article from PopularMechanics.com
By Logan Ward
Photographs by Ofer Wolberger
KEYWORDS
* infrastructure
* energy
* Green Design
* waste
* water
Every day, a few hundred thousand vehicles cross the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, their drivers barely aware of the small, rectangular land mass lying just to the north. From where I am standing, on rocky Yerba Buena Island, I can both hear the traffic thundering overhead and look across a narrow isthmus to the long-forgotten patch of real estate in the middle of the bay: Treasure Island. Home to an abandoned Navy base and a small population of low- to middle-income residents, the 400-acre property hardly lives up to its prosperous name. Defunct military buildings, rusty oil tanks and electrical transformers litter the landscape. Crumbling asphalt caps chemical dumps.
Treasure Island is an unlikely place to look for the city of the future, but that's what I'm here to find. My guide is Jean Rogers, an environmental engineer with the global design and consulting firm Arup. Surrounded by a panorama of postcard views—San Francisco, Golden Gate, Berkeley Hills—and buffeted by winds that whip in from the Pacific, Rogers seems somewhat unlikely, too: Petite, stylish, with an impressive string of degrees and a down-to-business manner, she speaks with easygoing "likes" and "you knows" sprinkled among phrases such as "tertiary water treatment" and "optimal solar exposure." Rogers jabs at the ground with the heel of her shoe, reminding me what an engineering feat we stand on: Completely man-made, Treasure Island consists of 20 million cubic yards of sea bottom that has been dredged up, dumped into walls made of 287,000 tons of quarried rock and topped with 50,000 cubic yards of loam.
Built for the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939, Treasure Island was claimed as a Naval base during World War II. When the base was finally decommissioned 11 years ago, San Francisco began studying how to redevelop it. From nearly 300 meetings among city officials, engineers, architects and the public emerged a plan for the most ambitious new community in the United States—a 13,500-person "urban oasis" that will rise from the soil of reclaimed Superfund sites, combining cutting-edge technology with restored natural systems to leave a light footprint on the Earth. After ground is broken in 2009, Treasure Island will become a testbed for the newest ideas in energy efficiency, water conservation, waste management and low-impact living. Says Rogers, with idealism undaunted by the task ahead: "We want it to be the most ecological city in the world."
At no time in history has a model metropolis been more sorely needed. More than half of the people on Earth now live in cities, where they consume 75 percent of the natural resources and are responsible for the majority of greenhouse gases. But while cities can be a liability to the planet—their aging infrastructure ripping through raw materials and compounding the effects of global warming—they can also represent an important opportunity. Typically, food and water enter a city as raw material and exit it as sewage and garbage in what might be called a linear flow. By producing its own energy and recycling its waste, a city can operate less like a factory and more like an ecosystem—supporting a larger number of people with far fewer resources.
Treasure Island represents a rare chance to wipe the slate clean—to tear down old infrastructure and lay new foundations using only the smartest ideas for the future.
Full article continues at: San Francisco Treasure Island Future City proposal in Popular Mechanics article
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