Utopia

Downtown

Utopia will be a grand place to build the buildings of the future, the kind that were dreamt about in the ’20s and ’30s: very Art Deco, very clean, very imaginative. It can’t start out with many of them, of course, since all cities start out small first, but the idea of elevated walkways, hundreds of feet above the street, pedaways spanning streets and UniModal rails crisscrossing through it all really turns me on. These kind of works can be encouraged, but I don’t see a way to really “enforce” it (“Your proposed building isn’t Art Deco enough!”).

Heat island solution

The big problems with big cities—and Utopia will be a big city eventually—is that they are huge heat sinks (heat islands). Cities not only create heat, they trap it. Blacktop streets trap and keep a great deal of the heat from the sunlight that strikes them. They take all night to cool, releasing more heat in the city, keeping the city from cooling off to a great degree. Replacing all the blacktop streets with cement isn’t practical either, and that would be akin to be making the streets out of mirrors, which would still make the city a huge hot spot. Just instead of trapping heat, it’d be reflecting it upon the inhabitants.

How to combat it? The most effective method I’ve heard about is rooftop greenery. Every skyscraper or office building would be required to have rooftop gardens. It could be something as simple as a lawn, or as complex as a Chinese garden, complete with Koi fish ponds. How this works is that plants absorb sunlight and heat, but don’t reflect or radiate it (blacktop absorbs it and radiates it). Rooftop greenery atop the skyscrapers and office building would have a cooling effect on the whole downtown.

This would require special building standards, of course, since a lot of greenery could be very heavy. Plus, they need special drainage and watering systems, but it would be worth it. Downtown Utopia could be a model for the world.

Take a break

Another rule I’d like to suggest, but I can’t force, is 30 minute early afternoon breaks. These would be nap breaks, and these are already implemented in some American businesses. The way it works is that around 1:30 or 2:00 in the afternoon, the employer turns the lights down low, all KB use ceases and all calls are ended. Then the workers take a needed snooze for 20 minutes. Any calls that come in during this period are automatically and silently directed to voice mail.

This, I think, would greatly boost production for knowledge workers. Using one’s brain is hard and early afternoon naps have been proven to boost afternoon productivity (or else the employers who implement them, wouldn’t).

There are some problems with this, of course. This only works for knowledge workers and employees who work in offices and wouldn’t be practical for construction workers (or would it? Where would they nap?) and other workers who don’t have seats molded to their butts. But it’s still something I’d like implemented in the workplace. I know that if I were allowed to nap at work (just for 20 minutes, of course), I’d be way more productive in the afternoon!

But, in cubicleland, there are some people who’d be uncomfortable with their co-workers seeing them sleeping. But if this were the norm, I think most people would get over it.

Ideally, the time for the nap wouldn’t be subtracted from the day’s total hours, so your eight hour day includes that 20-30 minute nap.