Obama Signs 'White House Rural Council,' an Agenda 21 Executive Order

John Birch Society CEO Arthur R. Thompson introduces the Stop Agenda 21 action project and shows how the UN’s Local Agenda 21 program may already be in your local community, through your home town or city’s membership in ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability. Agenda 21 seeks for the government to curtail your freedom to travel as you please, own a gas-powered car, live in suburbs or rural areas, and raise a family. Furthermore, it would eliminate your private property rights through eminent domain. Agenda 21 can be stopped at the local level by organizing and informing others to encourage local government officials to end their community’s membership in ICLEI and to repeal any of the Agenda 21-related “sustainable development” laws and ordinances they have enacted. - John Birch Society, Stop Agenda 21



Sustainable Development is the United Nations’ Agenda 21 program, which calls for the government to curtail your freedom to travel as you please, own a gas-powered car, live in suburban or rural areas, determine the number of children you may have, and determine the “rates of harvest” of farms and fisheries; and it calls for the government to eliminate your private property rights through eminent domain and to increase the price on goods and services through artificial shortages and new consumer taxes.

Stop the UN's Agenda 21 & 'Sustainable Development'

Infiltrated Nation
September 17, 2011

On June 9, 2011 President Obama signed Executive Order 13575, which established the creation of the White House Rural Council (WHRC). The purpose of the WHRC is to facilitate the federal coordination and implementation of sustainable development at the local community level.

President Obama’s EO 13575 reads in part:

Section 1. Policy. Sixteen percent of the American population lives in rural counties. Strong, sustainable rural communities are essential to winning the future and ensuring American competitiveness in the years ahead. These communities supply our food, fiber, and energy, safeguard our natural resources, and are essential in the development of science and innovation. Though rural communities face numerous challenges, they also present enormous economic potential. The Federal Government has an important role to play in order to expand access to the capital necessary for economic growth, promote innovation, improve access to health care and education, and expand outdoor recreational activities on public lands.

The Executive Order references “sustainable rural communities,” which is a reference to “sustainable development” – the nomenclature for the United Nations’ Agenda 21 program.

The term “sustainable development” was popularized in the now often-cited 1987 United Nations report, entitled Our Common Future, released by the Brundtland Commission. Chaired by its namesake — Gro Harlem Brundtland, the former Director-General of the World Health Organization and the Vice President of the World Socialist Party, the Brundtland Commission defined “sustainable development” as:

…development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

This became the central theme of the United Nations’ 1992 Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where the UN unveiled its program on sustainable development: Agenda 21, signed on to by 178 world leaders including then-President George H. W. Bush.

Sustainable Development is the United Nations’ Agenda 21 program, which calls for the government to curtail your freedom to travel as you please, own a gas-powered car, live in suburban or rural areas, determine the number of children you may have, and determine the “rates of harvest” of farms and fisheries; and it calls for the government to eliminate your private property rights through eminent domain and to increase the price on goods and services through artificial shortages and new consumer taxes.

Maurice Strong, the Secretary-General of the United Nations 1992 Earth Summit had this to say about sustainable development:

Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class — involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work air conditioning, and suburban housing — are not sustainable.

Since Agenda 21 was not an official treaty it did not require ratification by the U.S. Senate and has instead penetrated the American heartland and coastal regions through the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), which now prefers to be known as Local Governments for Sustainability.

ICLEI was founded in 1990, as the ‘International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives,’ at the World Congress of Local Governments for a Sustainable Future, held at the United Nations in New York City. According to its website, ICLEI describes itself as “an association of over 1220 local government Members who are committed to sustainable development.” Spanning over “70 different countries and representing more than 569,885,000 people,” ICLEI facilitates local governments in the implementation of UN Local Agenda 21.

You can find out if your local government is member by taking the following three-click challenge:

• Type WWW.ICLEI.ORG on your web browser & click go
• On the top bar menu of the website click on “Members”
• On the left side column click on “Global Members”

Scroll down to the United States of America, or other country of your choosing, and see if your local town or city is listed. If listed then you will know you're a member, but if not, do not celebrate just yet; your local government may already be implementing Agenda 21 and sustainable development.

Some buzz words to look out for in your local community are mentions of “smart equity,” “smart codes,” “smart growth,” “sustainable consumption,” “sustainable development,” “sustainable land use,” and “open space.” These terms are normally associated with your local government’s board, committee, or department of “sustainability” or “redevelopment.”

These agencies are usually comprised of their own staff and governing board, appointed by your local government. You might not be aware of this because the establishment of such an agency would have likely occurred without your vote or consent and is now passing ordinances and regulations affecting your livelihood, family, home, and property.

Using ICLEI computer software and smart growth models, a host of new regulations and new zoning laws are implemented by these agencies. One such commonly used model lays out the following new law:

…Government may enter upon the land and act to put it in compliance.

In the publication, Building a More Sustainable Future in Wisconsin, published by the University of Wisconsin-Extension Sustainability Team, it recommends and promotes:

…the importance of state and federal training and education programs to generate educators, facilitators and motivators who would be capable of going into individual homes and helping people develop their own personalized sustainability action plans.

The reason for this disregard for private property rights is due to the United Nation’s view on private property. According to “Section 11.2.3.1.3 Property rights and the use of biological resources” of Global Biodiversity Assessment (1996), published for the United Nations Environment Programme:

Property rights are not absolute and unchanging, but rather a complex, dynamic and shifting relationship between two or more parties, over space and time.

This interpretation of property rights is a far cry from the Founding Fathers. President George Washington said,

“Private property and freedom are inseparable.”

His successor, President John Adams said that

“Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist.”

The forefathers of this nation understood that without property rights there could not be freedom and individual liberty; the state can control the people so long as the people are on government-controlled land. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes no recognition or mention of this fundamental right.

If Agenda 21 is fully implemented it will eventually terminate your right to own property; and once that fundamental right is lost, tyranny is ripe to flourish. Your ability to live the lifestyle you desire, your freedom to pursue and reach the American dream of owning a large home and raising a family, and the means to travel as you see fit are all at jeopardy so long as your local government adheres to the principles and protocols of Agenda 21 and sustainable development.

You can help put a halt to this United Nations’ environmental juggernaut by contacting your State Representative and State Senator and encouraging them to cease funding and oppose all measures for sustainable development.

You should also work with your local officials to withdraw from ICLEI, if your local government is a member, and to cease implementation of sustainable development measures. Click here for further resources for doing this.

Obama Signs Agenda 21-Related Executive Order

Computer World reports that during his December 6, 2008 video address, Obama announced that he would invest in new computers for schools, expanded broadband access -- particularly in rural areas -- and funding on technologies to reduce medical costs as part of his stimulus package (Obama's technology plan calls for $10 billion for the adoption of a "standards-based" electronic health information system, which would include the adoption of electronic medical records). According to a July 14, 2008 news article in Bloomberg, Obama wanted the government to take an active role in reducing poverty and rural isolation with the Web, which would be in line with Google Inc.'s agenda. In November 2007, Obama held a meeting with Google employees to outline his plan to subsidize $5 billion to rural and low-income households for high-speed internet access. [Source]

The New American
June 22, 2011

President Obama signed his 86th executive order (13575) on June 9, which established the White House Rural Council (WHRC). According to The Blaze, the Executive Order seems to be in line with the United Nations radical Agenda 21, as it is designed “to begin taking control over almost all aspects of the lives of 16 percent of the American people.”

Evidence of this can be found in Section One of the Executive Order, which reads:

Section 1. Policy. Sixteen percent of the American population lives in rural counties. Strong, sustainable rural communities are essential to winning the future and ensuring American competitiveness in the years ahead. These communities supply our food, fiber, and energy, safeguard our natural resources, and are essential in the development of science and innovation. Though rural communities face numerous challenges, they also present enormous economic potential. The Federal Government has an important role to play in order to expand access to the capital necessary for economic growth, promote innovation, improve access to health care and education, and expand outdoor recreational activities on public lands.

