PAU | The Goldilocks Module — Building Affordable, Carbon-Negative Cities

The Goldilocks Module — Building Affordable, Carbon-Negative Cities

Worldwide

Program

Housing

Client

TED

Collaborators

Structural Engineering & Sustainability: Thornton Tomasetti

Size

12 Units

Status

Ongoing

In 2021 Vishaan Chakrabarti gave a TED Talk entitled “A Vision of Sustainable Housing for all of Humanity,” at TED’s “Countdown Summit” in Edinburgh, Scotland. Central to the talk was building we call “The Goldilocks Module,” a low-rise, high-density, net-zero housing prototype.

At the scale of individual buildings, we know how to build carbon negative single-family homes with existing technologies, but such homes are far from being a panacea, not only because they are very expensive to make carbon negative, but also because single-family homes encourage car-dependent sprawl which leads to a loss of wetlands, farming, forests, and community. You may think that tall towers are a better way to house the world’s growing population, but the reality is we are far from developing carbon negative skyscrapers because we don’t have the technology. Towers demand tremendous amounts of energy to build and operate. They also have very little roof area to effectively utilize solar panels, similarly, wind turbines on towers barely make a dent. How can we build carbon negative urban housing globally with the technology we have today that is also broadly affordable? The answer is hiding in plain sight, a “Goldilocks” strategy that rests between the scale of houses and towers, a scale at which we built many of our cities in the past.

This lower-scale Goldilocks template works so well because it hits the sweet spot… Between the number of inhabitants and the roof area we need to produce enough solar power for them and their communities. Beyond solar we can turn these buildings into climate assets with state-of-the-art battery systems that balance solar supply and peak demand. We can also rethink our heating and cooling systems using existing tech to create thermal storage for ice or hot water that can be produced off peak and used on peak. This prototype could even compost food scraps and solid waste into usable soil and protein for animal feed. These buildings can be constructed with simple local materials like wood or brick, both of which are affordable and have lower embodied energy than steel and concrete. Importantly, this template could be designed for the spacious, communal and equitable living our communities sorely need.

We can work with communities to make these buildings visually appealing, socially and racially mixed, and responsive to the needs of local cultures and climates. This housing would be dense enough to support mass transit such as light rail, express buses, and bike networks connected to jobs, schools, and other daily needs across our cities. Imagine this in two cities, New York City and Calcutta. Despite their mega-downtowns, both experience sprawl in their growing outskirts, sprawl that could be replaced with versions of our Goldilocks template that respond to local climate and culture at the building scale, while encouraging walking, biking, and mass transit at the urban scale.