Here's your chance not just to be the mayor, but the original city planner as well! Imagine a medium sized city that would be developed with modern, low carbon transportation in mind, and other strategies to reduce the average citizens' carbon footprints.
What would that city look like? Would that make you more likely to want to live there?
Sustainable City >
Tree Houses
Pleaching is a technique of intertwining living and dead branches. This technique can be applied to building foundations. Fab Tree Hab, a project developed by MIT students applies these techniques by growing a tree around a removable CNC machined plywood scaffold which can be removed and reused once the plants grow into an interconnected structure.
Using living plants as part of a home is much more sustainable then killing many trees to make a single home and the small amount of plywood that is used for the scaffolding can be reused many times.
This is an interesting idea which definitely could help our earth but how efficient is this. Most trees take on average 20-30 years to grow full size. That would mean that in order for this tree house to be built or grown it would take around 20-30 years. How convenient is that? Many homeowners whether building a home from scratch or buying one that's already built, want the process to be somewhat fast. People want times to make memories in their house, to have a safe place to come home to after a long day at work. Overall, I think this idea is very eco-friendly, but it also is very inconvenient.
Though the concept sounds relatively beneficial in the short run, wouldn't the tree eventually start just growing into the actual house? I for one would find it somewhat disagreeable to have branches growing out of my walls.