The second field trip of the week was held at The Sustainable City. Eedama has had many field trips there and you could read more on our other blog articles here. This time, the city became fully functional with 80% residential occupancy! The students were very engaged as this group in particular always sought practical replicable solutions.
The Sustainable City Tour
After the tour was done, the students split into groups with mixed ages and began building their solar ovens. The solar oven helped them connect the first day of discussing greenhouse effect and putting this effect to a beneficial use.
Urban design workshop
The solar oven workshop was not the last of the day. Building on the tour of The Sustainable City, the students had to design cities of their own! Firstly, the students identified the different elements that they had to include in their cities such as energy sources, water sources, food production and accessibility, housing, administration etc. They then reflected on how the Sustainable City made sure to use these valuable resources sustainably. Accordingly, they were split into groups and were given a city in a different climate per group. This meant that they were not simply replicating what they had just witnessed but rather building on the knowledge acquired and some logic to create these sustainable cities in climates some of them have never seen for themselves.
After an introduction to these different climates with an explanation of their main characteristics, the ideas they came up with were really impressive and each group presented their cities to the rest of the group at the end of the day. The group with tropical weather had slanted roofs for all their building with water catchments which they then used for irrigation around the city, the cold weather group resorted to geothermal energy as their main source and created greenhouses for their food production, while the temperate group came up with feeder transportation system for their city where the metro drops the residents off at different locations who were then met with electrical vehicles to transport within the city where as the hot climate group improved on what they had seen at the city by adding compost for their organic waste to be used for food production in their biodomes in the city.