Clearing out some drawers, I found a scrap of newsprint from 1991, survivor of a collection of cuttings that have mostly been thrown out, over the years – it’s from the Daily Yomiuri (English-language edition of the Yomiuri Shimbun), a paper I used to buy when I was living in Tokyo.
The reason I must have kept this was an item about environmentalism, something about “precycling” (I was interested in this stuff even then) and there’s also a picture of a building that resembles a gigantic artificial whale with “Aqua Amusement Land” in big letters on its side. According to the caption:
This is an artist’s conception of a floating whale-shaped garbage combustion plant with amusement facilities in Tokyo Bay. Designed by Shimizu Corp., the mammoth floating whale is the construction firm’s answer to the problem of sky-high land prices and overflowing trash, and even promises to make the problem of garbage fun.
Reading that, another reason for my keeping it becomes apparent – it appeals to my sense of the slightly absurd. A floating whale-shaped garbage combustion plant with amusement facilities. Garbage as fun!
The whale shape might be innovative but actually the basic concept already exists, of course. Not far from where I used to live in Tokyo is indeed a (conventional looking) garbage combustion plant with amusement facilities, i.e., a swimming pool heated with energy from burning rubbish. This is not as awful as it might sound – the pool is immaculately clean (and, of course, warm) and all you will see of the rubbish combustion is a plume of white smoke at the tip of a very tall chimney at the site. There’s no smell.
I haven’t found any evidence that a whale-shaped fun place called Aqua Amusement Land was ever built in Tokyo Bay, so it appears the idea was shelved and then abandoned during the economic slowdown of the ’90s. But the name Shimizu Corp. seemed familiar and I had a rummage around the internet for information about the company and its projects.
Shimizu still exists, of course; it’s a giant architectural and construction firm, based in Tokyo. The Shimizu people are also famous for dreaming up a series of futuristic mega-projects, which is why the name was familiar to me. You can see these on the Shimizu website and also on several others, including the curiously-named Pink Tentacle site and The Daily Onigiri (this last site, by the way, features articles about all sorts of fascinating – sometimes rather bizarre – things relating to Japan, such as tiny robots that can clean your smartphone screen or custom jigsaw-puzzle making machines.)
Some of the ideas, like the giant solar belt around the Moon, which can beam energy back to Earth in the form of microwaves, seem a bit too much; I quite like the Moon as appears now, although a sprinkling of lights from a few lunar cities would look nice.
The project I really like, though, is the Shimizu TRY 2004 Mega-City Pyramid. It’s a 2-kilometre high structure, pyramidal in shape, obviously, and constructed as a system of huge trusses made of carbon nanotubes, resembling something a Brobdingnagian infant might slot together out of Meccano. Basically it’s an arcology, the sort of mega city I’ve been interested in since reading the SF novel Oath of Fealty by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, back in the ’80s. The radical structure of this city would enable its inhabitants to enjoy abundant sunlight and fresh air (although I think it would probably help if they didn’t suffer from vertigo) and would also provide some protection against earthquakes and tsunamis – important in Japan, obviously.
As we head for a world population of 10 billion plus, what better place for the teeming billions than a global grid of well-designed mega cities, linked by air and high-speed rail? Also, if humanity continues to congregate in cities and as technology shrinks the area of arable land needed to feed us all, much of the rest of the globe could then be “rewilded” and we could visit it as eco-tourists.
To paraphrase the caption under my old newspaper picture of the artificial whale, cities like TRY 2004 Mega-City Pyramid even promise to make the problems of high-density urban living fun.
