Chris Kott wrote:
Creighton might disagree with me, but if the stationary battery storage issue has, indeed, been solved ages ago, it should be a simple matter of policy and economic incentive to help cities develop decentralised energy storage for off-peak generation times for solar and wind. It could be neighbourhood-scale, up to city scale, or it could be, in a move toward greater resiliency, a network of installations for individual high-rises, whereby excess power is stored throughout the system, to be released to the network when demand is higher. We seem to have no issue building parking accommodations and utility spaces deep underground; why wouldn't this work for giant batteries?
-CK
Of course, entire cities of the populations & needs that exist today switching back to wood gas after natural gas stops flowing can't be sustainable either. But then, nor do I consider the current population density of the Eastern seaboard to be sustainable; so either way, that which cannot continue will eventually cease; and an energy crunch or water shortage are exactly the right kind of crisis that would force the issue.
Gilbert Fritz wrote:
Of course, entire cities of the populations & needs that exist today switching back to wood gas after natural gas stops flowing can't be sustainable either. But then, nor do I consider the current population density of the Eastern seaboard to be sustainable; so either way, that which cannot continue will eventually cease; and an energy crunch or water shortage are exactly the right kind of crisis that would force the issue.
Creighton, what size of city do you think is sustainable? (Leaving aside issues such as Las Vegas.)
Gilbert Fritz wrote:
What a very Dickens viewpoint on urban living. The fact of the matter is that cities do exist as a natural consequence of the human drive towards trade, and there will always be a significant portion of the population that prefers an urban lifestyle. Granted, any city larger than about half a million people is likely too large to sustain itself in any long term energy crunch, but cities have existed for as long as civilization has existed, and they will continue to exist.
I'd agree. I'd also think that any city of less then half a million people wouldn't really need that tall of buildings . . . (Rome may have had a million inhabitants 1900 years ago, and they couldn't build much over 10 stories, if that. And it was a fairly compact city.)
In geographic locations that ancient cities would likely form, such as were two bodies of water intersect, (i.e. where a navigable river from the interior reaches a sea or large lake) and no resource limitations on the availability of water, good soil, decent growing weather during the summer season or wood, I'd consider half million to be the practical limitation. Any region that does not have direct access to a navigable waterway would be way less. We know from history, that smaller towns would form around such ancient cities, spreading out away from the main city about every 10 miles along any reasonable path, because the distance that a person could reasonably walk to a marketplace and return in the same day is about 5 miles each direction. The size of those towns were typically limited to the number of people that could either walk to nearby fields to work, or performed some kind of necessary trade skill that the farms within 5 miles would regularly require. The legacy of such an effect is all over the Eastern seaboard of the United States, although most of the actual impact has been covered over by suburbia and urban sprawl. Cities can only support their citizens with the ability to trade at distance, over water typically, and form because such long distance trade is how fortunes were once made.
Gilbert Fritz wrote:
Hi Creighton,
Thanks. I would assume that as cities shrink back to their maximum sustainable sizes, that the mid density and secondary core areas would do best, as opposed to the low density suburbs and the high density cores. Wouldn't it make sense that people would preferentially relocate to walkable neighborhoods with buildings that were more easily heatable, cool-able, and accessible then those in the downtown high-rise cores? Am I missing something here?
In short, I'd imagine building size and density would mimic traditional cities around the globe.
We don't have time for this. We've gotta save the moon! Or check this out:
Willow Feeder movie
https://permies.com/t/273181/Willow-Feeder-movie
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