Chapter 2506

Cat Getan's autumn is always exceptionally bleak; after the plants here—which were never lush to begin with—lose their last hint of green, even their withering and decay lack sufficient weight. It feels more like the city has been stripped of the gentle outer garment covering its steel skeleton, allowing this cold urban forest to return to its true form.

Using "steel forest" to describe Cat Getan today is truly fitting. During the time Bruce has been applying for his doctorate, Cat Getan's architectural renovation project has been ongoing, and as of now, the East District has been completely renovated.

The design philosophy for the renovation project has always been to accommodate the maximum number of people on limited land, ensuring their living needs are met to the greatest extent possible, sparing no cost to achieve this.

Therefore, the entire East District now solves the housing problems for over 8 million people of all social strata in Cat Getan, occupying less than one-fifth of the city's total area; the design philosophy of three-dimensional urban planning has played a major role in this.

Skyscrapers all over the world are basically used for commercial offices rather than residential housing; even those referred to as high-rise residences rarely exceed 40 floors, let alone super-tall buildings that easily reach 70 or 80 floors.

Obviously, this isn't because developers don't want to fit more people into smaller plots of land, but because buildings that are too tall are no longer suitable for human habitation. Heat preservation, sound insulation, structural stability, and even the load-bearing capacity of elevators are all problems that need to be solved. With the effort required to solve these issues, it's better to find ways to acquire more land.

However, this is not a very difficult problem for the Wei En Group to solve. After establishing the core guidelines for the entire architectural renovation project, these technical problems were broken through one by one.

First of all, the buildings in the East District are not isolated skyscrapers; many high-rises within a single area are interconnected.

If one must make a comparison, it would be a bit like the Roman Colosseum, where pillars and stone slabs support each other, enclosing an external area while leaving individual living spaces inside.

This allows the skyscrapers on the outside to support each other, reducing the requirements for material strength, while eliminating the need to build separate community activity spaces. Even public facilities like sports fields, gardens, and schools can be tucked inside.

Of course, the age-old problem is lighting. Although Gothamites of this generation don't need sunlight—and were almost baked by the overly intense sun that summer—the next generation of Gothamites must live a normal life like those in other cities and cannot avoid the sun.

Normal planning designers would either choose to sacrifice building height or continue to study materials to ensure proper lighting for an area with dense skyscrapers.

But the Wei En Group doesn't take the beaten path; they don't intend to move their buildings, they intend to move the sun.

Of course, this doesn't mean actually moving a star, but rather using the dark clouds over Cat Getan to accumulate sunlight and release it precisely at designated times.

For example, every building complex has its own number. The number doesn't mean when the building area was constructed, but represents its geographical location, lighting orientation, and lighting duration.

Once the time specified by the number is reached, the dark clouds will open a gap over that area, releasing the accumulated sunlight according to the specified orientation, ensuring that this place can receive sunlight during the entire lighting period.

Of course, this is not a long-term solution, because since the dark cloud control device started working, the dark clouds have been gradually decreasing. According to investigations and records by professional detection and statistical teams, the dark clouds may gradually dissipate within the next 50 years.

By then, lighting will become a big problem again, but the Wei En Group still doesn't want to move the buildings; they have already started researching how to create a sun.

Gothamites have no opinion on this, mainly because although they live in the East District, the current East District has basically been converted into residences, and the occasional convenience commercial facilities interspersed within cannot provide enough jobs.

In other words, although they return to the East District to sleep at night, they still have to work in other districts during the day.

Just because almost the entire population has been relocated to the East District, all the slums in the other three districts have been completely cleared, which has freed up an unimaginable amount of land.

Slums are like a stubborn disease on American soil. The extremely dilapidated and chaotic slums that many people imagine—without water or electricity, where people are crowded together waiting to die—do indeed exist, but there are more "hidden" slums.

For example, an apartment community that has long lacked property maintenance, a neighborhood that has been in a lawsuit with the power company and remains without electricity, or a declining community that failed to maintain street cleanliness, eventually causing housing prices to hit rock bottom.

These communities attract the homeless, making the entire neighborhood's public security even more chaotic. Even if their exteriors look new and good, the quality of life for everyone living there plummets, eventually forcing them to join in or flee.

Many residents in such neighborhoods have been in a state of endurance because they don't have the money to move to better communities, yet they still have the conditions to avoid falling into the state of being homeless.

After the East District was built, these people were basically attracted there, and the houses they owned were re-acquired and renovated.

The fact is, those who fall into truly hellish slums and those who can afford extremely high-end villa areas are both in the minority; the vast majority of ordinary Americans live in such communities.

Therefore, after concentrating the vast majority of the civilian class in the East District, the space freed up is astonishing.

In addition to allowing investors to build more commercial space, Cat Getan's industrial recovery can provide more jobs.

