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CHAPTER EIGHT
Review The New City
What has this design achieved? What if any, are the benefits for the cityscape and for the people who will live there?
Firstly it has ensured a logical and forward planned sequence of developments, natural region by natural region, which can be studied on paper and fully understood by the many divergent professional peoples from sociologists to engineers and from biologists to architects who must play their parts in the countless, final and detailed designs within the framework of the city design. Each can appreciate the special province of the other and reach agreements and decisions more readily. A wide unity of purpose would be an expected result.
Construction and engineering aspects of the design, ensure that the major water lines with their roads, precede other developments as they should rightfully do. The locating of underground mains at uniform depths below the surface is efficient and economical, particularly by comparison with present city practices where the placement and servicing of these mains turn many cities into vast underground mining operations where excavations are often very deep and pumping stations innumerable. Moreover, other service mains which are not dependent on gravity alone--city water supply, electricity, gas and telephone--would be associated in a practical manner with the water design lines. Each would have its appropriate and regular place in relation to all others, to be tapped and serviced with simplicity and expedition at low cost.
The major new divisions of the land into zones by the gravity flowing water lines and their overhead and interconnecting roads, offers opportunities for rational subdivisions into suburban areas and for subdivisions within the suburbs. The excellence of many facets of design within the present cities, but which exist now only as disconnected and disordered mosaics, would produce in the new city, an overall harmony of efficiency and beauty.
The first zone of the main ridges with its principal roads along the crest lines is the place for many of the centres of administration and management, the sites for the cultural and commercial centres.
The fourth zone along and above the shoreline and the drainage lines of the streams, is a critical zone for the balance and health of the wide landscape.
This is the zone for the principal sport and playgrounds, of the larger parks and gardens as well as sewerage treatments and City Forests. Treatment works will be as compatible with sports-grounds as toilets are with gymnasiums; everything is clean. This is a CLEAN city, where waste water treatment works have trees in mass surrounds. The water which moves to the rivers and harbours from the soil of the City Forests will probably be better than the water stored today in the great supply dams on the rivers.
Indeed, the natural regions which collect the water for these dams, should be designed on the same new water lines, so that all the water goes into special cleansing forests before it can reach the streams and rivers to flow to the storages.
Sewerage treatment works will discharge their effluents to irrigate what must become the fastest growing forests. The growth stimulating products which remain even in effluents which appear crystal clear, such as the various phosphate and nitrogen factors, now bid fair by their effects on the common waters of the land and the seas, to eventually destroy the oxygen balance of the world's atmosphere--and all life. But in the soil of the City Forest they would produce an opposite effect where the millions of rapidly growing trees would work to maintain the oxygen balance.
Of all landscapes, the greatest bulk of luxuriantly growing living matter will be in the City Forest. Therefore the City Forest must be also an important biological research centre. Because there may be certain trees in the world which would concentrate one or other of the harmful substances now in the environment; every kind of tree should be grown so that their wood could be analysed and such special properties discovered.
The fourth zone of the land protects the common waters and the atmosphere. There are to be no unnecessary intrusions into it but there will be public enterprises which are essential for the living and the workings of the city. Even these special facilities, where possible, must stand back from the water's edge and the shore lines, so that the water they shed and the waste water they release can be collected and pumped back to the mains along the upper boundary of the fourth zone, to be processed and reconstituted in the City Forest.
Many of the larger industrial complexes now intrude into the land of the fourth zone because of the ease and low cost convenience of getting rid of their obnoxious wastes in water by dumping them directly into the streams and the sea. They would be excluded and positioned in the second zone, where they would, if necessary, carry out the first processing of their wastes before it flows with the more normal city waste waters. Since the contents of waste water are valuable, designs for profitable extraction will continuously emerge. Where the size of such undertakings and their effluent discharge warrants, their individual design would provide for their own treatment works and forest. These businesses would soon learn ways to make both profitable.
What of the high cost of city land which would be used for growing forests? The cost of the land for a new city would be low. Only when people live there and other people want to live there does such land become valuable. It is more valuable when the facilities for homes and for industries have been completed at low cost efficiency in the roads and the service line beneath the roads. So why shouldn't a new city compete with older cities by offering clean air, good water and fertile soil and far better living, social and working conditions, as well as cheaper and better land for homes and for industries?
The land of the several City Forests will receive all the rain run-off and waste water from the city to use and reconstitute it and must continue to function even when it rains for a fortnight. To ensure its capacity in this direction and for economic reasons, dams for holding run-off rain water temporarily, would be located at the Keylines of the selected primary valleys, as in the farmscape. Concrete lined, they could be kept empty. The first rain run-off after a dry period carries with it greatly increased amounts of oil and other matter. The empty dams could be used to store temporarily this first flow, so that it could be cleaned when necessary. Even so, because the water goes in at the top and comes out at the bottom, the oil wastes which float and others which sink could be trapped and retained in the holding dams for treatment, sale or disposal after the rain has ceased. The dams would have controls which either turn the water into the dam or divert it around or below them. The bugbear of local floodings, which now occurs with each heavy rain storm, would be avoided.
The City Forest is a multi-forest. Firstly the various species of the trees would be selected for their ameliorating effects on the air, the waters and soil. Secondly the selection of tree species could be based on economic considerations. The City Forest is designed to be a working, perpetual forest for the profitable production of fertile soil and valuable timber (Chapter 11, "Soil and Trees".)