Can Cities Feed Us? | Conservation Magazine. By Sarah DeWeerdt Sometime in mid-2007, the world’s demographic scales tipped. Only a century earlier, urbanites represented just over 14 percent of humanity. But by 2007, a majority of the world’s people lived in cities, and more are on the way. Over the coming decades, cities will absorb all predicted global population growth and then some.
According to the U.N. Population Division, there will be 6.4 billion urban dwellers by 2050—as many people as lived on the entire planet in 2004. That stark reality leads to another: feeding this new urban world with an old agricultural model could be a recipe for environmental ruin—and human misery. In response, Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, wants to turn the old system on its head.
Despommier’s ideas are a far cry from the backyard chicken coops and vacant-lot community gardens that are most frequently touted by urban-agriculture advocates. His optimism, however, didn’t come automatically. Mini robot helicopters build towers, pyramids or walls. Sandrine Ceurstemont, video editor If you want to build a small tower or pyramid, flying robots can now do the heavy lifting for you. Daniel Mellinger and his team from the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a system that allows flying robots to construct just about any structure (see video above). A human only needs to decide on the design before an algorithm takes over to determine where parts should be placed to create it.
Tiny helicopters then follow these instructions and coordinate with each other by choosing the next part placement in a list. The team also developed a gripper that can easily pick up parts lying horizontally or upright. Once a piece is in position, magnets snap it in place. Earlier this year, the researchers had these robots perform acrobatic feats, like doing triple flips in the air and flying through windows at various angles. Hoberman Arch. Tensegrity Deployable Device. Tensegrity Inspired Deployable Structures. Movable Architecture. Responsive Kinematics. Growing Structure. AA Canopy by Emtech 2009_short version. Programmable-kinetic-fabric for architecture. Vertical Canal by Ned Kahn. Pixel Skin Interactive Facade. FLARE - kinetic ambient reflection membrane.