Website under constructions


Solar Cities: Founders: T.H. Culhane (California, New York, Iraq, Egypt, Germany) Dr. Sybille Frütel Culhane (Germany, Iraq, Egypt), Board of Directors: Andy Posner(California, Rhode Island, Russia), Michelle Finnel (America), Ahmed Khalifa (Egypt, Germany, Kenya), Neda Pouryekta (Iran, Germany, Kenya), Frank DiMassa (Italy, Northern California)


Downloads

(Note: This page gives you access to the .KMZ files we are creating for Darb El Ahmar and Manshiyat Nasser's Solar Cities ARG  project (described below). For access to Google 3D Warehouse components useful in making your own solar city, click here.)

As a first step, and an invitation for others to get involved, I am posting my progressively evolving KML files here:

Click here to download The Solar CITIES office and Cairo home of T.H. and Sybille Culhane at 4 Abu Hurayba in Darb El Ahmar. This 4809 KB file was created by the architects at the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Cairo and depicts the central headquarters of Solar CITIES effort to create a "million solar roofs" in what was historically "the city of the sun" ("Heliopolis").
The rendering of the Abu Hureyba street area was created by Nivine Akl, Mohamed Ebaid, Heba Foda, Kareem Ibrahim, Mahmoud Qotb, Mohamed Said, Nadine Samir, Roberto Simeone, and Ibrahim Zakareya. This is what the model looks like when imported into Google earth:

Click here to download Building 72 Darb Shuglan: Solar CITIES first solar roof This 3897 KB file was created by the architects at the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Cairo and depicts the famous community participation effort in industrial ecology, "building 72" where the families of Sou'ad, Magdi and Samiya participated in the creation of historic Cairo's first solar roof. The building now has a German designed/Chinese made "Sunshore" evacuated tube solar hot water system on it, with a 200 liter recycled plastic cold water barrel to provide adequate and stable water pressure and roof top storage for weathering the constant times of suspended water service.
The rendering of the Darb Shuglan area was created by Nivine Akl, Mohamed Ebaid, Heba Foda, Kareem Ibrahim, Mahmoud Qotb, Mohamed Said, Nadine Samir, Roberto Simeone, and Ibrahim Zakareya. This is what the model looks like when imported into Google earth:

Click here to download The Darb Shoughlan Community Center and School. This 4209 KB file is a masterpiece from the architects at the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Cairo and depicts the central headquarters of this urban revitalization effort.
The rendering of the Darb Shuglan Community Center and School was created by Nivine Akl, Mohamed Ebaid, Heba Foda, Kareem Ibrahim, Mahmoud Qotb, Mohamed Said, Nadine Samir, Roberto Simeone, and Ibrahim Zakareya. This is what the model looks like when imported into Google earth:

This is what the three model sets look like when imported into Google earth:

NOTES: Mahmoud Qotb kindly extracted the models from the AKTC master plan in Archicad 11 and supplied them to Thomas Henry (Taha) Rassam Culhane for posting in Google Earth. Culhane exported the model from Archicad 11 as a .3ds file, positioned and scaled it in Google Sketchup 6 and exported to Google Earth as a .kmz file. A full description of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture Historic Cities Support Programme can be found in "Cairo: Urban Regeneration in the Darb Al-Ahmar District -- A Framework for Investment" found at www.akdn.org.

Click here to download Solar Cities first attempt to use Google Sketchup to create building 72 in Darb El Ahmar  with home built solar panels

This file is only 186 KB

Here is a picture of our first attempt at creating a 3D view of Building 72 with the home built solar hot water system on top.

Here is the second attempt with a 3D Warehouse file of an evacuated tube solar collector that I modified in sketchup to look like the one we put up on the roof in Cairo.

The view is looking from Darb Al Ahmar West to Al Azhar park and you can see the Muqattam Hills in the background.

Click here to download Solar Cities first attempt to use Sketchup to create the Zabaleen school and Walid's shanty and the solar hot water system we built on top of the school in Manshiyat Nasser.
This file is only 40 KB

Here is a picture of the view of the Zabaleen school in Muqattam from the back, showing the community built solar hot water system we put on the roof.