Although in many comics Cat Getan has extremely serious pollution, it is rarely introduced what kind of industries this city actually has.

In fact, such serious pollution comes from the chemical industry that Cat Getan used to get rich and establish itself. It is not just second to none on the entire East Coast, but also famous on the American and even global level, and is also the aorta of the Wei En Group, this super-conglomerate.

Besides this, Cat Getan once had a very glorious history in the shipbuilding industry, but unfortunately, that was some time ago; now the shipbuilding industry has become the pillar of Metropolis.

However, in this type of manufacturing, the late-mover advantage still exists. Although the dozens of shipyards from Cat Getan's glorious era went bankrupt one after another in the last century, under the powerful blood transfusion of the Wei En Group, the three re-acquired and integrated Cat Getan shipyards are still gradually recovering.

With the chemical industry still being the industrial pillar of the entire city, the pollution problem is one that must be faced.

Some people might expect the Wei En Group to come up with some amazing technology to make chemical pollution disappear instantly.

But in reality, pollution treatment is also an industry that can provide a large number of jobs. Pollution detection, pollution treatment, and pollution discharge—every link requires manpower and can give birth to many enterprises, which is also an important link in maintaining the city's operation.

Currently, Cat Getan's main way of dealing with chemical pollution is still discharging it into the sea, but they have people in the sea.

Green Lantern Hal used the large amount of Green Lantern energy he obtained previously to set up energy filters in the three directions where Cat Getan borders the sea, decomposing the remaining pollutants. Arthur sent the Sea Race to monitor fixed points around Cat Getan, ensuring that the filtered seawater has no problems.

This system not only ensures that the discharged wastewater basically won't harm the marine environment, but also allows Bruce Wei En, who controls this system, to catch the mole who wants to discharge pollutants at the fastest speed.

And once he has such sensitive monitoring means, it leaves those mole enterprises that fish in troubled waters and don't properly treat pollution with nowhere to hide, which in turn forces Cat Getan's various pollution treatment industries to engage in technical involution.

After all, if you don't have good enough technology and the discharged sewage doesn't meet standards, you will immediately be named and shamed by the Wei En Group. To maintain their status in the industry, they have to actually do some real work.

Among Cat Getan's four districts, the West District, which developed earliest and declined first, has a large number of similar decaying communities. After the East District's housing system was built, many residents remaining in the West District chose to sell their houses and move to the East District to live in new homes.

The West District actually originally had a large area that was an old industrial base. Adding the newly freed-up space, more than 70% of the West District area can be used to build new industrial parks.

Thus, countless chemical industries and their subordinate peripheral industrial plants gathered here. In addition, super-conglomerates like the Wei En Group also established high-tech parks here, focusing on high-tech industries such as medicine, nuclear power, electronic chips, semiconductors, and new energy.

Comparable to the West District is the North District, which was once dominated by gangs and was the base camp of the Twelve Families. Most industries were built and developed around gangs, and it was once a money-laundering den for black and gray industries.

However, on the eve of the music festival, Godfather Falcone was assassinated and his whereabouts remain unknown. The Twelve Families have almost fallen apart. Most of those families that successfully "came ashore" have transformed into modern corporate systems and no longer label themselves as gang families; they are the main force in building the North District.

Because the North District itself had many entertainment areas for gang bosses to consume and have fun, and for black and gray industry personnel to fence stolen goods, it is still dominated by the entertainment industry. The model imitates the Imperial City, with the gambling industry and gambling tourism as pillar industries. It also includes the sale of alcohol, tobacco, and contraband, and also has some public facilities such as amusement parks, dance halls, and theaters.

And because the North District borders land and has large areas of suburban land waiting to be developed, higher-end entertainment venues such as golf courses, horse farms, and large comprehensive sports venues are also being built one after another.

The part of the West District that borders land is used for agriculture. However, Cat Getan is a city where, even setting aside man-made pollution, its own land and climate conditions are not very suitable for developing agriculture, so the area of farmland is relatively small, and there are more comprehensive farms with tourist reception properties.

The terrain within Cat Getan City is high in the west and low in the east, and the further south you go, the more uneven the terrain becomes. The suburbs of the western region are basically hills, and the groundwater conditions are not good enough, and water resources are not as abundant as in the east. So even if there is sunlight and no pollution now, and with Pamela, a plant expert, there to escort them, the agricultural products produced can only be said to be for fun, not even comparable to the farmland projects that Metropolis started a few years ago.

However, Cat Getan's indoor planting projects are quite impressive. Under the investment of the Wei En Group, in cooperation with the Biology and Chemistry Departments of Cat Getan University, a special plant cultivation industrial park was invested and built in the West District, focusing on the cultivation of rare and high-end ornamental plants that defy climate conditions, and it actually became profitable less than a year after completion.