Chapter 2553: The Sound of Wind and Rain (Part One)

Gotham's autumn was always particularly bleak. Once the plants, never lush to begin with, lost the last hint of green, even their dryness and decay lacked substance; it was more as if the gentle facade had been stripped from the steel skeleton, revealing the city's inherently cold urban forest.

Describing Gotham as a steel forest was apt, especially during the time when Bruce was applying for his PhD. The Gotham architectural renovation project was ongoing, and up to now, the East District had been completely transformed.

The renovation project's design philosophy had always been to use a limited amount of land to accommodate as many people as possible, ensuring their housing needs were met, whatever the cost.

Therefore, the entire East District, with less than one-fifth of the city's area, had solved the housing problem for over eight million Gothamites from all walks of life. The design concept of a vertical city played a significant role in this.

Skyscrapers around the world were generally used for commercial offices, not for residential housing. Even those deemed high-rise residential buildings were rarely over 40 stories, let alone the super-buildings frequently boasting seventy or eighty floors.

Clearly, it wasn't that developers didn't want to fit more people onto smaller land parcels; it was that excessively tall buildings were no longer suitable for human habitation. Insulation, soundproofing, building stability, and even the carrying capacity of elevators were all problems that needed addressing. Rather than solving these, it was often easier to simply acquire more land.

But for Wayne Enterprises, these were not insurmountable issues. Once the core policies of the entire building renovation project were established, these technical problems were one by one overcome.

Firstly, the buildings in the East District were not isolated towers; many of the high-rises within a given area were interconnected.

If one had to draw a comparison, they might be likened to the Colosseum, where columns and slabs supported each other, enclosing the outer area, while leaving separate living spaces within.

This configuration allowed the exterior high-rises to support one another, reducing the demand for material strength, without the need to construct separate communal areas. Even sports fields, gardens, schools, and other civil amenities could be accommodated.

Of course, there was the perennial problem of lighting. Though the current generation of Gothamites did not need sunlight, having been nearly scorched by the excessively intense sun that summer, the next generation still needed to live a normal life like other cities and not avoid basking in the sun.

A typical planning designer would either choose to sacrifice building height or continue to research materials in order to ensure normal lighting in an area dense with skyscrapers.

But Wayne Enterprises didn't follow the beaten path; they didn't plan to move their buildings, they planned to move the sun.

Of course, they were not actually going to shift a star, but rather, they planned to accumulate sunlight using the clouds above Gotham and release it precisely when needed.

Take, for example, that each building assembly had its own number. That number didn't indicate when the building area was constructed, but represented its geographical location, lighting direction, and lighting time.

Once the specified time coded in the number was reached, the clouds would open a hole over that specific area, releasing the sunlight accumulated within along the designated orientation, ensuring that sunlight was available throughout the entire lighting period.

Of course, this was not a long-term solution, because ever since the controllable cloud device began working, the clouds had been gradually dissipating. According to surveys and records by professional detection and statistical teams, the clouds could eventually dissipate within the next fifty years.

By then, lighting would become a major issue again, but Wayne Enterprises still didn't want to move buildings; they had already begun researching the creation of artificial suns.

Gothamites had no opinions on this, mainly because although they lived in the East District, it had mostly been transformed into residential spaces, with the occasional commercial facility offering insufficient job opportunities.

This meant that although they returned to the East District at night, they still had to work in other districts during the day.

Because nearly all the population had been moved to the East District, all the slums in the other three districts were thoroughly eradicated, freeing up an unimaginable amount of land.

Slums were like a stubborn disease on the American landscape. Many people's imaginations of extremely decayed and chaotic slums, lacking water and electricity, where people huddled together waiting for death, did exist, but there were many more hidden slums.

For instance, a condo community long devoid of property maintenance, a street block that has been fighting a lawsuit with the power company and remains without electricity to this day, or a declining community that failed to maintain street cleanliness, eventually causing housing prices to plummet.

These communities attracted homeless individuals, leading to increased chaos and insecurity, and even if they appeared new and well-kept on the outside, the living quality of all residents within plummeted, forcing them to either join the ranks or flee.

Many residents of these types of districts had been enduring because they couldn't afford to move to better communities, yet they still had just enough to avoid becoming homeless.

After the establishment of the East District, these people were almost entirely lured there, and the houses they left behind were then repurchased and renovated.

And the fact is that only a minority of people fall into the real hell of slums or can afford the luxury of living in high-end villas; the vast majority of ordinary Americans live in such communities.