Click here to download the KMZ file of Solar Cities first attempts to map infrastructure in Darb El Ahmar

This is a 9 MB file that has two CAD base maps created by the AKTC showing water and electric services, with Google Earth pins (posts) making them clickable in Google Earh.

Here is a crowded view of the AKTC infrastructure data from above:

Here is a closeup of the map with overlays:

What is needed now are posts showing the building numbers, so we can tie (geocode) survey information with real locations.

Clicking here downloads a .kmz file of "Solar Cities Waypoints". This is the beginning of a map of the entire solar cities project area. "Sunshine icons" indicate locations where one can purchase materials and services for building a solar hot water system (copper pipes, polypropylene pipes, plumbing supplies, tools, glass, aluminum sheets, window frames, screws, nuts and bolts, sheet metal bending, argon welding, copper brazing etc.) as well as locations where you can observe finished solar hot water systems or systems under construction.

Here is a picture of our beginning attempt to map out the locations involved in the study, with an eye toward creating a reliable map showing where the vendors of materials involved in urban upgrading are located. These points were gathered iin the field, walking around with the Garmin GPSmap 76CSx that AUC Environmental Science Professor Moshira Hassan suggested we use (it is waterproof and floats) and Andy Posner brought to Cairo when he came to work with us in the spring. The data were loaded into Google Earth using Easy GPS and GPS BABEL to do the file conversions.

Most Egyptians don't know where the resources are, and there are no yellow pages or reliable street maps. Our intent is to teach them how to use Google maps in their community resource centers and internet cafes and make these files available.

Using these files is very simple. Simply download the .kmz files, double click on them and they should launch Google Earth and take you right to the location. Alternately, you can download the files in a folder, then click and drag them into the left sidebar in Google Earth.



History and Operating Logos of the Solar Cities ARG:

It all started in 1961, the year Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to leave the gravity well of earth and went into space. Buckminster Fuller proposed the creation of The World Game" (a.k.a. "The World Peace Game") as the core curriculum for Souther Illinois University.
Bucky's visionary idea was ""make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone."
The idea behind Fuller's World Game was to find an alternative to War Games (already being modeled on computers by specialists isolated from the public) and put our collective intelligence to use for social and environmental welfare.

Finally the technology has caught up with Buckminster Fuller's vision. Our idea at Solar Cities is for enthusiasts of sustainable development and renewable energy to help create our part of the game, and make it competitive not only with military planner's War Games, but with all the time-consuming video games siphoning off so much of the publics' problem solving genius.

Our goal is not to replicate the great work being done elsewhere, but to enhance and extend it by creating game modules dealing specifically with the local microeconomic realities and individual and household needs issues pertaining to the communities in which we work.
It is hoped that others will jump on board, mod and model such games for their neighborhoods and areas of interest, and that little by little we will fill in the gaps.
This section, very much under construction, will allow visitors to access .kml files (archived as zipped .kmz files) that can be used with Google Earth.
The goal is to work together to create a unique data visualization tool for the areas where Solar Cities is working so that local citizens, planners, policy makers and global participants can envision and virtually experience the current urban Cairo environment (circa 2007), propose and make necessary and desired changes, simulate, view and even role play the results, and then make recommendations for real world changes.

Ultimately we hope that this site will act as a kind of "WIKI" for sustainable development. We hope to create an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) in which participants use their collective intelligence to solve real world problems.
The "game" would combine familiar elements of SimCity4 and The Sims 2 but would use the simulations merely to model and role play alternate realities that that, once agreed upon, could be truly implemented.

The hook of the game would be that "the system" or "the machine" would be programmed with A.I. following the logic of the dominant modernist, capitalist paradigm that seems to drive so much of the real economy.

"Players" would get to pit themselves against "the machine" or "the system", struggling to introduce a post-modern ("both-and" as opposed to "either-or") and post-capitalist ("profit is no longer a zero-sum game") paradigm that the A.I. avatars (and possibly other real life players) would find antithetical to their worldview.

