The City As Ecology

Sustainable Civilization: From the Grass Roots Up

Chapter VII - The City As Ecology

The minimum functional unit of civilization. An ecosystem consists of living and non-living aspects with multiple and interwoven sources of feedback. The city must be a large and dense enough gathering of people to provide the opportunity for continued training in specialization. There must be education, exchange and storage of knowledge, for while each person is a unique individual, that individual is a brief spark, and then gone. There must be ease of interaction, not only in exchange of information, but of goods and services. For non-crash consideration of the infrastructure aspects, examine on the web the publications of the “New Urbanism” movement.

The combined skills of technologists, economists, and ecologists are needed. A back-to-nature approach will not work - there are too many of us for that. - Eric A. Davidson, You Can't Eat GNP

PURPOSE

To provide on a local basis life support and sustainable community, including not merely the ability to repair existing technology and maintain current knowledge and skills, but to continue to advance. As an element of a larger civilization, each city can be seen as potentially the provider of a unique product or service specialty.

"A city's internal transportation system - the layout of its streets and roads, the layout of streetcar systems and subways - determines the character of the city, how its citizens live and work. It has less to do with the direct engines of wealth creation. Build subways and people will live in dense neighborhoods and walk to corner stores; build broad suburban streets and they will live in subdivisions and drive to the Wal-Mart." -Alex Marshall (How Cities Work)

"Above all else, a city is a means of providing a maximum number of social contacts and satisfactions. When the open spaces gape too widely, and the dispersal is too constant, the people lack a stage for their activities and the drama of their daily life lacks sharp focus." -Lewis Mumford (The Highway and the City) "City-making is an art rather than a product of statistical analysis or social service casework."

"The future will compel us to change our way of life, to give up the fiasco of suburbia and all its revolting accessories and re-condense our living and working places into the traditional human habitats called cities, towns, and neighborhoods." -James Howard Kunstler (The City In Mind)

MINIMUM SIZE

Preserving civilization on the scale of an "ecovillage" is probably not sufficient to maintain even present knowledge, skills, and technology, let alone make significant advances. Similar to a single family retreat (homestead), or a multi family (6 min 20 suggested) retreat (Homestead associations), an ecovillage can be too small to maintain "civilization", yet it is already too large to be an ad-hoc creation.

Education factor. Just providing on a sustainable basis teachers for K - 12 requires something larger. In Ecovillage discussed earlier we assumed each grade 1 to 12 classroom has 20 students, with each village unit requiring 72 teachers.

If each teacher works an average of 36 years, then for 72 teachers on the average two retire and must be replaced each year. If college for a teacher takes 4 years, with 20 teachers per college class, there are 80 teachers minimum "in the pipeline" at any given time, with 20 minimum graduating each year. An individual ecovillage only needs only 2 though.

To utilize the minimum efficient production of any given teacher specialist requires at least 10 ecovillages or a population of 96,000. If you want for example 8 different "specialists" in teachers, the number of ecovillages needed to provide for teaching the teachers jumps to 80, or a population of 768,000.

HUMAN SCALE

Los Angeles, New York, etc., are not likely candidates for conversion to low energy, low population sustainability. Such cities, that combine over dense population with sprawl will not survive a fossil fuel shortage, for example they cannot produce sufficient food within their borders.

Cities as we know them have exceed the law of diminishing returns and become a gathering place for the excess and excesses of humanity.

Human scale clearly implies the ability for an un-enhanced human to access the services available within a reasonable amount of time and with a reasonable amount of effort. (Not necessarily “immediately”.)

RETROFIT

While some cities may be too large, on the other end of the discussion, how do you see a large enough group coming together to start a city-scale eco-community from scratch? There may though be existing communities, with plot division, roads, pipes, wiring, etc. already in place that could be steered into a path to develop along more sustainable lines.

What, to you, is "Human scale"? How far are you willing to walk to visit family or friends, the library or museum? How far to grow or purchase your food? How far to your employment?

Commuting distance. Absent "energy to burn", the upper size is the ability to get people and supplies around.

I would suggest that an "optimum" size is one where homes are within a reasonable bicycle ride of the city center minimizing "need", or demand for motorized intracity personal vehicles. (Per the average of several bicycle safety sites, expect "sustained" speeds of 12 (experienced), 8 (average adult) and 6 (very young or very old) mph for a human on a typical upright bicycle. When younger, I recall almost daily bike rides from downtown Seattle to the mall, a one-way trip of about 12 miles…)  A half-hour commute (reasonable?) to the city / industrial core should probably be no more than 4 to 6 miles or so from the most distant housing.

