DENSIFICATION …..OF OBECITIES…… IS JUST A LOAD OF HOT AIR
The June 2009 issue of “The Ecologist” (the final print edition) was a special Issue devoted to “Sustainable Cities”.
What never ceases to baffle me about all such articles/TV programs, and I have read/watched many, is that they never succeed in identifying the fundamental flaw in our cities – THE FUNDAMENTAL FLAW IS SPRAWL . And, despite their best intentions, neither did Al Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth” or David Attenborough in his own CC documentary. The best they do is pepper the perimeter of the target with shots but they never get close to the targets bulls-eye, and if they ever do they don’t seem to realize it.
Anyway, to continue with the Ecologist.
I have just read a chapter devoted to “Sustainable Building” in which “sustainability consultant” Dr David Strong (www.inbuilt.co.uk) pontificates about “why the way we think about the issue needs to be demolished and rebuilt”. (It’s a pity he didn’t say “why London needs to be demolished and rebuilt”) Among other things he says
“The first task is to think differently and more comprehensively about sustainability, and to adopt ‘WHOLE SYSTEM THINKING’ (please teacher, my Dad says Arcologies are the solution! Shut-up and listen boy!). Its about collaborative, multidisciplinary, integrated teamwork. (now he’s sounding like a politician) It’s also about finding natural solutions to reduce our dependence on energy-intensive systems.
“There are so many opportunities offered by nature to ventilate, heat, cool, and illuminate our buildings for free.” (I agree, but such systems are expensive to install and work inefficiently in small buildings. They work infinitely more efficiently on a large scale, in large buildings, and ideally in VERY LARGE BUILDINGS. Arcologies are very large buildings that incorporate “whole system thinking” as Dr Strong puts it).
His ending remark is “The best solutions are ones that are deceptively simple and that FUSE TOGETHER ALL ASPECTS OF SUSTAINABILITY (er, um like Arcologies?), including a biologically and culturally informed appreciation of what people are and what they want from their environment”. (more grand-sounding but ultimately meaningless waffle)
I did a search on the Ecologists website for “Arcology” and came up with….Nada..! They appear to have not once even mentioned the word, let alone discussed the concept, even if only to reject it as a “pipe-dream” or “economically unfeasible” or whatever..! The only reason I can think of, and it is not an entirely logical one, is that everyone mistakenly assumes that an Arcology is not an Arcology unless it houses at least a million people! This is like saying you cannot have a large aircraft smaller than a 747 or a large ocean liner smaller than the latest 250,000 tonner. Paolo Soleri, who designed and promoted Arcologies (A City within a single building) on such a hyper-scale in his monumental book “Arcology – The City in the Image of Man” (MIT, 1969), is perhaps himself responsible for this mis-informed opinion and thus sadly, at the age of 90, the un-realisation of his dream. Must an Arcology of necessity house a million people? How absurd! Maybe one day they will though. Meanwhile why not start on a more modest scale – say 10,000 – a new city of say 100,000 people would then consist not of 40,000 small box-like houses (plus all the other mess) covering a vast area of fertile land, but just 10..!!!
And yet they blithely consider a massively gargantuan “refurbishment” of every single building in the country, a refurbishment that might optimistically result in a 20% carbon/GGE reduction. And yet, replacing the entire building stock with Arcologies would conservatively result in an 80% reduction. Of course it would be vastly expensive – although not nearly as much as you might think – and it certainly cannot be achieved overnight, but neither can any other solution..! And all the other “solutions” rely on expensively retro-fitting outmoded, grossly wasteful, problem-ridden, crime-ridden, grubby, sprawling, polluted, energy-sucking, social nightmares that you call Cities, but which in truth have become Obese Cities, or OBE-CITIES…!!
Unfortunately Sir Terry did not explain, nor did the interviewer ask, how this could be achieved in a city where the land has been minutely sub-divided into a million postage-stamp parcels of privately-owned land on which are sitting an equivalent number of little Englishmens castles. Densification – which, in density adverse British psychology, probably means going from low to medium density – ie, only a modest increase in terms of overall city density – could only be achieved via a massive district-wide compulsory purchase of houses in cheaper areas, though in London “cheap” is a relative term. With the average price of a “cheap” London house at say £250,000, any meaningful densification program would be as costly as the bank bailout. Lets look at some guesstimates.
Let us assume the London conurbation, as opposed to the smaller GLC area, has a population of 10 million depending on where the line is drawn. This would translate to approx. 4 million dwelling units of which perhaps 1 million are low and lower-medium density housing estates. Many of those, though, are in up-market areas currently worth upwards of £500,000 each – clearly out of the question. The govt could only afford to requisition the lower tier of semis and terraces – those built between 1920 and 1970 – that great but as yet un-named period of British peasant architecture.
For a whole host of reasons, sadly it wont be feasible to re-develop more than a small fraction of these endearingly ugly suburbs, but lets assume we can put a red cross on the front doors of just 10% of the 1 afore-estimated 1 million – ie, 100,000 houses. At £250,000 each that would be a cool £25 billion (100,000 x £250,000). Aside from the delightful residences most of the adjacent commercial property would also have to be acquired so the total compensation would easily be £30 billion, and that’s just for the land, without any demolition or re-building costs. So, in the unlikely event this is going to happen anytime soon, the govt and the taxpayer had better hope house prices tumble at least 50% from where they are now – at which point the owners fearing further losses might be willing to sell. But taxpayers, most of whom own residential property, don’t want prices to fall do they? So the govt, the planners, the greens (who are ambiguous on the issue), and the advocates of densification (assuming there are any besides Sir Terry) are in a no-win situation.
