage of the energy efficiency from its low surface area to volume area and the ability to adjust the thermal balance from the amount of sunlight reflected versus the amount transmitted.