City Planning

Let’s plan a new city. First, what’s its purpose? A city is for people to live and enjoy life. It’s easy to plan just for this. Also we want to be safe. Safe from flood, fire and each other. Further, we want a similar or better life for our children. We see that adding needs makes for a more complex city. Yet we do continue to build cities where none were before. We bring order into our random lives.

Typically, we expect cities to endure for a long time. After all, we invested lots of material and energy into their construction. And while new cities pop up all over the Earth, we also maintain the existing cities. In result, there are more and more cities. On a finite Earth. Thus, by design and perhaps inclination, we and our cities continue to reduce the wilds of the Earth’s surface. Cities reduce the local randomness, the entropy.

Yet the acts of planning, building and maintaining orderly cities come at a cost. The cost is energy. We must apply energy to install and operate all the infrastructure that makes up a city. And we keep adding energy for the city to endure. Otherwise the city fails. As did Rome in the first millennium. Ever wonder what happened to its million residents during their exodus? Ever wonder what would happen if Tokyo fails with its 38million residents? Should we plan for the future as adroitly as we plan cities?

There are lots of cities. Over half the human population lives in large cities. And we’re making more. And cities, by design, rely upon imports. Imports of food, raw materials and energy. As long as the imports continue then so do the new and old cities. And order reigns over chaos. But what happens if the demand for imports like energy exceeds supply. Will cities have been planned to deal with this?