As the Executive Order references “sustainable rural communities,” it raises a few eyebrows, since that is one of the key phrases found in the UN plan for sustainable development known as Agenda 21. The order admits that it intends to seize greater power over “food, fiber, and energy,” items that are key to human sustenance.

The mission and function of the White House Rural Council, according to the Executive Order, is as follows:

“The Council shall work across executive departments, agencies, and offices to coordinate development of policy recommendations to promote economic prosperity and quality of life in rural America, and shall coordinate my Administration’s engagement with rural communities.”

The order doesn't at all camouflage the levels of authority it will achieve. In order to reach the mission set out, the Executive Order states that the council will “make recommendations to the President, through the Director of the Domestic Policy Council and the Director of the National Economic Council, on streamlining and leveraging Federal investments in rural areas, where appropriate, to increase the impact of Federal dollars and create economic opportunities to improve the quality of life in rural America.”

Analyzing the language of the document, The Blaze questions,

“Is there a hint that a ‘rural stimulus plan’ might be in the making? Will the Federal government start pumping money into farmlands under the guise of creating ‘economic opportunities to improve the quality of life in rural America?’ ”

The order also states that the WHRC will “coordinate and increase the effectiveness of Federal engagement with rural stakeholders, including agricultural organizations, small businesses, education and training institutions, healthcare providers, telecommunications services providers, research and land grant institutions, law enforcement, State, local, and tribal governments, and nongovernmental organizations regarding the needs of rural America.”

In other words, the federal government will seemingly control every aspect of rural America.

The order’s mention of “nongovernmental organizations” (NGOs) should be disconcerting, as NGOs are unelected, often government-funded organizations that are key to Agenda 21.

Executive Order 13575 asserts that the WHRC will “coordinate Federal efforts directed toward the growth and development of geographic regions that encompass both urban and rural areas, and identify and facilitate rural economic opportunities associated with energy development, outdoor recreation, and other conservation-related activities.”

As observed by The Blaze,

“When did outdoor recreation become a conservation-related activity?”

So who will be heading these opportunistic efforts? The following is a list of members who will be serving on the new council, which will be headed by Tom Vilsack, the current Secretary of Agriculture:

(1) the Department of the Treasury; Timothy Geithner

(2) the Department of Defense; Robert Gates

(3) the Department of Justice; Eric Holder

(4) the Department of the Interior; Ken Salazar

(5) the Department of Commerce; Gary Locke

(6) the Department of Labor; Hilda Solis

(7) the Department of Health and Human Services; Kathleen Sebelius

(8) the Department of Housing and Urban Development; Shaun Donovan

(9) the Department of Transportation; Ray LaHood

(10) the Department of Energy; Dr. Steven Chu

(11) the Department of Education; Arne Duncan

(12) the Department of Veterans Affairs; Eric Shinseki

(13) the Department of Homeland Security; Janet Napolitano

(14) the Environmental Protection Agency; Lisa Jackson

(15) the Federal Communications Commission; Michael Copps

(16) the Office of Management and Budget; Peter Orszag

(17) the Office of Science and Technology Policy; John Holdren

(18) the Office of National Drug Control Policy; R. Gil Kerlikowske

(19) the Council of Economic Advisers; Austan Goolsbee

(20) the Domestic Policy Council; Melody Barnes (former VP at Center for American Progress)

(21) the National Economic Council; Gene B. Sperling

(22) the Small Business Administration; Karen Mills

(23) the Council on Environmental Quality; Nancy Sutley

(24) the White House Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs; Valerie Jarrett

(25) the White House Office of Cabinet Affairs; and such other executive branch departments, agencies, and offices as the President or Secretary of Agriculture may, from time to time, designate. Chris Lu (or virtually anyone to be designated by the 24 people named above).

The Blaze says of the list,

“It appears that not a single department in the federal government has excluded from the new White House Rural Council, and the wild card option in number 25 gives the president and the agricultural secretary the option to designate anyone to serve on this powerful council.”

Even more notable than the levels of power being achieved by the creation of this new council is the various connections to Agenda 21.

For example, Valerie Jarrett served as a member on the board of the Local Initiatives Support Coalition (LISC), which uses the language of Agenda 21 and ICLEI [International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives] as their webpage descriptively explains the organization’s work to build “sustainable communities.”

Likewise, Melody Barnes is the former Vice President of the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress. Soros is a prime advocate of Agenda 21 and in fact, his Open Society provided $2,147,415 to ICLEI.

Additionally, Hilda Solis and Nancy Sutley, through their environmental endeavors, appear to be connected to Agenda 21. In 2000, Solis received an award for her work on “Environmental Justice.” Sutley served on the Los Angeles Metropolitan Water District and supported the low-flow toilets, which are now being revealed as costing more money and creating an odor problem in the city of San Francisco.

Finally, the timing of the Executive Order is a bit suspicious, since the administration is meeting with a number of Agenda 21 operatives at the end of the month. ICLEI reports:

ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability USA (ICLEI USA) and U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) today announced the launch of the National Press Club Leadership Speaker Series to be held on June 28. The event’s inaugural keynote speaker will be the Honorable Sha Zukang, Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), whose keynote address, The Road to Rio+20, will explain the role of key global and national stakeholders, and the impact and vision of this historic conference.

Fortunately, Americans are becoming increasingly aware of the radical agenda being pushed by the U.N. and supported by this government, and have hosted a number of anti-ICLEI rallies this week, with more planned in the future.

Smart Growth will increasingly herd Americans into regimented and dense urban communities. Smart Growth is Sustainable Development’s ultimate solution, as it will create dense human settlements, subject to increased controls on how residents live and increased restriction on mobility. In the words of one smart growth activist: “It will be the humans in cages with the animals looking in.”

USDA Signs MOU with Rockefeller’s Council of Foundations to Exploit Rural America

Food Freedom
August 20, 2011

On Friday, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced that USDA has signed an agreement with the Council on Foundations “to provide new sources of capital, new job opportunities, workforce investment strategies,” and, last on the list but the heart of it: “identification of additional resources.”

The group will work with Obama’s newly created Rural Council, which Vilsack also chairs, to implement UN Agenda 21 – a 300-page, 40-chapter, “soft-law” policy that came out of the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Brazil in 1992.

Though couched in eco-friendly motives, Agenda 21 will “severely limit water, electricity, and transportation - even deny human access to our most treasured wilderness areas, it would monitor all lands and people. No one would be free from the watchful eye of the new global tracking and information system,” wrote Berit Kjos in 1998. (Patrick Wood believes that today’s smart grids are doing just that, and gives an excellent 40-minute speech here.)

Ironically, the Secretary made the announcement while hosting a White House Rural Forum at the Iowa State Fair, the same day news broke about how the USDA lied to farmers and ranchers about federal drought insurance. Vilsack has refused to pay up during the worse drought in US history.

The Council on Foundations formed in 1949 and was joined by the Rockefellers in 1958. It has since morphed into a think tank drawing from the government and private sector. It is funded mainly by corporations and foundations (including Ford, Lilly, and General Mills) to provide “a wide variety of services primarily for endowed, grantmaking organizations throughout the United States and in foreign countries.”

The Memorandum of Understanding will give corporations – whether dressed up as foundations or just openly themselves as profit-driven businesses – full and unhindered access to all resources in rural America, where oil, gas, uranium, coal, water and other resources are buried under people’s private property or under public lands.

