DESIGN FICTION: How the City Plants Grow

DESIGN FICTION: HOW THE CITY PLANTS GROW

Freiburg, 2037

Infrastructure is a boring word. A word consigned to engineers, economists and public policy wonks. And bio-architects.

But that infrastructure beneath our feet keeps the lights on, the data streaming. It brings us clean water and takes waste-water away.

And in Freiburg, beneath this sleepy city is a hidden subterranean network of plants.

It connects each and every plant and tree in our city in a way that allows the soil to regenerate, re-capture carbon and allow those very same plants to communicate with one another.

Carsten Havertz is best known for his work designing the first great city plant substrate in Freiburg in the late '20s. Groundbreaking; the design and implementation saw the uprooting of 2M tonnes of concrete and tarmac, to be replaced with topsoil and organic compost. Urban Planning 101 today, when the Freiburg Municipal Planning Council set out to redefine how city flora are connected the plan was met with something altogether less than enthusiasm.

Why would you even bother?

The questions cut like daggers from Left and Right alike. Even environmentalists saw this as expensive quackery. Green-naivety.

E2.5 billion spent re-earthing Freiburg could be much better spent elsewhere  - rewilding, protecting existing rainforest, research, tree-planting. Literally any other environmental investment would have a better ROI in terms of carbon capture, biodiversity, conservation. Why spend money on the expensive land in commercial centres to replace with relatively tiny amounts of plant matter. Madness. The project came under criticism in Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Bild and Die Tageszeitung. Green Entrepreneur, billionaire and German socialite Jo Mueller called for a public enquiry. A mismanagement and misappropriation of tax payers money and a diversion away from urgent action needed on the twin fronts of Biodiversity Crisis and Climate Crisis.

Henning Blum, council member at the time, described the period as "One of the most challenging of my life. It was not easy. It took its toll on all of us. On our families - who were called out on social media and metastreams. There were even death-threats. In the end, those turned out to be AI-gentic. But of course, we didn't know that at the time. We thought we'd wake up one night and be taken away by BioStomp or something." Blum is visibly shaken recounting the incident, even today. It's clear the memories have left a deep wound.

But his expression changes suddenly when he speaks of the city today.

Smile-blazing: "But look at Freiburg today. It is a miracle. A cathedral of living matter. It is the unthinkable made real by perseverance. And of course, by the maestro himself, Herr Doktor Havertz."

What was he like? "Oh, he was ... [pauses, lost in thought] ... he was otherworldly. He knew things, he saw things we could barely see. He could feel the possibility. It was flowing in him and when he let you see his vision, it was like looking into a crystal ball that reached out filling you with brilliant hope. To listen to him when he was in one of his moods was like listening to music. The most magical music. Not the music we hear today, but the type of music you read about in books. Spellbinding ... " Another pause. I let time pass, it's clear that Blum is somewhere else. I am about to interrupt, when he reanimates, hand on chin.

"You know, there was a story my mother told me when I was child about a Piper. He came to the village and played a flute and led all the children away with him. I never really understood it at the time to be honest. I was always asking questions. Why would these children just get up and follow some man playing music? It was silly. But I've thought about that story a lot since I first met Carsten Havertz."

He was the piper, leading you all astray?

"No [emphatic ... pause]. He was the Piper, certainly. But he wasn't leading us astray. He was leading us into the future. And we wanted to go with him. We were giddy to go with him. There was simply no question we would follow. I guess, I never really understood that about the fairytale. Why did the children go? Were they under a spell? Well maybe they were but it was a spell that they wanted to feel."

