Why haven’t we ever built domed cities?

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
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Why haven’t we ever built domed cities?

Short answer: it’s a difficult engineering challenge, it would be very expensive, and would have a lot of drawbacks- but that would have made a pretty uninteresting column. :stuck_out_tongue:

Domed cities hark back to '50s science fiction, when the hubris of the times led to the expectation that Science! could achieve almost anything. Along with flying cars, rockets to Mars, and limitless cheap atomic energy, domed cities would fulfill the (dis?)utopian dream of freeing people from the whims of nature.

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Cecil mentioned Fuller, but he fell a bit short: He didn’t even mention his other proposal, to build fully-enclosed cities floating miles high in the atmosphere.

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Domes go much farther back than the 1950s, although it’s true that covers with them became much more common then.

Hugo Gernsback’s ur-story of collected science fiction wonders, *Ralph 124C 41+ *features a floating domed vacation city, which started serialized in Modern Electrics in April 1911.

Other early mentions of domed cities include:
J. Schlossel, “A Message from Space,” Weird Tales, March 1926
David H. Keller, “A Life Everlasting,” Amazing Stories, July-August 1934
Capt. S. P. Meek, “Giants on the Earth,” Astounding Stories, Dec-1931/Jan. 1932 (though the cities are on Venus)
D. G. Turner, “Moon Madness,” Scoops, June 2, 1934 (on the moon)
Stanton A. Coblentz, “The Sunken World,”* Amazing Stories Quarterly*, August 1928 (underwater in Atlantis)
John Duthrie, “Electrolytic Onslaught,” Astounding Stories, Jun 1935 (underwater)
A. W. Bernal, “Cosmic Menace,” Amazing Stories Quarterly, Summer 1931
Clifton B. Kruse, “Menace from Saturn,” Astounding Stories, July 1935 (on Venus)
David R. Daniels, “Death Cloud,” Astounding Stories, February 1936

And another David H. Keller story, “One Way Tunnel,” Wonder Stories, January 1935 with a domed city cover by Frank R. Paul.

Domed or roofed cities were not invented by sf writers or artists. Almost nothing was. Check out the roofed city in this series of German postcards depicting the future from c1900. It was directly stolen for an American series.

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I think you’d have to look at the advantages and disadvantages of such a system.

All you’d really be accomplishing would be to eliminate outside weather, and essentially putting the city in a greenhouse. So you wouldn’t have rain, or snow or serious wind, but you’d also have to cool the place, and to a lesser extent, heat the place, all on the municipality’s dime.

Plus, you’d be limited in growth- it would be like the modern equivalent of the medieval city wall. Before long, you’d have city growth outside the dome’s confines.

I suspect that rain, snow and wind aren’t such huge issues in most places that anyone would seriously think of putting a dome over a city, with all the energy, pollution and maintenance issues that would entail. Better to let everyone do their own climate control in their own buildings to the degree that they can, or to which they see fit.

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A better question concerning a dome over a city might be, “Why bother?” What is the profit?

You have a dome.
Next time you deep fry a turkey, all the smoke glues itself to the dome.
The same with outgassing plastics, (That new car smell.).
No more grass, or trees, until you start spraying millions of gallons of water on the ground.
It’s 25 degrees C, inside, it’s 40 below, outside. Condensation, and more weight on the dome.
We had a snow storm in Oklahoma City. There was a foot of snow on a plastic greenhouse. The owner was worried about snow load. He called the OKC fire department, and they started hosing the snow off the roof. Dry fluffy snow became wet, sticky, saturated snow. Surprise! The greenhouse collapsed.
Watch the Simpsons movie to learn why a domed city may not be a good idea, if you can still breath the outside air.

For a practical domed city, move to Mars. Until the dust builds up high enough, and the static charge builds up until you can flash fry a cow, and collapses the dome, you can live in a domed city.

Some ideas look better on paper.

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Despite some minor disadvantages like air circulation, high maintenance costs, and the potential for catastrophic failure there is still one over significant advantage to domed cities. They look really cool.

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Discovery had an episode on their Mega Engineering show about building a dome over Huston…you can watch it on Youtube if you like. Seemed like a lot of work for little gain, though they do address some of the problems mentioned here and in Cecil’s article.

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Fremont Street, except on a bigger scale. Awesome idea.

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Multiple small scale enclosed living spaces are better.
I lived in Winnipeg. There is a twin tower high rise apartment building there, that has a glass enclosed, full height atrium between the towers. All winter the apartments with balconies in the atrium are warm, have nice levels of humidity. There is a tropical garden in the atrium.
The buildings themselves provide more than enough support for the glass wall structures. There is venting. The roof area is relatively small. But the sides let in lots of light.

A giant dome is unreasonable for many reasons. But using buildings in high density areas to host various sized enclosures is very reasonable. Also, the smaller enclosures are easier to control. If they are hooked together with air circulation systems / enclosed walkways, they can be further moderated. Some may collect more or less heat than others. Non enclosed areas would still be scattered all over as well, so some urban nature can exist.

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I came across an article about the proposed Winooski, Vermont dome that Cecil mentioned: Doomed Dome: The Future That Never Was – h+ Media

I thought by now we’d build a dome
Around the world, control the weather

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Wait a minute, the real question is what exactly is going on in Slug’s drawing? What does it have to do with domed cities? Who is the giant horned baby and is that supposed to be chocolate milk?

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Thanks for reminding me why I never look at Slug’s drawings.

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This one was WTF-er than usual.

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(emphasis mine)

Well heck, I just learned something new today. Go ahead and take the rest of the day off with pay, Exapno. You’ve earned it. :slight_smile:

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OK, to deconstruct Slug’s drawing: The letter writer states

So we have:
[ul]
[li]a kid (the one they used to be)[/li][li]living in Winnipeg (so the antlered earflap cap ala’ The McKenzie Brothers) who dreamed of-[/li][li]being served (chocolate milk, though why that I dunno)[/li][li]by a robot; and there’d be flying cars (in this case, a flying robot car)[/li][/ul]

By Signorino standards this one makes sense; but I guess there was no opportunity to work in a scantily clad woman with incredibly cantilevered breasts.