In the name of “sustainable” practices, helping rural America, and creating jobs (another broken Obama promise), Obama enlisted 25 federal agencies for his Rural Council, including the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.

With this new MOU, the USDA has now openly invited corporations in the name of “philanthropy” to join the Rural Council’s efforts.

Government agencies and now corporate America are openly working together to assert complete control over all of rural America, removing state sovereignty which is central to the Constitution, written in by the framers to protect the nation from tyranny.

Vilsack’s press release promises things that superficially sound positive. But if one looks closely, one can easily read the MOU as a corporate gift. Simply remove the gloss about rural America.

With gloss:

• Foster greater economic opportunities and partner in creation of new sources of rural opportunities to improve the quality of life for rural Americans
• Identify resources that can be used to produce new economic opportunities
• Promote new partnerships in workforce investment strategies and
• Develop innovative, effective and sustainable methods of collaborating to benefit rural communities.

Without gloss:

• Foster greater economic opportunities and partner in creation of new sources of opportunities to improve corporate interests
• Identify resources that can be exploited for corporate interests
• Promote new partnerships in investment strategies for corporate interests
• Develop innovative, effective methods of collaborating to benefit corporate interests.

Neither Obama’s Rural Council nor the Council on Foundations include farmers and ranchers. This is a corporate-federal assault on the country. Combined, they are moving to achieve the long-planned Agenda 21, which the Rockefellers designed, as a means of getting people off the land so that corporate interests can have direct access to resources to use as they wish.

This Is What Life Will Be Like in the New World Order

Planned-Opolis: Infomercial for '1984'-Style City of the Future

By Vigilant Citizen
January 6, 2011

Funded by corporations such as Bank of America, the City of London Corporation, PepsiCo UK, Time Warner, Royal Dutch Shell and Vodafone, Forum for the Future envisions scenarios for cities in 2040.

No, this is not a sarcastic video. It is a real, serious scenario.

To sum up:

• Food and water is regulated and rationed by a “Global Food Council” which seizes total control over farming. Meat is a rare treat only to be enjoyed on special occasions


• The state decides what your job will be with “designated career announcements,” nobody has the choice to decide their own vocation


• Movement and behavior is controlled by a calorie credit card linked to a smart phone that rations the amount of travel the citizens of planned-opolis, are allowed to make. Private ownership of cars will be banned for non-elitists because, “the state knows they just aren’t practical anymore.”


• “It makes so much sense doesn’t it,” insists the smiley faced slave “Vee,” who enjoys the fact that she can “switch off brain and go to work,” adding, “With this many people around I’m glad there’s a mega-computer in charge.”


• Those who resist and still cling to some semblance of freedom in defiance of the state and the super-computers running the slave grid, there’s the “cry freedom ghetto,” prison camps for malcontents who are blocked from getting jobs, accessing high speed transport or the Internet

Other scenarios conceived by Forum for the Future are slightly different but they all have common threads: drastic reduction of rights, privileges and freedoms; constant reference to “an elite” having exclusive rights on cars and other luxuries; state controlling all aspects of life.

A New World Order is not a conspiracy theory, THEY are selling it to you as we speak.

Megacities on the move - Planned-opolis from Forum for the Future on Vimeo.

Elite Openly Flaunts Plan to Turn Cities into High-Tech Slave Grids

By Paul Joseph Watson, Infowars.com
January 6, 2010

Not content with depicting children being slaughtered in the name of preventing non-existent global warming, climate change alarmists have embarked on a new propaganda campaign lecturing us all about how we will be forced to live in a “planned-opolis,” where car use will be heavily restricted, CO2 emissions will be rationed, meat will be considered a rare delicacy, the state will decide your career, and only the mega-rich elitists enforcing all these new rules and regulations will be exempt from them.

Browbeating us about how the only solution to expensive fossil fuels is to enforce a “tightly planned and controlled” system, the infomercial (funded in part by oil companies like Royal Dutch Shell), goes on to tell the story of what life will be like in 2040 through the words and actions of a subservient, obedient slave named “Vee” who dutifully acquiesces to the necessity of the new way of things.

Even as Britain shivers under its coldest December in 100 years, and as places as far flung as Southern China suffer unprecedented bouts of freezing rain and cold weather and as the onset of a new mini ice age causes mass die-offs of sea life, the entire piece, produced by the Forum for the Future group, is veiled in debunked rhetoric about CO2 emissions causing rising temperatures.

We soon begin to learn what living in the new “planned-opolis” will look like — food and water is regulated and rationed by a “Global Food Council” which seizes total control over farming. Meat is a rare treat only to be enjoyed on special occasions (mirroring precisely the conditions endured by those in Maoist China).

The state decides what your job will be with “designated career announcements;” nobody has the choice to decide their own vocation.

Movement and behavior is controlled by a calorie credit card linked to a smart phone that rations the amount of travel the citizens of slave-opolis — I mean planned-opolis — are allowed to make. Private ownership of cars will be banned for non-elitists because “the state knows they just aren’t practical anymore.”

Of course, none of these new rules will apply to the rich elitists enforcing them on the rest of us — it’s made clear in the ad that the wealthy will still be able to roll around in CO2-belching cars whenever they like while everyone else is forced to get government permission and be allocated a time slot in which to use restricted vehicles provided by the “Slick Travel Corporation”.

“It makes so much sense doesn’t it,” insists the smiley faced slave “Vee,” who enjoys the fact that she can “switch off brain and go to work,” adding that, “with this many people around, I’m glad there’s a mega-computer in charge.”

Of course, for those who resist and still cling to some semblance of freedom in defiance of the state and the super-computers running the slave grid, there’s the “cry freedom ghetto,” prison camps for malcontents who are blocked from getting jobs and accessing high speed transport or the Internet.

In a chilling throwback to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, the propaganda piece chillingly invokes the notion of families being separated because some people refuse to submit to state-imposed green fascism. This is a subtle yet shocking insight into the true motivation of the makers of this piece — they can barely contain their their fascist tendencies and wanton revulsion towards freedom.

The Forum for the Future Organization derives its funding from a combination of taxpayer money, via local governments, as well as monolithic corporations and large banks.

Some of its financial backers include Bank of America, the City of London Corporation, PepsiCo UK, Time Warner and, crucially, Royal Dutch Shell — which, of course, is one of the biggest emitters of CO2 on the planet.

In other words, an organization lecturing the little people about how only the mega-rich will be able to drive cars and eat meat in 30 years in order to reduce CO2 emissions is largely funded by mega-rich banks and multinational corporations, as well as oil companies.

This is nothing less than Orwell’s 1984 and then some — a chilling nightmare scenario where all freedom is crushed in the name of protecting mother earth. But of course, this has nothing to do with saving the environment. The whole thing is funded by multinational corporations and giant banks, and yet the idiot “liberals” over at the Guardian website wholeheartedly agree that rationing, government control of mobility and food, the state deciding your career, cars being banned for all but the rich, and resistors forced to live in abandoned ghettos is a reasonable and rational course of action.

The agenda for eco-fascism knows no bounds — despite the fact that global warming has been completely discredited as a contrived fraud based on pseudo-science, corruption and agenda-driven politics. Its adherents are relentlessly forging ahead with their horrifying vision of a future where the middle classes are eviscerated and everyone — besides of course the elitists imposing the tyranny — is forced to reduce their living standard and become subservient to an all-pervading state that enforces high-tech slavery under the excuse of a green revolution.

Banning incandescent light bulbs and introducing carbon taxes is only the beginning — if we let these parasites have their way with us we’ll all be living in their purpose built slave-opolis before we know it.

“Planned-opolis” Cities Already Being Tested in South Korea

By Daniel Taylor, Old-Thinker News
January 6, 2011

In 2008 Old-Thinker News reported on the deployment of Ubiquitous Computing technology in South Korea as a testing ground for future development of cities world-wide.

