[QUOTE=Lumpy]
Thrasymachus, the concept of urban living in one big building is an old one; probably goes back to the 1920s. To make a long story short, it’s impractical. Even the Soviet Union- famous for it’s ugly architecture, bureaucratic central planning, and lack of concern for it’s peoples’ wishes- never tried it.
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I find your objection interesting because of your location, and wasn’t going to reply otherwise, but I’m interested in your comments and have a little time this morning. Of all the cities in the US, Minneapolis MN is probably closest in implementation to the “One Building City”.
For those that haven’t been there - the city has an extensive network of “skyways” connecting the major downtown buildings. These are fully enclosed bridges about 100 feet or so, most of them at the second or third story level. The convenience of it is enormous, just veer off the highway into a big parking garage at the south end of the city (it has its own exit even), and into the city you go on foot. There are maps inside the skyway, and many of the buildings have restaurants and shops on the floor where the bridges connect, or decorations, so it’s a very pleasant walk.
http://www.mapformation.com/portfolio/specialprojects/mpls_skyway.htm
Your date of 1920’s-ish for the time when people first got ideas for building on a larger scale, to include the uber-building concept, seems about right as that’s about when steel became accepted as a building material - making larger structures possible.
I’m curious about the reasons why it was found to be impractical though, care to elucidate? From your post it seems that it was never attempted. Of the various ideas I’ve heard about for conservation, these types of massive urban planning projects are in a special category as they require no new tech to be invented, which is a plus.
I gathered on my visit there that the skyway project was controversial, as all municpal projects seem to be, so I guess you were one of the objectors? I wouldn’t mind hearing your comments on it, as you live there…
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
The notion of large-scale restructing of cities being a ‘viable solution’ is ridiculous. You apparently have no idea how much that would cost.
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Well, it’s ambitious I’ll grant, but I haven’t seen an “energy crisis solution” that wasn’t at least small-r ridiculous (solar panels in space, hydrogen cars, everyone lucky enough to be alive is a hunter-gatherer, growing oil with algae all over the ocean), so let’s hang some numbers on it and see if the cost vs. benefits wash out.
I’ll start with costs. How about 1 trillion $ and ten years for a good sized city? 10 million people at $100,000 per capita to build the thing. Doesn’t seem unreasonable - the land is already owned by the gov’t and there are economies of scale as an advantage, but it’s not just homes for all, it’s working and common space, plus infrastructure and there will be engineering challenges galore whether it’s built new or retrofitted Minneapolis style.
So that’s 10% or so of the US GDP, or roughly 1% per year, either way it’s is a pretty solid chunk of change. Even GWB would wince before asking Congress for that kind of dough. 
To put it in perspective, to do this instead of going to Iraq would mean that it’d be 1/3 done now, in both $ and years.
Now there’s a big problem here as you can’t just bulldoze a city and put an orange fence around it while construction happens for 10 years, where do all the people go? Let’s say this is a “The New New Orleans further upstream” or “The Big one hit SF, build it again” kind of situation for the sake of argument so building a new city is motivated and plausible and the old one is semi-useful still.
For benefits, it’s hard to calculate as most forms of energy usage would benefit under such a scheme, but this thread is about peak oil, so we’ll concentrate on petroleum to keep things tractable. The DOE tables are here:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/petro.html
For 2004, table 5.1, total petroleum supplied is 20.5 million bbl daily for the US. With a population of 300 millions, that’s .068 bbl per person per day, or 2.87 gallons (petroleum, not gasoline).
Multiplying that back out for the 10 million folks in the hypothetical city, and it’s 683,333 bbl per day.
Now the savings for the new city vs old is hard to estimate. Petroleum is cracked mostly to gasoline nowadays, but it’s also used for plastics and lube, and aircraft fuel and solvents.
There’s still transport energy cost even if most walk, as a larger volume is being heated/cooled in the new city, and the turbo-elevator and moving sidewalks for old people use electricity, which comes from somewhere. If power is generated onsite, cogeneration can handle hot water and some heating, and the huge size of the structure affords some insulation that is not present for individual dwellings, etc…
I’m going to WAG at a usage factor of 0.15 for the folks in the big city for petroleum vs a standard usage of 1.0 for the US average. This is a guess, and I’m basing it on most petroleum being used to make gasoline, and these folks aren’t burning much of it anymore on a daily basis since cars are designed out. They’ll still drive out on weekends, still use plastic for a lot of things, and still light up with Bic lighters though, so it ain’t zero. Seems reasonable enough - they burn it 1/6th the usual rate.
So if those 10 million are living as usual, 683,333 bbl at 70 a barrel (current price as of this post) is 47.8 million per day/
If they’re in the hypothetical city, 7.1 million $ per day - so the city saves 40.6 million in petroleum each day. Break even is therefore 67 years away on the initial 1 trillion.
Certainly not the best of investments, but I don’t think it works out to being beyond consideration at all either, even with the very coarse assumptions involved. I suppose including the time value of 1/2 hour or so saved on commuting each day for everyone would make it quite attractive.
), but rather discuss what we could and should do to prepare.
(They could have done this with Brasilia, I guess).