cities Archives - Page 5 of 11

Bicycles and Fresh Bread

The NY Times points out that bicycles and the European penchant for fresh bread are more closely related than you might at first imagine. A writer in Amsterdam talks about how a slightly different conception of daily life enables cities without cars, and how that life is really more free than our slavish commitment to the car.

Location Efficiency More Important than Home Energy Efficiency

How important is Location Efficiency? Median US home price: $175k. With a traditional 20% down 30 year mortgage, total loan payments amount to about $350k. Utilities over the same timeframe are around $75k. And the cost of commuting from suburbia? Roughly $300k! This is in general agreement with the energy (as opposed to financial) analysis recently published by the EPA.

Industrial Scale Urban Farming in NYC

TED fellow Viraj Puri talks about his Brooklyn rooftop farming startup. Gotham Greens has ~1500 square meters of hydroponic greenhouses producing herbs and salad greens in a very controlled environment… somewhere between a farm and a manufacturing facility. The system is solar powered, and can operate all year long. They currently produce ~100 tons of food a year, and they believe the business is viable at least in the urban foodie context. I was happy to see Puri readily (repeatedly) admitting (or even pointing out) that the system cannot scale up sufficiently to provide a large proportion of the city’s overall food requirements. This is in stark contrast to the idea of Vertical Farming, which is clearly bunkum — once you’ve covered the roofs with greens, there’s no more farming to be done unless you pipe in light somehow, which is much less efficient than simply farming where the light is naturally.

Just out of curiosity… I wonder how much food could be produced in Brooklyn at full capacity? And roughly how much does the city eat? The land area of the borough is 183 km^2 and it has 2,500,000 residents, or roughly 75 m^2 per person. Their production of 100 tons/1500 m^2 is roughly 66 kg/m^2 per year. So if the entire area of Brooklyn were producing like this greenhouse, you’d get nearly 5000 kg of food per person per year. The average American consumes about 1000 kg of food per year, so if you were able to use 20% of the borough’s area, you’d be close to meeting demand… at least by mass. Gotham’s 59kW solar array probably takes up ~590 m^2 (100 W/m^2 is typical of solar cell power production) and only provides part of the operation’s power. Probably there’s other infrastructure too that’s not actively producing food, so say they’ve got about half their total area dedicated to actual plants… then you’d need to get up to 40% of the land area being utilized to get 1000 kg of greens per resident per year. However, most of the 1000 kg that we actually eat is a lot more energy dense than lettuce. I wonder how many calories per m^2 one can get out of these setups, and what the most productive crops would be? Honestly I’m surprised at how large the potential production is. I wonder what the actually available rooftop area is?

The American suburbs are a giant Ponzi scheme

Suburbia as Ponzi scheme. We have subsidized suburban growth through debt and taxes, and reaped the short-term financial rewards of that growth, but at the expense of taking on ever larger long-term liabilities in terms of infrastructure maintenance and a very energy intensive transportation system. I disagree with Strong Towns on the appropriate overall scale of habitation (more people and a much larger fraction of our overall economy live in cities, not towns), but this is (another) good critique of the American Nightmare.

Major developer to build car-free micro-homes in Portland

DR Horton, which has built nearly 20,000 mostly suburban homes across the US, is now pitching cozily downsized car-free living in SE Portland. It’s a development called Division 43, made up of 29 units, in 2-3 story buildings, on one third of an acre, with no on-site parking, and shared outdoor spaces including a garden plot. 350-700 square feet, 1-2 bedrooms and 1-2.5 baths, open floor plans, energy efficient, $120-180k. Sounds pretty awesome. Would be great to see similar stuff available in Boulder.

Location Efficiency and Housing Type

According to this EPA study, regardless of the type of housing, living in an area with good transit access saves more energy than building a “green home”. Of course, living in a mixed use, transit accessible apartment that’s also energy efficient uses the least energy, but it’s important to realize how limited the potential for cost-effective energy efficiency is in a sprawling suburban context.

Activate the Future

BMW is running an ad campaign on the future of mobility. Of course, they call it a “documentary”. It’s amazing how close they come to imagining a future in which we don’t use cars in cities. But of course, since they’re a car company, they can’t quite get there. The fundamental attribute of cities that makes them work — density — is also what makes them incompatible with cars.

UNEP Green Cities Report

UN say cities are green, need to be greener (pdf). Cities provide higher standards of living, and more economic opportunity with less energy, materials, and land use. They house 50% of the world’s people, but account for 60-75% of the world’s emissions, not because they’re inefficient, but because city dwellers are disproportionately rich. Interesting data points: Tokyo and Paris dwellers emit half as much carbon as New Yorkers or Londoners. São Paulo is as rich as Mexico City but with 1/3 the emissions. Delhi is 1/3 as rich as São Paulo, but with the same emissions.

Population Growth vs. Migration in Boulder and the World

The Boulder Blue Line has a short post entitled This Law Cannot Be Repealed by Albert Bartlett, who is an emeritus professor of Physics at CU, and who is most well known for speaking about the absurdity of “sustainable” growth and what exponential growth really means. He’s also one of the original architects of Boulder’s “Blue Line”, which has limited growth beyond certain boundaries within the city and county.

I agree with Bartlett on a lot. Unconstrained population growth is undoubtedly, in a global context, an epic disaster. In his collection of essays Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley noted of overpopulation that “Unsolved, that problem will render insoluble all our other problems.” Similarly, the unconstrained geographic growth of towns and cities is a catastrophe, resulting in very low-density, car-dependent development which exacerbates the consequences of population growth by increasing the amount of resources that each individual consumes, in terms of land and energy and material goods.