South Korea was chosen for the test because, in the words of the city’s developers, “There is an historical expectation of less privacy.” Recent attention has been given to plans for “planned-opolis” cities — as presented by Embarq, Vodafone and others — that are rigidly controlled to “cut greenhouse gases,” and where travel is tightly restricted. As reported in 2008,

“South Korea is at the forefront in implementing ubiquitous technology. An entire city, New Songdo, is being built in South Korea that fully utilizes the technology. Ubiquitous computing proponents in the United States admit that while a large portion of the technology is being developed in the U.S., it is being tested in South Korea where there are less traditional, ethical and social blockades to prevent its acceptance and use.”

As the New York Times reports,

“Imagine public recycling bins that use radio-frequency identification technology to credit recyclers every time they toss in a bottle; pressure-sensitive floors in the homes of older people that can detect the impact of a fall and immediately contact help; cellphones that store health records and can be used to pay for prescriptions.

These are among the services dreamed up by industrial-design students at California State University, Long Beach, for possible use in New Songdo City, a large “ubiquitous city” being built in South Korea.

Much of this technology was developed in U.S. research labs, but there are fewer social and regulatory obstacles to implementing them in Korea,” said Mr. Townsend [a research director at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California], who consulted on Seoul’s own U-city plan, known as Digital Media City. “There is an historical expectation of less privacy. Korea is willing to put off the hard questions to take the early lead and set standards.”

The “U-City” model is the standard that will be followed in future development. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, Bill Gates’ Microsoft Corporation is involved with the technological development of South Korea’s U-Cities. As reported,

“Microsoft Corp. will play a key role in creating a ubiquitous computing environment for future citizens and businesses of Songdo International Business District (IBD).”

Additionally, IBM’s “Smarter Planet” initiative is at the forefront of the push for a planned-opolis future.

China Wants to Construct a 50 Square Mile Self-Sustaining City South of Boise, Idaho

End of the American Dream
June 8, 2011

Thanks to the trillions of dollars that the Chinese have made flooding our shores with cheap products, China is now in a position of tremendous economic power. So what is China going to do with all of that money? One thing that they have decided to do is to buy up pieces of the United States and set up "special economic zones" inside our country from which they can continue to extend their economic domination.

One of these "special economic zones" would be just south of Boise, Idaho and the Idaho government is eager to give it to them. China National Machinery Industry Corporation (Sinomach for short) plans to construct a "technology zone" south of Boise Airport which would ultimately be up to 50 square miles in size.

The Chinese Communist Party is the majority owner of Sinomach, so the 10,000 to 30,000 acre "self-sustaining city" that is being planned would essentially belong to the Chinese government. The planned "self-sustaining city" in Idaho would include manufacturing facilities, warehouses, retail centers and large numbers of homes for Chinese workers. Basically it would be a slice of communist China dropped right into the middle of the United States.

According to the Idaho Statesman, the idea would be to build a self-contained city with all services included. It would be modeled after the "special economic zones" that currently exist in China.

Perhaps the most famous of these "special economic zones" is Shenzhen. Back in the 1970s, Shenzhen was just a very small fishing village. Today it is a sprawling metropolis of over 14 million people.

If the Chinese have their way, we will soon be seeing these "special economic zones" pop up all over the United States.

So exactly who is "Sinomach"?

The following description of the company comes directly from the website of Sinomach....

With approval of the State Council, China National Machinery Industry Corporation (SINOMACH) was established in January 1997. SINO-MACH is a large scale, state-owned enterprise group under the supervision of the State Assets Supervision and Administration Commission.

As you can see, Sinomach is basically an arm of the Chinese government.

The borrower is always the servant of the lender, and now China is buying up America.

The reality is that Sinomach is not looking only at Idaho. Sinomach is in discussions to develop "special economic zones" all over the United States. Sinomach has recently dispatched delegations to Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania to explore the possibility of establishing "special economic zones" in those states.

Will such "self-contained communities" soon start appearing from coast to coast?

According to Dr. Jerome Corsi, the U.S. government has already set up 257 "foreign trade zones" across America. These "foreign trade zones" will apparently be given "special U.S. customs treatment" and will be used to promote global free trade....

"The FTZs tend to be located near airports, with easy access into the continental NAFTA and WTO multi-modal transportation systems being created to move free-trade goods cheaply, quickly and efficiently throughout the continent of North America."

So what do our politicians think about all of this? Most of them are greatly in favor of it.

"Idaho’s the last state that should say we don’t want to do business with Asia," Idaho Lt. Gov. Brad Little said last year. "Asia’s where the money is."

So will all of this "foreign investment" really bring jobs back to the American people?

Perhaps a few, but the truth is that these "special economic zones" that the Chinese are setting up are designed to be self-contained communist Chinese communities. Some Americans will likely be employed in these areas, but not nearly as many as our politicians would have you to believe.

In addition, these "special economic zones" represent a massive national security threat. The communist Chinese could potentially be able to bring in and store massive amounts of military equipment virtually undetected.

In the days of the Cold War, we would have never dreamed of giving the Russians a 50 square mile city in the middle of Idaho. But today we have become convinced that the communist Chinese want to be our great friends.

The following quote originally appeared in the Idaho Statesman, but has since apparently been taken down....

"The Chinese are looking for a beachhead in the United States," said Idaho Commerce Secretary Don Dietrich. "Idaho is ready to give them one."

Indeed.

If relations between the U.S. and China go south someday, we will deeply regret giving China so many open doors.

The truth is that you can never fully trust the communist Chinese. Their top military officers talk about a coming conflict with the United States all the time. China is extremely interested in North America. In fact, the Chinese and the Mexicans have even been holding talks on military cooperation.

But even if you don't consider the communist Chinese to be a military threat, you should be deeply concerned about the economic implications of what is happening.

Today, tens of millions of Americans are wondering why the economy is so bad.

Well, there are a lot of reasons, but the fact that we have sent China thousands of our factories, millions of our jobs and trillions of dollars of our national wealth is a major contributing factor.

If you do not know the truth about how badly the Chinese economy is wiping the floor with the Americen economy then you need to read this article: "40 Signs The Chinese Economy Is Beating The Living Daylights Out Of The U.S. Economy".

Beautiful new infrastructure is going up all over China today, and meanwhile many of our once great manufacturing cities are turning into rotted-out war zones.

China would not be what they are today if we had insisted that they abandon the communist system and respect basic human rights before we ever opened up trade with them. But that did not happen. Instead we enthusiastically welcomed China into the WTO and we let the predatory Chinese system run wild.

In 2010, China had a "current account balance" of over 272 billion dollars, which was the largest in the world.

In 2010, the United States had a "current account balance" of negative 561 billion dollars. According to the CIA world factbook, that put us in last place in the entire world. In fact, our negative current account balance was more than 9 times larger than anyone else in the world. If you go check out this chart it will give you a really good idea of how nightmarish our trade situation has become.

The world is changing and nothing is ever going to be the same again.

Just ask the residents of Boise, Idaho - they are about to have a 50 square mile self-contained communist Chinese city plopped right into their backyard.

Our 'New Way of Life' Will Depend a Whole Lot Less on Home and Automobile Ownership as People Move from Suburbs to Denser Urban Communities

The Path to Recovery

By Richard Florida, The Atlantic
May 7, 2010

Economic peaks and valleys are part of the life cycle of any society. They can be difficult, sometimes horribly painful, but just as trees shed their leaves in the fall to make room for the new growth of spring, economies reset themselves.

Times of crisis reveal what is and isn't working. These are the times when obsolete and dysfunctional systems and practices collapse or fall by the wayside. They are the times when the seeds of innovation and invention, of creativity and entrepreneurship, burst into full flower, enabling recovery by remaking both the economy and society.

