The following is a transcript from the “Architecture and Urban Development with Minecraft Java” series I created/hosted on Schoolhouse.world this month. In this course, I provided the group with a blank Minecraft world and we took on different roles within the landscape to create our ideal ecocity — we had a lot of fun!
Welcome everyone, I’m Owen! Let’s get started.
We’re used to seeing cities mapped out and designed in a very particular way. You might be use d to seeing a city mapped out in a way where it’s just rows and rows and rows of houses sprawled out all over the place. In fact, we have a name for this. It’s called urban sprawl and every house is exactly the same. This is what the city has become in the traditional urban development landscape. And unfortunately, this is not sustainable by any means because it leads to a wide variety of different problems.
First off, we see increased land usage because, I mean, look at this. This is just not an effective way to use land because we’re using so much of it. Also the increased use of cars. Obviously, you’re getting more fossil fuel and greenhouse gas emissions, which have poisoning effects on the environment, and that can lead to issues like drought, deforestation to clear more space, wildfires. I mean, practically half of Canada is on fire by now. It’s not good. And in order to power all of this currently where the mainstream way is using fossil fuels, which you’re seeing poisonous gases like methane, nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, all spewing into the atmosphere by the thousands of tons. And not only is this bad for the environment, but this has a critical effect on public health as well.
Because as a result of this, we see issues like food and water shortage, once again, returning to the issue of drought. Land scarcity, because we quickly run out of developable land, supply chain backlogs as car and road traffic starts to become more and more problematic. And this overall just leads to poor public health, which is not sustainable by any means. And this list is not exhaustive. We could go on for many different points about how the current urban development model is hurting humanity. And, I mean, it’s no secret that this is a problem. So, what we’re gonna be looking at in this series is ways to fix this, right? Ways to address these problems, change the current urban development model, and increase the current idea of a city or improve the current idea of a city so that it’s sustainable for both humanity and the environment.
And so, this philosophy that I’ve just described, this idea of helping both humanity and the environment at the same time. This is called ecodesign, and it’s a fairly new urban design philosophy. And there are really two underlying principles of ecodesign. The first is describing the traditional urban growth model which is the cities of the last century have been optimized for functionality and not necessarily livability. So, we’re putting priority on, like, logistics, you know, energy exports and imports, so transmission of goods, and always human wellbeing has come second. And so, this is really something that needs to change.
And that’s what part two of this looks at, which is through the applications of policy, planning, and design, which are three urban design concepts we’ll be studying over the course of this series, city governments can encourage the development of cities that promote the common good and environmental health, which is what we look for in truly sustainable cities. And this has been achieved in quite a number of places throughout the world. But in order to have a lasting and significant impact, it needs to happen over a much larger scale.
And so, those were really the two foundational ideas. Now, let’s take a look at what we call the six axioms, which are really…in math you might’ve heard in axiom of, like, triangle congruence or triangle similarity. Here we refer to them more as just like guiding principles. The first is to embrace and manage complexity, right? So, our way of life is messy, it’s complex, and instead of trying to suppress that and organize everything, we should be trying to embrace it, and create where you’re gonna be heard and referred to as an experiential urban experience, which is really designing cities and urban spaces around creating a pleasant living experience for the individual.
The second axiom, we want to manage the growth of our cities in a more effective way in particular as it pertains to population and the economy. So, with the current urban growth model, cities are expanding outwards and consuming much more land, a much larger quantity of resources, and none of this is good for the environment, the economy, or humanity. That’s what we just looked at. And so, we really need to focus on making these growth patterns sustainable over a much longer period of time.
The third is to involve several different professions in the design and planning of cities. So, in addition to, you know, maybe designing a school for a particular age group not only will you need an architect or a structural engineer to build the building itself, but you might also want to consult educational specialists or sociologists so that you are building the school around the needs of the student rather than the pure priority of making the school as functional as possible, which is, again, what we’ve seen overdone in the past.