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

Besides allowing investors to build more commercial space, Gotham's industrial resurgence could provide many more job opportunities.

Although many comics depict Gotham as having severe pollution, they rarely introduce what kind of industries the city actually has.

In fact, the severe pollution stems from Gotham's chemical industries, which made the city rich and are the lifeblood of Wayne Enterprises, not only leading on the entire East Coast but also renowned in America and the world.

In addition, Gotham once had a very glorious shipbuilding industry history, but unfortunately, that is in the past, and now shipbuilding has become a pillar of Metropolis.

However, in such manufacturing industries, there is still a latecomer advantage. The dozens of shipyards of Gotham's glorious past, although bankrupt in the last century, are gradually reviving under the strong injection of Wayne Enterprises' funds, with three reacquired and integrated Gotham shipyards.

With the chemical industry still being the industrial backbone of the entire city, pollution is an issue that must be faced.

Some might expect Wayne Enterprises to come up with some astonishing technology to make chemical pollution disappear in an instant.

But in reality, pollution treatment is also an industry that can provide a lot of job opportunities. Pollution detection, treatment, and emission—each step requires manpower and can give birth to many companies, all of which are vital links in keeping the city running.

The primary method for Gotham to deal with chemical pollution is still to discharge it into the sea, but they have someone in the sea.

Green Lantern Hal used the massive amount of Green Lantern energy he had acquired to set up energy nets in the three directions where Gotham meets the sea, breaking down the remaining pollutants. Arthur sent the Atlanteans to monitor the waters around Gotham, ensuring that the filtered seawater was safe.

This system not only ensures the wastewater discharged barely harms the marine environment but also allows Bruce Wayne, who controls the system, to quickly catch any insider wanting to dump pollution.

Once he had such sensitive monitoring methods, it meant that those underhanded businesses failing to properly manage pollution became exposed, pressuring the pollution treatment industry within Gotham to undergo technological involution.

After all, if your technology isn't good enough and the wastewater you discharge doesn't meet the standards, you'll be immediately named by Wayne Enterprises. To maintain their position in the industry, they'd have to get to work and accomplish real things.

Among the four regions of Gotham, the West District was the earliest to develop and the first to decay, holding many similar declining communities. After the residential system in the East District was established, many of the inhabitants left in the West District chose to sell their houses and move to new homes in the East District.

In fact, a large area of the West District was originally an old industrial base. Together with the newly vacated space, more than 70% of the West District area can be used to build new industrial parks.

Thus countless chemical and related peripheral industrial plants gathered here. In addition, super conglomerates like Wayne Enterprises also built high-tech parks here, focusing on medical, nuclear power, electronic chips, semiconductors, new energy, and other high-tech industries.

Corresponding to the West District is the North District. Once dominated by the mob, it was the main base of the Twelve Families, with most of the industries built and developed around the mob, and was once a den for black and gray industries.

However, Godfather Falcone was ambushed on the eve of the music festival and has been missing since then. The Twelve Families crumbled, and those who successfully went legit mostly turned into modern corporations, no longer priding themselves as gangster families. They became the leading force in building the North District.

Since the North District itself had many entertainment areas for mob bosses to relax and for black and gray industry members to fence their loot, it remains predominantly entertainment-based, following the model of Emperor City, with gambling and gambling tourism as its pillar industries. It also encompasses alcohol, tobacco, and illicit product sales, along with some theme parks, dance halls, theaters, and other public facilities.

And because the North District borders on land, it has large undeveloped suburban land, which is why higher-end entertainment venues like golf courses, racetracks, large integrated sports arenas, etc., are under continuous construction.

The part of the West District that borders land is used for agriculture. But Gotham is that kind of city that, even without human pollution, is not very suitable for agriculture due to its land and climate conditions, so the farmland is quite small. Most of it comprises agro-tourism farms that serve as attractions for visitors.

In Gotham, the terrain is higher in the west and lower in the east, and the more south you go, the more uneven the terrain becomes. The suburban areas of the West District are mostly hills, and the groundwater conditions aren't good, with water resources not as plentiful as in the East. So, even now with sunshine and no pollution, and Pamela, the plant expert, to assist, the agricultural products can only be considered for amusement and can't compare to the agricultural projects Metropolis started a few years ago.

However, Gotham has been successful with its indoor farming project. With investment from Wayne Enterprises and cooperation with the biology and chemistry departments of Gotham University, they have established a specialized plant cultivation industrial park in the West District, focusing on the cultivation of precious and counter-seasonal high-end ornamental plants. In less than a year after completion, it turned a profit.