One 'Solution' to Urban Air Pollution: Let's Live in Bubbles

You know China and India have environmental image problems when people give up on fixing their dismal air quality and instead suggest living like the Bubble Boy in hermetic, climate-controlled complexes.

That's the innovative and somewhat troublesome vision of international architecture firm Orproject, which proposes dotting cities in the developing world with green spaces containing filtered air. The "Bubbles Biodiversity Parks," as the recently awarded idea is called, isn't exactly original; back in the 1960s, Buckminster Fuller dreamed of enclosing Midtown Manhattan with a pollution-fighting, 2 mile-wide hemisphere. The project proved impractical, but the folks at Orproject assert today's technology could support smaller, more lightweight greenhouses—sort of like happier versions of the dreadful structure in Under the Dome.