The Recipe for Suburbia

 This blog post is based on a Facebook post I made. 

The recipe for suburbia is really simple. Take a city and add energy. It's that's simple. The city will flow out into burbs, first but putting energy into public transit and then into private cars and roads for them. We can see the history of suburbs with the first suburbs along transit corridors in the late 19th century and early 20th century energised by public transit. In the 20th century the automobile dialled up the energy use and facilitated suburban infilling. Suburbanisation happened at an increased rate. 

Two things can constrain this. Geographical containment like an ocean or mountain range and zoning constraints. This acts like a pressure container wherein pressure is contained and does flow out as energy wants to. But a pressurised container can be breeched by adding still more energy. A tunnel, bridge, land reclamation or other energy expending engineering project can push through a geographical boundary. Money can push through a zoning boundary. What is money? An IOU for energy. So energy can push through the best politically imposed zoning rules. Thus corruption in urban planning policy which is so common today.

If you want to compare American cities with European cities you can apply energy reductionism. The use of energy per person is lower in Europe than in the United States, especially true of fossil fuelled sources. In addition, because Europeans have a different political philosophy to Americans, Europe is more likely to have zoning law for development. The different types of cities in Europe compared to America is directly a reflection of energy use and, indirectly, energy IOUs applied to politics.

Looking at wealth as energy IOUs it is easy to see why wealth inequality is incompatible with democracy. The power to affect events, to use energy is lopsided and even the most carefully crafted system of checks and balances and due process will fail eventually under its weight. .

What is the effect of withdrawing energy from urban systems? A drop in private transport use except bicycle use. The use of bicycles would be expected to increase. An increase in walking and public transport use would also be predicted. Shrinkage of suburbs and contraction towards public transit corridors would be the long term consequence..

It is not only the spread of suburbia which a result of energising urban are but also the height of CBDs. Today's skylines are dominated by skyscrapers. Energetic pressure growing the height of the CBD as well as spreading out the suburbs. The invention of elevators in the late 19th century saw the first skyscrapers wherein people were no longer confined to buildings of 6 stories or fewer. It was always this and not engineering constraints which had limited the height of buildings. People will not walk up stairs to higher floors than this each day. Elevators made use of increasing energy use in the 19th century. The first skyscrapers were built in New York and Chicago and then they became ubiquitous in cities around the world. Going up as well as out with the increased input of energy into urban systems. With energy withdrawn, buildings over 6 stories would be unusable and skylines would eventually return to what they looked like before elevators were invented.