The Matrix- Not the Future Our Cities Want

The Matrix- Not the Future Our Cities Want

The Matrix movie was created to show a matrix system that was designed in order to sustain the machine world and keep it protected from the potential harm of human beings. This system was created by machines with Artificial Intelligence and these machines were created by humans. In the matrix system, the AI was able to tap into the bioelectricity that the human body creates. This form of heat and electricity was used to power the machines. Although this idea of machines taking over human’s lives to protect themselves and using human heat as electricity is a little far-fetched for today’s world, the idea of using the wasted heat energy and bioelectricity as a sustainable way to power machines in the future could actually be a possibility.

The movie features and takes place in an expansive virtual city, called Mega City. This is where all of the humans in the matrix live. This virtual city is often viewed as many real-life cities mashed together in order to form one massive city. It houses a very large urban area and has a skyline that is impressive, yet uninteresting. Mega City is meant to show the grey and utilitarian parts of cities in the United States and Australia in the 1990s. It also shows the small areas inside those cities that have entertainment and color. The city is said to be designed in this way so the humans inside of the matrix cannot distinguish between what they have created in reality and the virtual world they are inhabiting inside the matrix. This was meant to show how the expansive cities and buildings that were going up through the 1990s were not sustainable in the future of the expansion of cities, yet humans were not recognizing what needed to be done to have sustainable cities and buildings in the future. This idea stems from the hyper reality theory, which states that this society that is controlled by the machines is more believable and realistic to the humans than the actual world that they live in.

Figure 1

Mega City is designed as a Y shape city. This provides opportunities to divide, split, and create hierarchies between the four main districts of the city- Downtown, International, Westview, and Richland. Richland is viewed as the slum of Mega City and Westview is where the middle class live in the movie. Downtown is mainly the working center of the city and is divided from the lower and middle-class houses by the large aqueduct, as it almost acts as a moat protecting Downtown and International from those two areas. International is where the upper-class lives in the city. It is purposely laid out to not be easily accessible from the poorer areas of down to keep those people out. However, Downtown is connected to those areas by bridges for lower and middle class people to get to work. As can be seen from the map of the Downtown district in Figure 3, each of the four districts in the city are very large and include entire cities within each one of them to form Mega City.

Figure 2

Figure 3

So, what can we learn from The Matrix and how can we create more sustainable buildings in the future from it? Clearly, future cities want to avoid the grey and utilitarian design and want to strive to create vibrant areas that provide unique experiences to occupants. As we saw from the example in The Matrix (Figure 4), cities can develop grey and unsustainable futures if we are not smart in the future of urban design. From the movie, the idea of using excess and wasted heat and bioelectricity to power machines is given an application. How realistic is this in the future of architecture and urban design though? Thermoelectric power has been a hot topic recently in the push for green energy and green buildings. It has been calculated that 20-50% of the total heat created from inside buildings and from their mechanical systems is wasted and released into the environment. Initial challenges with this process mainly include large upfront costs, difficulty transporting the heat turned energy to be used again, and a need for a relatively low temperature to oppose the heat to make the energy. However, there are solutions being tested for all issues. The upfront costs will most likely decrease as technology advances and becomes more readily available, as we’ve seen many times before. As far as transporting the heat energy, insulated pipes, more efficient propulsion, and cheaper insulating materials are all being explored. Finally, being able to get a cooler temperature to interact with the heat has simple solutions, it is just a matter of finding efficient ways to imply those solutions. In conclusion, we can see from the movie The Matrix how unsustainable urban design can affect human’s everyday lives. Solutions to the issues of creating more green buildings are being worked on currently and may be a lot closer in our futures than we might think.

Figure 4