solarpunk Dawnville (part 2)
The previous entry was originally made some days ago, but it was unfinished so I just saved it without publishing it. I did this because I was busy with a personal work of mine and I was too tired to finish the edit. This entry and the next ones will be saved and published at the same time, not after a time period.
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Today we're going to finish the construction of Dawnville by building the utilities and the civic services, among other things.
Let's begin with the most important resource, energy. Without electricity you'll have a dead city, but the last thing we want are power plants that burn fossil fuels. So let's go green and let's go solar. It's a solarpunk city journal, so of course we'll begin with solar energy.
We also need water. Fortunately Dawnville is next to a lake and above an underground source of water. We need this water supply but we don't want to drain it. This tower can pump, clean, store, and distribute enough water to cover the town's needs.
Everybody wants access to useful products, but nobody wants to deal with waste material. Those products need resources to be made and you get them by mining, logging etc, and everybody can understand the size of their environmental footprint if we let them uncontrollable. A recycling center can help a lot by dealing with the garbage problem and by reducing the need of extracting new resources from nature. But the technology of 100% recyclable materials is not here yet, so we also need a solution for the non-recyclable materials, such as the bio-hazard waste from the hospitals. And no, don't even think about using landfills. What we need for now is a waste-to-energy incinerator, but not one that brings too much damage to the environment. We need a plasma gasification plant, a technology that already exist. The plasma gasification process can vaporize waste material and the resulting steam & SynGas can both be used to power generators to produce electricity and reusable green fuels. This process is extremely clean and environmentally friendly, making it perfect for our eutopian future.
Unfortunately this facility takes plenty of space and some extra terraforming process was nessesary to be constructed, but fortunately there was an area which was flat and large enough to minimize the environmental footprint of our project. Something that many people doesn't realize is that the natural environment and the system that constitute it are so complex, and the challenges we need to deal with are so many and different, that sometimes an idea can solve a problem and create a new one. This is something we must always have in our mind, that environmental problems are not as easy to be solved as we might think, but if we don't solve them we'll be doomed to perish. And to solve them we'll need well established strategies, team working, and reconsidering everything we have taken as granted.
And now that we have the utility services we need, it's time to remove the rail pieces and start building and zoning.
Our Sims need food, but most of the farms we have today are not as clean and efficient as we want them. They consume plenty of resources and have such a huge environmental footprint that they even contribute to the man-made climate change, especially livestock farming. The current agricultural system has led to a significant loss of biodiversity and disruption of ecosystems, with millions of hectares of forests, grasslands and wetlands have been sacrificed to be converted into farmland. And the less I need to talk about the chemical deterrents used by farmers that have contaminated the surrounding nature and public health, the better for my sanity. That's why we need something to produce enough food with the most efficient and environmental friendly way possible. Enter the skyfarms, also know as vertical farms. The idea is very simple. Instead of spreading out our farms, why not stacking them up in tall "greenhouses" buildings? These farms-in-a-skyscrapers applies modern technologies such as hydroponics and robotics (and yes, we already have robotic farms) to produce large amounts of food by using less space and resources. Those farms can also recycle the water they use, and since they're practically big enclosed greenhouses there's no need of using pesticides and other chemical deterrents. And if that's not enough, vertical farms can be build in the middle of the city, providing easier access and eliminating long commutes and their environmental cost. So expect plenty of them in Fairview.
Now let's start building our civic buildings. Our Sims need -and deserve- to be safe, healthy and educated. By placing them in the center Dawnville, everybody can have better access to them no matter where they live.
This clinic might looks small, but it's efficient enough to support our town by using technologies such as telemedicine. It can also produce some of the medicines it needs to help both the sick and injured. See the domed garden behind of it? It's an underground laboratory that researches for and creates new medicines.
We all know how awesome trees are, but we also know how flammable they're too. We need trees for plenty of reasons but we don't want a fire in our hands. This is one of the reasons we need fire protection, which can be even more advanced by deploying firefighting drones that patrol the town and detect and extinguish any source of fire.
What's the best way to eliminate crime? Adding more police officers sure does helps, but if you need to solve a problem you'll need to find its roots and begin from there. If it's true that crime is made by lack of access to the needs (such as scarcity or/and unemployment), by not enough education (something that can lead to bad decisions), or by psychological problems (go watch The Joker to see what I mean), start from there. Still having some police officers looking around to see if somebody needs help is always welcomed.
And yes, I like having my police and fire stations next to each other, especially since they usually have the same range.
Speaking about education, here is our educational corner. The elementary school (the yellow building) and the high school (the black one) uses new technologies such as holograms to make learning interactive and more fun. Thanks to e-learning, children can attend their lessons even from the safety of their homes, during emergency situations such as bad weather or serious pandemic, or when somebody is too ill to go to school. But the most important is that those schools uses new methodologies and strategies to teach the new generation of Sims not just what to think, but mostly how to think, making them into thinkers instead of just future workers. As George Carlin said "Don't just teach your children to read. Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything".
Jiddu Krishnamurti said that there is no end to education and the whole of life is a process of learning. You just can't stop discovering new things and remembering what you've discovered. The Public Library of Dawnville (the silver building) has a nice collection of both physical and digital books of any kind, such as literature and encyclopedias. A small server can hold plenty of digital books to read, but nothing beats the lovely smell of the old books. The Dawnville, Cultural Center (the yellow building with the dome) acts like a museum that holds in the form of various exhibits the memories of the past and the visions of the future.
After a long day in the school or in the library you'll always have a nice park waiting for you to relax and breath some fresh air. If this park also has a playground or a skateboard track to have some sun and burn some calories, that's even better.
Diagonal streets and roads makes my cities for flexible and interesting, but I don't like the teeth-like jagged edges. That's why I always build some diagonal fillers to hide as many teeth as possible. Which means even more parks in our town. After all, having plenty of mini parks scattering across the city is way better than having a single but huge park in a specific point of the city. But if you can have both of them, why not?
And now it's time for zoning. Because it's the very first town of Fairview, it's not easy to predict what they want and when they want it, so I needed to made some guesses based on what they want now and what they might want later. Yeah, good luck with that. Of course this means that all of the zones will stay the same, so expect changes during the development of Dawnville, like replacing homes with shops or with rewards. But there are some zones that are very likely to stay as they are right now. For instance, since industries need a way to ship their goods outside of the city, it make sense to have them close to the north entrance/exit of the town.
It also makes sense to have some of them close to the recycling center.
I think it also makes sense to zone for some extra agricultural buildings close to the south entrance/exit and surrounding the vertical farm. I don't know if all of those zones (or any of them) will be developed. Maybe some of them will be replaced by homes. We'll see.
And of course it makes sense to have a nice neighborhood close to our schools and parks.
Let's add some commercial zones in the center of the town too, close to all those important buildings and parks. A drug store close to the clinic? Why not?
Remember when I said in my previous entry that some extra streets might be constructed? This is what I meant. In some residential zones I made some extra streets with dead-ends for better access in the entire area, allowing even more homes and parks to be build.
And this is how Dawnville looks like right now. As you can see and imagine, this is not its final form. In the next entry we'll see it fully developed with extra civic buildings, and surrounded by an entire forest of pines and deciduous trees and many other things.
See you there 
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