Future Perfect

Then there’s the jatropha tree. It grows in arid zones and in Australia is regarded as a weed. Its nut yields an oil that can be produced for about $US3.60 a gallon (about 60 cents more than ordinary diesel). The residue can be used to feed cattle, says Ron, and he has put some of his own money into schemes now flourishing in Mali, Tanzania, India, Thailand and South Africa. The key to success will be quality control in refining.

Lord Oxburgh, like Tim Jones, is keen on oil from corpses. Here is how Brad Lernley of Cosmos magazine reported this story:

It is the worst stuff in the world. Eighteen to

But two hours later, sterile as you please, an oil truck pulls up behind this Thermal Conversion Process plant in the small American Midwest town of Carthage, Missouri, and the driver attaches a hose from a nearby stationary tank to the truck’s intake valve. One hundred and fifty barrels of oil (23,800 L), worth $US12,300, gushes into the truck’s tank, and off it goes to an oil company that will blend it with heavier fossil-fuel oil to upgrade the stock.

The real challenge, though, it seems to me, will be social. Stu

Imagine, instead, a transport system in which the approach of your bus would be signalled with a ping on your mobile phone and you could stroll to the bus stop knowing the wait would be barely a minute (this technology is ready). Imagine forsaking your car (converting the garage into a romper room or workshop) and having a vehicle-a carlet-only when you really needed it. As private cars already cost more than the taxi equivalent of trips taken, you would also save heaps. Imagine taking trains from the centre of town and moving at 300-350 kph to your destination, getting off just a five-minute walk from where you want to be. Imagine making a plane trip special again, instead of a long-distance endurance test.

Imagine biking or walking (ru

And that future could be ours. Not in 2027, or 2037- but tomorrow!

The Hunches of Nostradamus

2008 Cost of petrol rises from a low point of $0.85 to a high of $2.35 in Australia. Some 56 per cent of people say they would rather die than not drive their cars. Some do.

2009 Singapore and London a

2010 Traffic jams in Beijing and Thailand last four days. Twenty-seven babies born in cars.

2011 Proportion of Sydney residents commuting by car goes up from 72 per cent to 79 per cent. Pedestrian arrested in Canberra.

2012 Petrol reaches $3.20 a litre. Twenty-four per cent of Saudi Arabians are billionaires.

2013 In Sydney and Melbourne 347 car drivers die of starvation.

2014 Japanese launch railway network with bullet trains travelling at 670 kph.

2015 Richard Branson offers trips to the moon for $3.5 million. The first to go find a Starbucks in the Sea of Tranquillity.

2016 Perth removes all cars from within city boundaries. Citizens discover legs.

2017 In Beijing pollution causes fall in life expectancy to 29 years.

2018 Oil Wars break out. Sydney executives no longer allowed free car as part of salary package. Most break down and cry.

2019 Texans accept declared state of emergency and pledge to limit each family to only three 4WDs.

2020 Australian PM rides bike to work. Gets there twenty minutes early.

2024 Government finally removes tax concessions on 4WD purchases.

5. The Future of Cities – More than Half the World’s Population?

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

– Abba Eban, Israeli statesmen,

Vie

Harry Seidler used to make much of this. He would show pictures of the heart of Vie

Future Perfect you don’t need to quarantine the historic. (Federation Square in Melbourne does this superbly.) Nor does modern housing require a scorched-earth policy, a start from ground zero.

How many times have you looked down from a plane and seen fresh clover-shaped scars where new roads outline the shapes of instant suburbs being prepared, as if homes are about to land intact from the sky, delivered by ET? Kit towns. When you walk through them after they are finished, they seem strangely dehumanised and lonely places.

The 1960s and ‘70s were notorious for this kind of development. It was as if any kind of housing would do-a legacy from the Second World War, when shelter at all costs was required. In the 21st century we face greater simultaneous challenges: vast populations, water shortages, killer pollution and climate change. This year, according to the United Nations, more people will live in cities than in countryside: three billion of us squashed into barely 2 per cent of the earth’s surface.

One of the paradoxes of this movement of the poor in search of food and work is that the conurbations have spread over the best agricultural land. Towns were established long ago next to fertile fields and good water; now concrete has covered them in the quest for lebensraum. Vast Dickensian shantytowns and slums ring the great cities of South America, Asia and Africa. What answers has science got to this historic challenge? Maybe Vie

So, how to combine the old with the new, as symbolised by those rustic UN offices and by Vie