Vertical Suburbia in Singapore

Here's Jim Kunstler's reply to my query in its entirety (after permission to do so) :

lowem:

I've got a question : I wonder, is the super-dense vertical suburbia where I live (Singapore, over 6000 people/sq km) any better or worse than America's horizontal suburban sprawl?

Jim Kunstler:

Let me try to unravel this question, since I do not know how the skyscrapers are deployed on the terrain in Singapore.

First, the skyscraper -- really any building opver seven stories -- is a product of the cheap energy age. While it is a good thing to make cities dense, the skyscraper tends to represent hypertrophy, excessive growth. One can't fail to notice, for example, that much of central Paris and London provide a very rich cosmopolitan experience at seven stories or less. I think we must regard the skyscraper as a still-experimental building type. It is only about 100 years old. It has existed because of conditions made possible by fossil fuels. It remains to be seen how well they will function in a world of fossil fuel scarcity.

Personally, I believe the advanced nations will have trouble with their electric grids in the decades ahead. In North America this will be due to our depleting supply of natural gas, combined with the difficulty of getting Liquid Natural Gas from distant sources. The political difficulty of re-starting a comprehensive nuclear power program here in America suggests that, at the very best, there will be a decade-long delay in building new nuclear generation plants. I think this bodes rather darkly for New York City, a city constructed almost entirely of tall buildings. I can't imagine they will work very well with the electric supply sporadically cutting off.

lowem:

Thanks for your prompt and insightful reply. May I quote you on the peakoil.com forums? :)

Should blackouts occur, well, I live on a low floor, fortunately. Too bad for the neighbours on the 15th floor, or in other estates, 40th floor, and the upcoming 50-floor dwellers of "Duxton Plain" are sure gonna have fun doing some exercise : http://www.ura.gov.sg/competition/results.html

I'd suppose it's all a matter of how frequent and how long the blackouts are. When the gas stations, water pumps and other pieces of critical infrastructure stop working, that's when it will start to get hairy ..

Guess it means that both vertical and horizontal suburbia have got their own sets of problems.

Back to the basic problems, then, of population & "growth"..

Jim Kunstler:

Sure, go ahead.

I also think the natural gas situation will redound on the skyscraper issue. We're getting to a critical point with our North American gas supplies. You can't not run the furnaces in a 20 story apartment building for 36 hours in February.

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