Major periods of economic transformation, such as the Great Depression or the Long Depression of the 1870s before it, unfold over long stretches of time, like motion pictures rather than snapshots. Likewise, the path to recovery can be long and twisted--the better part of three decades in the case of those two previous crises. Seen in the greater context of history, economic crises inevitably give rise to critical periods in which an economy is remade in ways that allow it to recover and begin growing again.

These are periods I call Great Resets.

We're still very early on in the current economic Reset, so it's difficult to fully grasp how it will ultimately play out. But we can all sense that our way of life is changing and our economic landscape is too.

This emerging new way of life will be less oriented around cars, houses, and suburbs. We'll be spending relatively less on the things that defined the old way of life. We'll have to, if we expect to have money left over to sustain the new industries that will emerge in the Great Reset and usher in an age of renewed prosperity.

Before we can nurture the new industries of the future, develop new forms of health care and biotechnologies, or even explore new forms of education or more experiential forms of entertainment and recreation, we first have to free up capital by producing the goods of the old industrial order more cheaply and efficiently.

We've reached the limits of what George W. Bush used to call the "ownership society." Owning your own home made sense when people could hope to hold a job for most or all of their lives. But in an economy that revolves around mobility and flexibility, a house that can't be sold becomes an economic trap, preventing people from moving freely to economic opportunity.

Not only has that piece of the American Dream grown dark, but it's also clear that financial excess in the housing sector was one of the central causes of the economic crisis. Housing sucked up far too much of the nation's and the world's capital, and too many people--already overextended by the purchase of outsized houses--used those homes like virtual ATMs to finance carefree consumption.

Every Great Reset has seen our system of housing change, and this one is no different. The rate of home ownership has been on the decline for some time now. Many of those who still choose to buy homes will choose smaller ones, while many more will opt for rental housing.

Our new way of life is likely to depend a whole lot less on the car. In October 2009, The New York Times reported,

"The recession and a growing awareness of the environment are causing many people to reassess their automobile ownership. After more than a century in which an automobile represented the American dream, car enthusiasm may no longer be a part of Americans' DNA."

Car culture no longer exerts the powerful pull it once did. More and more families are deciding to share cars, and young people are putting off buying them and using public transit, bikes, their feet or Zipcars (membership-based, easy-access short-term car rentals) instead. It's not just that oil and gas have become expensive, it's that traffic and gridlock have become a deadweight time cost on us and our economy.

One constant in the history of capitalism is the ever-more-intensive use of land, as mercantile towns replaced agricultural villages, major industrial cities replaced those towns, and massive complexes of suburbs, exurbs, and edge cites expanded the boundaries of those cities.

The change we are living through is much more than a movement from suburbs to denser urban communities. What we are seeing is the rise of a new, bigger, and denser economic landscape than ever before--the rise of vast megaregions such as the corridors stretching from Boston to New York and Washington, D.C., around greater London, and from Shanghai to Beijing. These concentrations of population, which encompass several cities and their surrounding suburban rings, have grown swiftly in recent years.

The largest megaregion in North America is the great "Bos-Wash" corridor, initially identified by the geographer Jean Gottmann. Stretching down the East Coast, it includes Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., and is home to more than 50 million people while producing more than $2 trillion in economic activity. Its economic output is greater than that of either the United Kingdom or France and more than double that of India or Canada. The second biggest, which Gottman dubbed "Chi-Pitts," covers more than 100,000 square miles and is home to 46 million people, producing $1.6 trillion in economic output. Other megaregions in North America include:

• Char-lanta: Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh-Durham, 22 million people
• So-Cal: Around Los Angeles, 21 million people
• Tor-Mon-tawa: 22 million people
• Nor-Cal: Around San Francisco, 12.8 million people
• So-Flo: Miami, Orlando, and Tampa, 15 million people
• Dal-Austin: Dallas and Austin, 10 million people
• Hou-Orleans: Houston and New Orleans, 9.7 million people
• Cascadia: Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, 9 million people
• Pho-Tus: Phoenix and Tucson, 4.7 million people
• Den-Bo: Denver and Boulder, 3.7 million people

Around the world, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Mumbai are hubs of giant megaregions. Each of these is a financial and commercial center with tens of millions of people and hundreds of billions of dollars in output.

These megaregions, not nations, really power the global economy. Taken together, the world's 40 largest megaregions account for two-thirds of all global economic activity and 85 percent of the world's technological innovation while housing just 18 percent of its population. Megaregions are the strategic power centers of the economy, housing 85 percent of all corporate headquarters in the United States and Canada.

Though many analysts have predicted that the importance of cities--and that of location--would fade with globalization, the reality is that cities and megaregions have become more important economically than ever before. Even as globalization has spread factories, businesses, and laboratories to places such as India, China, Brazil, and beyond, these activities are being concentrated in the megaregions of those countries. Contrary to the notion that the world is flat, the most successful megaregions, in fact, are becoming economically stronger and spikier, not flatter.

Megaregions are to our time what suburbanization was to the postwar era. They provide the seeds of a new spatial fix. They expand and intensify our use of land and space the way that the industrial city did during the First Reset and suburbia did in the Second.


Source: Range Magazine, Fall 2005

As people pour into the world's great megaregions, inner cities and close-in suburbs are being reclaimed and rebuilt. Older suburbs, especially those on transit routes, are being reorganized and rebuilt into denser communities offering more condos and town houses as well as single-family homes. Suburban malls and office complexes are being retrofitted and turned into walkable areas with a mixture of housing, shops, and restaurants and in some cases even new parks. Subways and rail transit are being expanded as highways clog.

The location decisions made by new college grads have interested me for years. Their choices involve evaluating not just the company they'll work for but the labor market it's located in and what the surrounding area has to offer. Because they are both highly skilled and highly mobile--three to five times as likely to move than, say, a 45-year-old--the decisions they make about where to live are likely to leave a lasting imprint on our economic geography.

To get at the factors that attract and keep young Gen Y members, those born between the years 1979 and 1990, in certain places, my colleague Charlotta Mellander and I analyzed the results of a Gallup survey of some 28,000 Americans.

Jobs are clearly important. Gen Y members ranked the availability of jobs second when asked what would keep them in their current location and fourth in terms of their overall satisfaction with their community. From this perspective, big cities make sense for them, as they offer more robust labor markets with more and better job opportunities in a wide number of fields.

In an age in which corporate commitment has dwindled, job tenure has grown far shorter, and people switch jobs with much greater frequency, career success involves a great deal more than simply finding the right first job. In these highly mobile and economically tumultuous times, career success for young people depends on locating themselves in a thick labor market that offers diverse and abundant job opportunities. Picking an economically vibrant location is an important hedge against economic uncertainty and the risk of layoff.

But remember that jobs were not the highest-ranked factor. Across the board, the survey respondents said that the ability to meet people and make friends was of paramount importance.

These young people intuitively understand what economic sociologists have documented: that vibrant social networks are key to landing jobs, moving forward in your career, and securing personal happiness. They not only desire a thick labor market but also seek what I have come to call a thick mating market, where they can meet new people, go out on dates, and eventually find a life partner.

And whereas older Americans see high-quality schools and safe streets for their children as key, Gen Y understandably ranks the availability of outstanding colleges and universities higher. Many are likely to go back to graduate school and want to have good programs nearby. For all these reasons, big cities at the heart of megaregions top the list of their choices.

The auto-dependent transportation system has reached its limit in most major cities and megaregions. Commuting by car is among the least efficient of all our activities--not to mention among the least enjoyable, according to detailed research by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues.