Four, and this is very, very important, always engage the opinion of the public. So, we want to get the public’s approval over the design decisions that are made because, again, we want to focus on creating a living experience that’s grounded in the enjoyment and happiness and comfort of the individual. And that is really all grounded, not in the opinions of the government who’s overseeing all of this, but in the opinion of the public.
The fifth is to respect both the natural and built environments. So, you don’t want to give either too much leeway in creating cities. So, you definitely don’t want to build so much so that it’s impacting the environment negatively, but you also don’t want to give the environment so much headway so as to suppress, you know, existing infrastructure. So, there needs to be a balance there.
And the final one is to draw on multiple different design methods. So, to explore different creative mediums, different architectural styles and also focus the design and planning on the traditions and priorities of the city, and to embrace examples that are already out there. So, for example, throughout this course, we’re gonna be taking a look at several different cities that have achieved these axioms to great effect and studying them and trying to implement them in the city that we’re gonna be building with the creative project.
Okay. So, that was a lot. We focused on the current problems with urban growth, urban planning, urban design, the problems with all of those things as they currently stand. So, for example, the issue of urban sprawl, how they lead to all these other environmental issues which in turn impact humanity in unsatisfactory way. We looked at the really underlying principles of this design philosophy, ecodesign, as being able to identify the problems with the current system, and mitigate and correct those problems in our future design efforts and our future development efforts. And then we sort of expanded that into six individual axioms that we can follow to achieve those goals. And so, we’ll be returning to these throughout the series.
Now we’ll get into the groundwork for our creative project, the Minecraft project as I’ve seen many of you are excited about it. And again, don’t worry if you don’t have Minecraft installed. That’s really just if you want to participate at all. Like I said, this is a very casual thing, so if you just want to stay for the lectures, like the one I just gave, that’s totally fine. If you don’t want to participate at all, that’s totally fine too. And then if you do want to participate, but don’t have Minecraft Java or Bedrock Edition installed you can help by, like, really just imagining ideas and being an architect, sketching out streetscapes, and then showing it to us so we can implement it into our concept city. Or even providing verbal suggestions by putting them in the chat. Or, if you just wanna stay and watch.
Again, this is all entirely up to you. I’m just providing the content and the project resources. So this is very much a choose-your-own-adventure series for you. But for today, the first part of the project will be taking a look at the demographics of the city that we’ll be working with, and then assigning our roles so we can better split up the group effort.
So, this is Schoolhouse City, very humorously named. It has a fairly large population, 100,000 people over an area of approximately 2,000 square kilometers. Again, this is all fictitious. I just came up with this. And the area is by no means set in stone. We can go beyond that. I know it’s kind of difficult to measure that in a video game. This is all just for, like, context’s sake. And then that comes out to an approximate population density of 50 people per square kilometer.
The population is more diverse than average. As you can see, we have a diversity index of around 70%, which is nine points higher than the national average. We have the community priorities. So, the priorities that the population has sort of placed has come up with that we need to cater to. The first, of course, is education. I mean, that’s kind of the whole…that’s what Schoolhouse was founded on and hence what Schoolhouse City was founded on as well. So there should be plenty of access to education, plenty of education infrastructure, art, music, and theater. So, both the visual and performing arts. This is very much an appreciation for culture.
And then nature is a big one for the people of Schoolhouse City as well. They want to have a very intimate connection with nature. They want trees and plants both within the city itself and access to parks elsewhere. And then I have two more pieces of data here. This is the age distribution, so you can see mostly 20 to 40 years old, which is, like, sort of first half of life, I guess you could say. And then we have also a roughly equal income distribution with around 31% being high income, 35% middle income, and 33% low income.
So, maybe you can tell I’ve put some effort into this. These are, again, entirely fictional, but these are what we need to be catering to when we start building, organizing, and conceptualizing this city that we’re gonna be in charge of developing. And we’ll come back to all of this, but does anyone have, like, questions about what any of this means?
The session concluded with questions about how much space each Minecraft block represented in our city, etc., and then we made plans for Day Two (read the transcript!