So he had charisma? An infectious Reality Distortion Field? "Yes, I think. Maybe more than that." Another pause. This time a pained expression on Blum's face. He's conflicted, having an argument internally. Again he resumes, sighs. He's made up his mind, and a calmness comes over his face. "You know I've not really spoken about this publicly before. When I was young - university time - I fell in with a crowd. I cared about sustainability, and that led me to some communes and ... anyway that's not important. At that time, in that scene, whatever, ... neo-psychedelics were a thing. I'm sure you remember the Summer of Insight and all that. Well, I was one of those people for a little while. And then I drifted into harder substances, Nhat and Opies. I was addicted to Opies for quite some time. It was not ... anyway, it was a long time ago. But the thing that you hear these days with Opies addicts ... and no no ... I can say it, that is what I was. We shouldn't shy away from these words. Anyway I was an addict but what you never hear about Opies these days is how incredibly good it felt. Of course it did. That's why I took it! [Laughs]."

"It was unbearably good. Unbreathably good. It wasn't a superficial high you see. It was as if every cell in your body was vibrating gently with Life. Meaning was clear. It was a hug from god himself. And the certainty of the hope you felt ... there's nothing even remotely like it. Nothing."[pause]

"Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Except maybe listening to Carsten Havertz. And his beautiful vision of a City that Lived."

The City that Lived was groundbreaking in so many ways. Bio-architects consider it not only a masterpiece because it was so unlike anything that had come before it. But a masterpiece in its own right. The layout, planning, the detail of the Freiberg substrata remains to this day the benchmark, the north star for substrata design. That isn't just an aesthetic preference or architectural accolade. That Masterpiece status is visible in downstream quantitative ways. Measures of plant health in Freiburg are higher than in other cities of similar size and climate. The jump in well-being index was the largest seen by any city that invested in substratum (with the possible exception of Irkutsk in the Siberian Republic and the quality of that data is contested).

What's less well known about the City that Lived were the other benefits that emerged from it. Freiburg had the lowest age-adjusted per capita heat deaths in Scorching 34. It had the lowest per capita number of excessive deaths due to Avian Flu '35. According to researchers at Robert Koch Institut, that was largely because of the proximity of the population there to such a variety of birdlife that shared open streams and settled in the gardenfarms. It didn't provide immunity as such, but seems to have provided partial immunity to a minority of the population; enough to stop the virus from tearing through the city like it did so many of its neighbours on the Eurasian continent.

The plant pathways of Freiburg are amazing to behold. Canals of earth that house the network of root system and soil movement that allows the city to regenerate, to sit in the ecosystem rather than apart from it. The Glass Avenue is a major tourist attraction today and worth the visit. Here the soil is divided by corridors of glass that allow you to walk within the soil network and see this tangle of roots and the slow movement of water, worms and the very occasional mole. Amazingly, the soil health of downtown Freiburg is higher than that of the average American farm.

More surprisingly still, the average citizen of Freiburg reports a higher level of affinity with nature than activists in Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF.

This was always the plan.

Havertz in his essay Manufacturing Biophilia finished with a sentence that Blum knows by heart. "Love is not an abstract thing. Love of Nature neither. If we want to learn to love our Living Planet, we must first live in it."

That love of Nature is undeniable in Freiburg. It is everywhere to see. In the wild, richness of the main thoroughfare right through to the leafy forest of the industrial estates and the winding greenery of the ringbahn and autobahn.

Love of Nature then is not an abstract thing. That love is real. And that love is measurable in money. That E2.5 billion spent on the Living City. A waste it was said.

E2.5 billion is the sum of private donations of Freiburg's residents to Environmental NGOs, clans and accelerators in 2036. Each year, the City of Life pays for itself as it strengthens its residents commitment to Biophilia.

To complete this piece, my research led me to seek out a senior figure in BioStomp who had allegedly threatened the Council.  Speaking on the condition of anonymity, owing to their being wanted for acts of terrorism and bio-terrorism, I wanted to know if they still viewed Freiburg as the 'act of betrayal' they dubbed it all those years ago. "Ahhh. No, no. Freiburg was ... we may have gotten that one wrong. You know it was war. We needed urgency. Of course, this looked like an absolute disaster. With the floods, the fires, tens of millions displaced in Europe alone. Tigers, gone, red squirrels, badger, rhinos, gone, gone, gone. And this bunch of bureaucrats wanted to dig up their city and plant a few more trees. It was madness. [smiles]

But sometimes madness is necessary."