Though one might think that the crisis would have reduced traffic (high unemployment means fewer workers traveling to and from work), the opposite has been true. Average commutes have lengthened, and congestion has gotten worse, if anything. The average commute rose in 2008 to 25.5 minutes, "erasing years of decreases to stand at the level of 2000, as people had to leave home earlier in the morning to pick up friends for their ride to work or to catch a bus or subway train," according to the U.S. Census Bureau, which collects the figures. And those are average figures. Commutes are far longer in the big West Coast cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco and the East Coast cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and D.C. In many of these cities, gridlock has become the norm, not just at rush hour but all day, every day.

Just about the only remedy for traffic congestion anyone ever suggests is building more roads and highways, which of course only makes the problem worse. New roads generate higher levels of "induced traffic," that is, new roads just invite drivers to drive more and lure people who take mass transit back to their cars. Eventually, we end up with more clogged roads rather than a long-term improvement in traffic flow

More and more people are choosing to take the subway, train, or bus or even walk or bike to work and go about their daily business--providing they live in an environment that allows for such choices.

In Manhattan, 82 percent of workers get to work by public transit or bicycle or on foot. That's ten times the rate for Americans in general, eight times the rate for workers in Los Angeles County, and 16 times the rate for residents of metropolitan Atlanta. The New York City subway is a remarkably effective technology for moving masses of people around quickly and efficiently. Between 8 and 9 in the morning on a typical workday, more than 385,000 people use its subway system to commute into the central business district.

New York is not the only place where this kind of change in commuting and local traffic patterns is occurring. In Washington, D.C., 57 percent of commuters get to work by means other than driving a car--more than a third take public transit, 12 percent walk to work, and 2 percent ride their bikes; just four in ten drive to work alone. In Boston and San Francisco, roughly half of workers get to work without their cars--roughly a third of commuters take transit, and 10 to 15 percent walk to work. In Philadelphia, 41 percent commute without cars and 27 percent take transit.

These numbers may seem like a drop in the bucket. But 60 percent of Americans surveyed in 2005 said they want to live in walkable communities with shops, restaurants, movie theaters, schools, and churches nearby. We're already seeing the shift as increasing numbers of people move to walkable communities closer to where they work. That will clearly expand in coming decades.

For the time being, most Americans remain behind the wheel. Today, more than three-quarters of Americans drive to work alone. They have no other choice. There are, however, other things we can do to ease congestion and take more cars off the road. Employers can offer more flexible schedules and the ability to work from home or telecommute. But as we've already seen, in many cities traffic is not just a rush-hour problem.

The only alternative left is to price the roads. We pay for everything else: we pay to take the subway, ride the bus, or take the train, we pay to drive through the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels or over the George Washington Bridge. Why should the roads be essentially free? If we want to make traffic better, we have little choice other than to make people pay for the roads they drive on.

Richard Florida is director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto. Adapted from THE GREAT RESET: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity by Richard Florida.

How To Reduce Your Carbon Footprint: Move To New York on Howcast

U.S. Population by Major City and State
Agenda 21: Social Engineering for a New World Order
The Purpose of the Economic Meltdown
Global Education, Land Use, and Population Control
Sustainable Development: The Communist Agenda for the 21st Century
Freedom Is Being Replaced By Servitude, Capitalism By Socialism, and Property Rights By 'Sustainable Development'
Transportation System of the New World Order Excludes Private Auto Mobility
Agenda 21: 'Walkable Urbanism' Rather Than 'Drivable Suburbanism'
Social Engineering is Forcing People into Cities Because It is Easier to Track and Control an Urban Population
The Wildlands Project (the 'Rewilding' of America)
Vehicle Disabling Systems
Intelligent Transportation Systems: Big Brother Tracking Our Every Move By Vehicle and Public Transit
Regimented and Dense Urban Communities — That's What Life Will Be Like in the New World Order
Carbon Credit Scam
Bulldozing America
Death of America's Middle Class
Abolishing Private Property Rights
Engineered Economic Collapse
Engineered Housing Bubble and Crash
The Impact of the Housing Crash on Wealth and Retirement
The Great Corporate (and Government) Water Heist
The Great Government Land Grab

Regimented and Dense Urban Communities — That's What Life Will Be Like in the New World Order

China Wants to Construct a 50 Square Mile Self-Sustaining City South of Boise, Idaho

End of the American Dream
June 8, 2011

Thanks to the trillions of dollars that the Chinese have made flooding our shores with cheap products, China is now in a position of tremendous economic power. So what is China going to do with all of that money? One thing that they have decided to do is to buy up pieces of the United States and set up "special economic zones" inside our country from which they can continue to extend their economic domination.

One of these "special economic zones" would be just south of Boise, Idaho and the Idaho government is eager to give it to them. China National Machinery Industry Corporation (Sinomach for short) plans to construct a "technology zone" south of Boise Airport which would ultimately be up to 50 square miles in size.

The Chinese Communist Party is the majority owner of Sinomach, so the 10,000 to 30,000 acre "self-sustaining city" that is being planned would essentially belong to the Chinese government. The planned "self-sustaining city" in Idaho would include manufacturing facilities, warehouses, retail centers and large numbers of homes for Chinese workers. Basically it would be a slice of communist China dropped right into the middle of the United States.

According to the Idaho Statesman, the idea would be to build a self-contained city with all services included. It would be modeled after the "special economic zones" that currently exist in China.

Perhaps the most famous of these "special economic zones" is Shenzhen. Back in the 1970s, Shenzhen was just a very small fishing village. Today it is a sprawling metropolis of over 14 million people.

If the Chinese have their way, we will soon be seeing these "special economic zones" pop up all over the United States.

So exactly who is "Sinomach"?

The following description of the company comes directly from the website of Sinomach....

With approval of the State Council, China National Machinery Industry Corporation (SINOMACH) was established in January 1997. SINO-MACH is a large scale, state-owned enterprise group under the supervision of the State Assets Supervision and Administration Commission.

As you can see, Sinomach is basically an arm of the Chinese government.

The borrower is always the servant of the lender, and now China is buying up America.

The reality is that Sinomach is not looking only at Idaho. Sinomach is in discussions to develop "special economic zones" all over the United States. Sinomach has recently dispatched delegations to Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania to explore the possibility of establishing "special economic zones" in those states.

Will such "self-contained communities" soon start appearing from coast to coast?

According to Dr. Jerome Corsi, the U.S. government has already set up 257 "foreign trade zones" across America. These "foreign trade zones" will apparently be given "special U.S. customs treatment" and will be used to promote global free trade....

"The FTZs tend to be located near airports, with easy access into the continental NAFTA and WTO multi-modal transportation systems being created to move free-trade goods cheaply, quickly and efficiently throughout the continent of North America."

So what do our politicians think about all of this? Most of them are greatly in favor of it.

"Idaho’s the last state that should say we don’t want to do business with Asia," Idaho Lt. Gov. Brad Little said last year. "Asia’s where the money is."

So will all of this "foreign investment" really bring jobs back to the American people?

Perhaps a few, but the truth is that these "special economic zones" that the Chinese are setting up are designed to be self-contained communist Chinese communities. Some Americans will likely be employed in these areas, but not nearly as many as our politicians would have you to believe.

In addition, these "special economic zones" represent a massive national security threat. The communist Chinese could potentially be able to bring in and store massive amounts of military equipment virtually undetected.

In the days of the Cold War, we would have never dreamed of giving the Russians a 50 square mile city in the middle of Idaho. But today we have become convinced that the communist Chinese want to be our great friends.

The following quote originally appeared in the Idaho Statesman, but has since apparently been taken down....

"The Chinese are looking for a beachhead in the United States," said Idaho Commerce Secretary Don Dietrich. "Idaho is ready to give them one."