The A.I. in the game would endeavor to vigorously fight any moves toward "sustainable development" and "environmental and social justice" that upset the status quo.

Players would have to negotiate their way around hostile agents representing industry, government, local and international business, and threatened community members.

Winning the game would involve working toward win-win situations that satisfy both the "idealists" playing the game, and the programmed paradigm posing as "realism".

The first step in this game is developing the game itself. To do so, we first have to create a digital, 3D Darb-Al Ahmar Muslim Craftsperson community and Manshiyat Nasser Zabaleen Christian Community.

This virtual community needs real household attribute data -- all the socioeconomic indicators (poverty level, income, infrastructure, access to credit, family size, gender distribution etc.) that would allow us to model a faithful representation of the actual communities.

An interface needs to be designed that allows for friendly data visualization (see SimCity 4 for some ideas).

Once we have created the community AS IT IS, with reliable data, we then need to develop a game engine that allows us to interact with and manipulate variables in the community.

The game data would have to be updatable as real changes occur in the real community.

Players would try to introduce and create renewable energy technologies, training centers, workshops, small business opportunities and the like (as in The Sims 2 "Open For Business" expansion pack), and see how these things affect the community when played out.

Ideas that game out as producing "Pareto Optimality" would be shared by players with real life planners and policy makers.

Ideas that seem to cause too much conflict and disruptions would be red-flagged and saved for analysis to get better ideas of why given attempts to improve the community don't work.

While all of this is very ambitious, the first stage would be simply creating KML files for use with Google Earth that allow the overlay of 3D architecture, photographs and attribute tables of local infrastructure and demographic information.

How you can help:

 We truly appreciate articulate, detailed and intelligent feedback.

 The First Round  in our ARG is to invite the collective intelligence of the players themselves to solve the puzzle of how to make a serious game fun.

 Rage Against the Machine: Fighting the System and Having Serious Fun!

As the game designers we have been thinking a lot about that issue and have proposed that the fun in the game will come from "raging against the machine" and fighting "the system".

 This is no mere metaphor -- we mean it quite literally -- the players will fight against the computer system - against the binary logic of "the machine" whose artificial intelligence programming will be steeped in (and now I AM being metaphorical) the paradigm of modernism with its unforgiving "either-or" logic and its assumption that development is a zero-sum game.

Because much development theory uses this narrow logic  (a fact pointed out in the 1960s by Andre Gunder Frank in his classic essay "the Development of UnderDevelopment" ;, our game will pit man against machine by letting the AI espouse the notion that "to have haves you need have nots" and fight to maintain the status quo, while the players will operate under the idealistic assumption of Buckminster Fuller that it has been possible since around 1973 to elmininate poverty and suffering and their is no longer any excuse for there to be "losers" in development.

The part of the game that pits man against the machine will occur in a classic virtual gaming environment, and at time could devolve into the violence of a first person shooter if the players desire.

The primary landscapes will be contemporary Cairo Egypt and Peten, Guatemala.  

The in game A.I. will be characters representing government officials, conservative citizens, business and industry leaders and religious fanatics among others. They will try hard to stop any progress toward "greening" the city or the village if it threatens their interests.  

The real players (human intelligences) who take on avatars in the virtual part of the game will assumedly do so in order to try out their skills as technology transfer agents, diplomats, relief workers, negotiaters and innovators.  

It is not inconceivable that some people will decide to play on the side of the "status quo", and that could make things even more interesting.

The point is that people can try out ideas in simulation before commiting to them in the real community.  If the local government officials protest, if the police arrest, beat or kill the "do-gooders", or if fanatics or thugs decide to get rid of the agents of change, then the game can get quite exciting indeed.

All of these things are also possible in the real world, but we think it is much more fun to PLAY these scenarios rather than suffer the consequences in the real world.

By playing, it is hoped that we will become more sophisticated when it comes to real local action, and avoid in the real world the danger and violent conflict that would be fun in the game.

Your further thoughts are welcome!

If you have map data about innercity Cairo you would like to contribute to this project, please contact us at thculhane@gmail.com


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