Letter to the editor of National Geographics
Re: Streetless ecocities versus street-box cities 050927
Your magazine emphasizes the degrading encroachment of human living patterns and transportation on natural earth conditions.
Most people on earth are moving to mega-cities with urban sprawl. These cities are basically all the same; streets and boxes (all buildings and cars are boxes). We spend most of our time in today’s cities in home boxes, office boxes, shopping or entertainment boxes and boxes on wheels. We cannot imagine living without our boxes in street-box cities. We envy the big boxes with eye-catch shapes, but they are the least livable and make the cities more unlivable.
The street and box industries tie up with property owners to make people think there can be nothing better, but we sense the cities are getting worse even with the efforts of urban planners.
Architects receive honors for their monument boxes that only further degrade cities. The rich with their big obscene boxes are poverty stricken with the show that owns them.
Cities with parks, lakes or rivers have some diversion, but that only means we must spend more time in boxes on wheels to get from one box to another. What percentage of our time do we spend in city parks? The street-box mafias (street transportation industries and city box makers linked with the mass media, property owners, politicos and ”architects”) are degrading the lives of all in cities in the name of “development projects?”
Our children can assume they will live in worse city conditions than we live in today. (Note: I grew up on a farm, so let’s not dream of that life).
All cities planners today should have stand-by drawings of streetless ecocities to replace their cities, in case a natural catastrophe or bombs destroy the city. Large sections of most cities need urban renewal. The city conversion can begin there with a section of the city living structure that step-by-step extends throughout the city. The city residents will gradually understand that the streetless eco-zones are the best place to live. All residents see outside city-town art and science themes from their homes with no streets or people-boxes. Art and science themes are also built into the city living structure with learning, health care and shopping areas. Today’s fanciest buildings and avenues cannot compare with the quality of life offered in streetless ecocities.
I think it will be worth your expense to have a writer and artist with a sense of measurement interview me for a week in my box in Osaka, Japan. We would compare the two city bases in terms of population-space ratios, personal living space, the city living structures, how residents spend their daily time, their quality of life, transportation, the cities in torrid, temperate and frigid zones – or deserts, the city economy, social strata criteria, crime, how residents view progress, social relations, urbal towns (urban-rural elements that extend to streetless ecocities with food production), where and how to start the conversions – and of course, which is most compatible with humanity in mother earth conditions.
II think the streetless ecocity is one of the most important themes that National Geographic can address. I have been dreaming of living in a streetless ecocity for 40 years, but I have been focused on a global structure for the organized field of health care. Of course self care, clinics and hospitals in the streetless ecocity need this structure based on the same reasoning as streetleess ecocities.
My Proposals and Stances