Indeed.

If relations between the U.S. and China go south someday, we will deeply regret giving China so many open doors.

The truth is that you can never fully trust the communist Chinese. Their top military officers talk about a coming conflict with the United States all the time. China is extremely interested in North America. In fact, the Chinese and the Mexicans have even been holding talks on military cooperation.

But even if you don't consider the communist Chinese to be a military threat, you should be deeply concerned about the economic implications of what is happening.

Today, tens of millions of Americans are wondering why the economy is so bad.

Well, there are a lot of reasons, but the fact that we have sent China thousands of our factories, millions of our jobs and trillions of dollars of our national wealth is a major contributing factor.

If you do not know the truth about how badly the Chinese economy is wiping the floor with the Americen economy then you need to read this article: "40 Signs The Chinese Economy Is Beating The Living Daylights Out Of The U.S. Economy".

Beautiful new infrastructure is going up all over China today, and meanwhile many of our once great manufacturing cities are turning into rotted-out war zones.

China would not be what they are today if we had insisted that they abandon the communist system and respect basic human rights before we ever opened up trade with them. But that did not happen. Instead we enthusiastically welcomed China into the WTO and we let the predatory Chinese system run wild.

In 2010, China had a "current account balance" of over 272 billion dollars, which was the largest in the world.

In 2010, the United States had a "current account balance" of negative 561 billion dollars. According to the CIA world factbook, that put us in last place in the entire world. In fact, our negative current account balance was more than 9 times larger than anyone else in the world. If you go check out this chart it will give you a really good idea of how nightmarish our trade situation has become.

The world is changing and nothing is ever going to be the same again.

Just ask the residents of Boise, Idaho - they are about to have a 50 square mile self-contained communist Chinese city plopped right into their backyard.

Life on the Edge: Four Visions for Inhabiting a World Transformed by Climate Change

Conceptual shelters that will protect us all from the perils of our rapidly changing environment: rising waters, extreme heat, rampant pollution and overpopulation

By Suzanne LaBarre, Popular Science
October 18, 2010

Wake of the Flood Circa 2080, New Yorkers could live in some 600,000 modular apartments strung along structural cables and held in place by powerful electromagnets. The support cables would be attached to the city’s existing skyscrapers.

Environmental disruptions and technological advances have always influenced where and how people live. Early humans may have left Africa after rapid fluctuations in rainfall destroyed their food supply, and the opening up of the American Southwest occurred roughly in parallel with improvements in air-conditioning technology.

In the decades ahead, a warming planet and a booming population will again alter where we live and how we construct our homes.

PROBLEM: RISING SEAS / SOLUTION: CITY(E)SCAPE

The most immediately disruptive force could be a rapid rise in sea levels. A coalition of scientists from Denmark, England and Finland predicted last year that by the end of this century, melting ice and thermal expansion will drive up the world’s sea levels by more than three feet. It’s unclear how many people that would displace, but the damage could be vast—approximately 10 percent of the world’s population lives in coastal areas lower than 30 feet above sea level. Land that remains above water will face increasingly frequent storm surges and flooding.

The residents of coastal cities could head for higher land, or they could do something distinctly more drastic: They could add a second city above the water.

Agriculture Model

New York City, for instance, is an archipelago that could lose as much as a fifth of its landmass by 2080. But Mustafa Bulgur and Sinan Gunay, recent graduates of Istanbul Technical University’s architecture school, suggest that New Yorkers could make up the lost housing by stringing cables between existing skyscrapers and suspending some 600,000 prefabricated homes among them. By tethering a cable over the flooded streets and avenues—and even extending those cables out to structural towers in New York Harbor—it would be possible, they say, to safely house up to 2.5 million people.

The homes themselves, most of them no larger than 800 square feet, would be made from lightweight titanium plates and held together by even lighter-weight carbon nanotubes. Each would be secured to its support cables by powerful electromagnets. It will be hotter in 2080, too, so the northern and southern facades would be covered in photochromic Plexiglas, which adjusts its translucency according to the strength of the sun. The remaining surfaces would be covered with spiky eight-inch-thick photovoltaic panels. (The spikes, Bulgur says, generate more energy than standard flat panels, because they increase the surface area of the solar collector.)

Each unit would contain its own “agricultural module”—a tall column of soil, held together by a silicone net, that would provide fresh fruit and vegetables and also help insulate the house. A tank would store more than 5,000 gallons of freshwater from the citywide supply, which itself would use highly efficient desalination processes to transform the source of the city’s trouble into its nourishment.

Other architects have proposed a different approach: homes that require no land at all.

Zigloo, a firm in Canada, envisions a narrow underwater skyscraper, deeper than the Empire State Building is tall, that by collecting rain for freshwater and using sun and wind for power would provide a self-sufficient home for 2,000 people (zigloo.ca). Gro Architects in New York proposes harvesting tidal motion to power a network of floating single-family homes (groarc.com). And with the Sub Biosphere 2, architect Phil Pauley imagines a completely submergible habitat for as many as 200 daring aquanauts (philpauley.com).

Monument Squatting: The architect Stéphane Malka proposes taking over La Grande Arche de la Défense in an overcrowded Paris of the future.

PROBLEM: POPULATION / SOLUTION: AUTO-DEFENSE

In 2008, for the first time, more than 50 percent of the people on Earth lived in cities. This was good news for the environment; New Yorkers, for example, have a carbon footprint that is a third of that of their suburban and country-dwelling counterparts. But that population shift will also present major challenges.

By 2030, some five billion people are expected to live in cities, up from more than 3.3 billion this year­—and those cities are expected to be packed. In the 2000 national census, for instance, New York City had a density of 26,400 people per square mile. In 2030 that number is expected to be about 30,000.

New construction will help to alleviate some of the crowding, but Stéphane Malka has another idea: to make better use of the buildings that are already there. Malka, a 35-year-old French architect, proposes taking over La Grande Arche de la Défense, a 361-foot-tall office building and monument to national brotherhood in Paris. It’s the perfect building to showcase a system of infill design.

In Malka’s vision, the arch’s hollow belly transforms into a colony of 450 388-square-foot prefab apartments.

Prefab Topview

Auto-Défense, as he calls the project, relies on basic modular assembly. Housing units would be prefabricated from steel, glass and wood facades stripped from other buildings, then flat-packed and delivered to the arch by truck. On arrival, they would be maneuvered into a structural scaffolding, which itself would already have been anchored to the interior facade of the arch, and locked into place by means of simple mortise-and-tenon joints. In La Défense, the units could be stacked as many as 25 high, but Malka’s design could be applied to the side of any building.

Prefab Frontview

To get in and out of their homes, residents could catch elevators among the offices on either side of the arch­—the two sides of the arch would be connected by elevated catwalks supported by suspension cables­—and move from house to house by way of more catwalks, attached to the scaffold itself.

Malka’s vision of close-packed homes has precedent, particularly in Japan, where small-space living has been common for decades.

In 1952 the architect Makoto Masuzawa built the 538-square-foot Minimum House. Architect Makoto Koizumi revived the design, which can house a family of five, in 2002; the Tokyo firm Boo-Hoo-Woo currently produces a line of 15 different dwellings for tiny urban lots based on Koizumi’s revival of the Minimum House (9tubohouse.com/eng).

In Amsterdam, Keetwonen, a high-density dormitory made of shipping containers, already houses students in 1,000 studio apartments (tempohousing.com).

And someday, when even Los Angeles needs to give up its sprawling ways, architect Houston Drum will be ready with his design for the 25-Hour City, a 1,900-foot-high multi-tower skyscraper that houses 800,000 Angelinos at 26 times the city’s current population density (houstondrum.com).

Prefab Floorplan

The Oasis: The Positive Impact House harvests energy and water from the environment for self-sufficient living.

