Are domed cities possible?


Eden Projects photo courtesy Edifice/CORBIS
Have you ever thought about living in a domed city?
Have you ever thought about living in a domed city? The temperature would be the same year round. And there would never be any rain or snow to spoil picnics and weddings! Science fiction writers have been talking about domed cities for years. We may actually have them sooner than you think.

People have built very small examples already. The great Mall of America is like a tiny city under glass. Covering about 80 acres of floor space, it has 500 stores, 80 restaurants and an indoor amusement park! Biosphere 2 is a giant glass lab covering more than three acres. The two Eden greenhouses in England are domes that cover about five acres.


What if we were to expand on these projects? We could crank up the coverage to city-size -- say 650 acres. We're talking about covering a piece of land about one mile on each side.

The first question is, "What technology would you use to cover such a huge space?" Here are three ideas:

  1. The Mall of America uses normal mall construction. It has concrete and block walls, trusses, skylights and so on. It is not very glamorous or inspiring, but it's easy to imagine building a super-giant mall.
  2. The Eden project uses a geodesic dome and hex panels covered with very strong plastic.
  3. A stadium in British Columbia has a fabric shell held up by air pressure. Sixteen fans provide the extra pressure. In a project of this size, maybe buildings could hold the dome up. Six tall buildings might act as six pillars supporting the dome's center. Other buildings around the city could be the shorter pillars.

How many people could live in a city this big? Let's say that the average height of the buildings is 10 stories. That gives the city about 260,000,000 square feet of floor space. If you figure that the average person needs about 500 square feet of space to live and work, then this city could hold over half a million people.

How much would it cost to build? Space in a skyscraper costs something like $400 per square foot to build. Let's use that same cost for this city. The total cost for this project would be something like $100 billion, or $200,000 per resident.

What will it cost to heat and cool this city? The Mall of America does not spend money on heating, even though it is in Minnesota. The lights and people give off plenty of heat. The problem will be cooling it, especially when the sun is shining. One way to solve that problem would be to locate the domed city in a cold climate.

How will people get around? The maximum distance between any two points in the city will be about one mile, meaning that a person can walk anywhere in a half-hour or less. There might be some electric monorails and moving sidewalks. There will need to be a way to deliver food and products coming into the city. Underground train systems or roads for trucks might be the best solution.

The thing that you come to understand after thinking about a domed city is that it's not such a far-fetched idea. There's a good chance that we will see something like this over the next decade or two. Finally, people will be able to plan their weekends without having to worry about the weather!