But if this is to be done, instead of replacing these dreary oblong hutches with boring upright hutches of flats, would it not make sense to build beautiful iconistic DSC’s in their place? If you intend to pay that much for the land it makes sense to make optimum use of it. And then you could also tear up all the roads too, thus increasing your buildable acreage by perhaps 25%…!
(I am also ignoring any public open land, parks, schoolgrounds, etc, which might add considerably to the total and which would be considerably cheaper to acquire)
And how much land would 100,000 dross houses release? Assuming 10 houses to the acre, that’s 10,000 acres or 4000 hectares. Adding the road space maybe 5000 hectares. (OK there will still need to be some roads or tram tracks, whatever, but I’m just making some rough guesstimates of the maximum potential) .
Lets assume that prior to requisitioning, these 100,000 houses housed 250,000 people – 2.5 per household being about the average. Ok lets assume they were 3-up – that’s 300,000
In theory, 5000 hectares could accommodate 250 DSC’s, of which at least 250 hectares would be parks, gardens, woodlands, etc.
(although somewhat less in practice because not all the cleared districts would be of the right dimensions or otherwise unsuitable),
250 DSC’s x 8000 people each = 2 million people (conservatively 1.5 million) could live in virtual paradise where previously 300,000 lived in ugliness.
Now it looks like an absolute bargain…!!!
Sir Terry – you were right..!
No democratic government would be politically or financially able to enforce a compulsory purchase order on hundreds of thousands of individual owners. And, regardless of how generous the compensation might be, there are bound to be some stubborn individuals who would demand more or refuse to co-operate. (And, due to decades of rising prices caused by massive over-speculation caused by ever-increasing levels of owner-occupancy, the government would be unable to afford purchase at “market rates” – and such a drastic move could only be achieved by force backed up by a military dictatorship.)
But, even if large-scale “densification” were a political and economic possibility, the so-called densification would be a half-measure and at best convert some low-density areas to medium density – it wouldn’t be anywhere near enough.
Decades of misguided government policies and individual greed have conspired to cover Britains green and pleasant landscape with monotonous sprawling suburbs of low-density individually-owned and occupied houses. This has left Britain with no option but to build the cities of the future on more virgin land. Our chickens have come home to roost.
Richard Register, author of “Ecocities:Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature”, says on his blog (www.ecocityviews.blogspot.com)
“…the concepts behind the ecological city are fairly simple. Here they are: Switch to a pedestrian and transit oriented infrastructure with ecocity architecture built around compact centers designed for pedestrians and transit. Roll back sprawl development while vigorously restoring nature and agriculture. Attach renewable energy systems while making things recyclable and using non-toxic materials and technologies. There you have it! Only three short sentences for the essence of it”.
Foster, Rogers, and Register are saying exactly what Paolo Soleri has been saying for 40 years. If it were not otherwise, their remarks would seem to be a perfect introduction and justification for the need for Arcologies, except they manage to avoid endorsing what surely is the comprehensive solution to these problems.
This is something I can never understand with greens – or celebrity architects like Foster and Rogers – they are very eloquent at pointing out all the disadvantages of ObeCities, but then they disappoint by mouthing the usual clichés and sound-bites of being more e/v aware and using a bit less of this and that….! They, and everyone else, are bereft of a substantive solution.
HAVE I MISSED SOMETHING?
When famous architects like Norman Foster and Richard Rodgers or enviro-activists George Monbiot (“Heat”) or authors like Richard Register – all of whom are very well aware of the problems – are not talking about arcologies at every conceivable opportunity, I have to admit it does make me doubt my own convictions. If they discussed it, or even mentioned it in passing, before dismissing the idea as impractical – at least I would know their thoughts on the issue. But I am consoled when reminded of George Orwells comment…..
“To see what is in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle”
WOULD PYRAMID ARCOLOGIES BE OUTRAGEOUSLY COSTLY TO BUILD?
Only one residential pyramid (Luxor Hotel, LV) has ever been built, so it is natural to assume that such a building would be more expensive than a traditional skyscraper (upended long box). But what is an A-frame building other than a 2-sided pyramid? Unlike a tall perpendicular building, a pyramid does not directly challenge the forces of gravity, so intuitively a pyramid should be both easier and cheaper to build than one which does.
Because its fundamental design is so much more stable, a pyramids inclined walls can be “under-engineered” with less steel and less concrete.
Furthermore, one of the major costs of a skyscraper is the excavation of its very deep foundations and the supporting structures therein. On the other hand, because a pyramid’s “footprint” is so much larger, its weight is correspondingly distributed over a much wider area. Thus the excavation needs be much less deep and then only under the load bearing walls. There will be no need to excavate where the huge atriums will be.
So, unless I’m missing something major, a pyramid might well be less expensive to build than a conventional building of the same floor space. I’m hedging my bets here because these are all optimistic guesstimates and assumptions which may well be completely wrong.
Interestingly Foster has designed a “self-contained city” within a building (he doesn’t use the word Arcology) for Moscow called “Crystal Tower” with a price tag of $4 billion which sounds optimistic considering these dimensions…
620m wide at base – 450m high
Total floor area 2,500,000 m2,
of which 1,400,000 below ground, consisting of
Underground Parking – approx. 14,000 spaces 525,000 m2
Utilities and services 875,000 m2
Site area 440,000 m2