PROBLEM: DESERTIFICATION / SOLUTION: POSITIVE IMPACT HOUSE

One of the paradoxes of global warming is that even as it leads to flooding in some parts of the world, it will lead to severe water shortages in others.

According to the United Nations, climate change is likely to reduce rainfall in drylands, which cover 41 percent of the land on Earth, including much of the American West. In 2007, the U.N. estimated that desertification could eventually affect some one billion people in at least 100 countries.

Yet architect Robert Ferry of Studied Impact Design, which operates out of Pittsburgh and Dubai, proposes that deserts need not be unlivable, or even uncomfortable. His Positive Impact House, a 3,200-square-foot single-family home, is not only designed to draw enough water and cool air from the environment to sustain five people, it will also send energy back into the grid.

Surplus Power: Roof-mounted solar cells and eggbeater turbines together generate nearly twice the house’s daily energy needs.

The water comes by way of an atmospheric water generator, similar to commercial units used today. These devices run refrigerant through metal coils, which attract condensation that is then funneled into a purifying holding tank. (The desert air is moister than you might think; Dubai, for example, averages 80 percent relative humidity at certain times of day in January.) Two generators would produce enough freshwater for drinking and showering, and the shower water would be recycled for use in flushing toilets and growing food. (A related composting system would also generate biogas for cooking.)

Most of the year, the natural flow of air through the house’s windows would be enough to cool it. But during the hottest months, a fan would draw hot outdoor air into an underground chamber, where the temperature is 50ºF to 60º year-round, and then into the basement and up through floor vents. As the cool air warms back up again, it rises and escapes through a 200-square-foot interior courtyard, whose slim vertical cavity would create a wind tower.

Roof-Mounted Solar Cells

The 24 panels of roof-mounted, sun-tracking, concentrated photovoltaics, which use lenses to magnify solar rays by a factor of as much as 2,000, would be capable of generating all of the 80 kilowatt-hours of electricity the homeowners consume daily. Eggbeater wind turbines on the roof would produce another 40 kilowatt-hours. The extra energy would help with any sudden need for additional power, but on a normal day they could pump it back into the grid, thereby generating income. In the U.S, a homeowner sending 40 kilowatt-hours of energy to the grid every day would earn as much as $3,000 annually.

Nearly all of this technology is in small-scale use today.

A nonprofit group called FogQuest is harvesting fog to provide water to Ethiopian villages. In Zimbabwe, the Eastgate Centre shopping mall uses huge, perforated, chimney-shaped structures to draw air in from the outside. (Zimbabwe is hot, but air that moves is cooler than stagnant air.) And in Orange County, California, the Groundwater Replenishment System makes sewer water suitable for drinking (gwrsystem.com).

Breezeway: In the hottest months, a fan draws air through a naturally cooling underground tunnel into the basement, where it rises into the house by way of floor vents. Meanwhile, 18-inch-thick, rammed-earth walls help keep the house cool during the day and warm at night.

Sustainable Habitat 2020

PROBLEM: POLLUTION / SOLUTION: SUSTAINABLE HABITAT 2020

In the coming decades, advances in pollution control may not be enough to counteract the air- and water-poisoning effects of dual explosions in population and energy consumption.

Within 20 years the number of cars in the world will rise to two billion, and most of them will be powered by gasoline or diesel.

By 2100 air quality in Southern California is expected to violate federal standards 50 more days a year than it does now. Pollution will be particularly vexing in fast-developing countries like China, which according to the World Bank is already home to 20 of the 30 most polluted cities in the world. In one third of China’s cities, for example, the groundwater is contaminated. Buildings are part of the problem too.

The nonprofit group Architecture 2030 estimates that the residential-building sector is responsible for about a fifth of global greenhouse-gas emissions.

Multifunctional Exterior Skin

In response to these challenges, designers at the Dutch electronics giant Philips imagined Sustainable Habitat 2020, an apartment building engineered to make life healthy even in the smoggiest urban environment.

“The question we’re posing is a depressing one,” says Clive van Heerden of Philips Design. “At this rate of urbanization, what do you do if the pessimists are right? How do we begin to start making buildings sustainable?”

The high-rise apartment tower, composed of hundreds of 431-square-foot units, is intended for future Chinese megacities. The multifunctional exterior skin is the most important part of the structure. Dotted with suction-cup-shaped “funnels,” it forms a membrane between the indoors and outdoors that controls the inflow of light, air and water.

Green House: Air-cleaning, solar-energy-harvesting, water-capturing funnels coat the Sustainable Habitat 2020 apartment building. The funnels change shape to make most efficient use of prevailing weather conditions.

The funnels are embedded with photovoltaic cells and sensors, which track humidity, wind direction, and the brightness and angle of the sun. As the sensors detect changing weather conditions, they direct the funnels to change into the most effective shape for the task at hand. For example, on clear days, the funnels follow the path of the sun like flowers, transmitting light indoors and generating enough solar power to provide all the building’s electricity. (Energy stored during the day is used for lighting at night.) When it rains, the funnels change shape to become water-capturing cups. As rain trickles into the cones, the water is pumped to a cell structure behind the facade, where it is filtered, stored, and channeled into a closed-loop system in which everything, even toilet water, gets recycled. When it’s breezy, the funnels elongate into a trumpet shape—a natural wind tunnel that directs air through a filter and then indoors. (When it’s sunny and breezy, the funnels multitask.)

Other architects have begun working on projects in the same spirit as Sustainable Habitat 2020.

The San Francisco firm IwamotoScott Architecture, for example, has proposed a low-rise dwelling called the Jellyfish House for a decommissioned military base on San Francisco Bay’s Treasure Island. The project’s creators say the house, with its permeable skin, will be like a living creature (iwamotoscott.com).

Cell Walls: The translucence of exterior wall cells [at right] can be adjusted by touch. The interior wall [blue] works as a water tank, purifying and storing rainwater captured by the funnels on the apartment’s exterior.

The United Nations' Agenda 21 action plan is Sustainable Development. Sustainable Development works to abolish private property in order to manufacture natural resource shortages and other alarms in order to facilitate governmental control over all resources and, ultimately, over all human action. So-called public/private partnerships are the major tool used to accomplish this objective. What makes the United States of America unique is that this is the only country in the history of the world where management of the natural resources is under citizen control. Everything that city residents obtain originates from the natural resources that come from rural lands. If public/private partnerships achieve control over natural resources, urban citizens are doomed. - Freedom Advocates, Transforming America: Sustainable Development, 2005

Happiness, which the Founding Fathers equated to owning property, is having a tough go of it. The second action plan of Sustainable Development — a term that represents the efforts to eliminate private property in America and to control and limit human action — is called Smart Growth. Smart Growth will increasingly herd Americans into regimented and dense urban communities. Smart Growth is Sustainable Development’s ultimate solution, as it will create dense human settlements subject to increasing controls on how residents live and increased restriction on mobility. In the words of one Smart Growth activist: “It will be the humans in cages with the animals looking in.” - Berit Kjos, Transforming America: Sustainable Development

The Livable Communities Act is a social-engineering bill to restrict residence in the suburbs and rural areas and force Americans into city centers. It has passed the United States Senate Banking Committee and is on the fast track to passage in the Senate. Defending the right of every citizen to maximize his potential and pursue happiness on his own terms makes opposition to the Livable Communities Act necessary. The threat to our mobility is but one aspect of the Livable Communities Act that deserves resistance. Property rights, private enterprise, and affordable homeownership are also threatened under this command-and-control legislation, despite the clever catchphrases that soften its message. - Bob Livingston, Social Engineering Bill in Senate Will Force You into City, Personal Liberty Digest, September 10, 2010