Let's carve out an arbitrary 9 square miles of city core, as a mile wide cross in the center. For the outer edge to be 6 miles from the far edge of the perpendicular aspect of the cross (75% of the city center) the city overall is 11 mile wide.

This provides 112 square mile "village" areas, at around 9,600 people each, or a city population of a little over 1 million.

Potable water collection. Using earlier numbers developed for the homestead at 12" annual rainfall, to provide for human use, and biointensive gardening on the homesteads, the water collection area is around 230 square miles, a dedicated water collection belt around 3.5 miles wide would provide for filling the city cisterns.  The city is now 18 miles on a side.

Thinking in term of this same 230 square mile water collection area completely covered in present technology solar panels. This is around 712 million square yards constantly intercepting 712 million kw of sunlight. With 10% efficient solar panels while exposed to the sun it produces just over 71,000 megawatt of power.

Tossing more numbers, 6 hour/day average, 360 (Ariziona) relatively clear days, 10% intermittent coverage, annually the array produces around 138 million megawatthour of power. Before we get too cheerful on this, note that the present cost for around 712,000,000 one-hundred watt solar panels at $500 each would be around $356 Billion, with each of the 134,400 homesteads in the city being billed abour $2.5 Million.

Farming and food shipment. The city needs food. While each homestead has its own garden, the field inside each 20 homestead unit, adding the additional safety factor of farmland bordering the city for a population of a million, at 1/4 acre per person, requires say 390  square miles of farmland. As a belt outside the potable water collection, this would be a belt about 4.5 miles thick. The city is now 27 miles on a side. This puts the outer edge of the farming belt about 13.5 miles from the city center, and of course less for the housing areas, and most of the community centers of the villages. Not an unreasonable distance for even pedal-powered food shipment, if that's what is necessary.

Crop irrigation water collection. Depending on the rainfall of the applicable area, the water collection area outside the farming area will vary. A 12" rainfall could for example require 6 times as much water collection as is planted in traditional farming. The farm water collection belt is 14 miles wide.  The city is now 55 miles on a side.

Age Distribution. Assume a healthy population at essentially some stable total population. Assume on the average that the lifespan is around 80 years. Assume that on the average there are the same number of people in each particular age. In a city of a million or so, there are around 12,500 of each age.

The entire city need not be constructed or altered at the same time.

Just as a thought, curved roads, or those with tree planted "traffic circles" at intersections provide a visual limit helping to provide a feeling of place, rather than a straight line running off to the limit of vision. You must keep in mind though, that a curved road

Consider three dimensional use of the space. Living space does not necessarily have to be at ground level. Say a big department store type building is 75,000 square feet. If built well, six homesites could be located on each such roof, while still leaving skylights to the business area below. What about the "roof" of your home as a greenhouse?

BIOMIMICRY THE CITY AS ECOSYSTEM

In Biomimicry, Janie M. Benyus presents 10 "Lessons" humans need to learn, not only as individuals but as a civilization. The world is full such that we cannot expect to indefinitely draw resources from somewhere else, and dump our effluent in the home of someone else. Nature evolves complex systems, with every niche filled with life, that are "run" by multiple and overlapping feedback loops. In general the nutrient cycle is closed, but the weblike physical infrastructure and food chain allow high diversity and density. If non-thinking creatures can act in relative symbiosis to weave a multi layer, multi purpose, season adaptable physical environment, with little energy or resources lost, resistant to outside disturbance, can we learn to:

1. Use waste as a resource. 2. Diversify and cooperate to fully use the habitat. 3. Gather and use energy efficiently 4. Optimize rather than maximize 5. Use materials sparingly 6. Don't foul their nests 7. Don't draw down resources 8. Remain in balance with the biosphere 9. Run on information 10. Shop locally

1. The community seen as an essentially closed ecosystem must take steps to use waste as a resource. Considering the biological matter and water that have and continue to flow into the city, one might expect it to be a lush oasis. Instead for the most part we continue to have a one-way flow where materials enter the city only long enough to become trash, to then be shipped away. What steps will you take to:

- Cease "waste" enabling activity - Utilize graywater and blackwater - Compost biological scraps - Pass on useful but no longer desired items - Disassemble broken complex items for parts reuse - Leave no waste to dangerous to reuse - Your thoughts?

We must rethink and rework our use of materials. The throwaway economy that has been evolving over the last half-century is itself headed for the junk heap of history.

Various studies indicate that modern industrial economies could (as an interim measure) function very effectively with a level of virgin raw material use as low as one tenth that of today.

We need to recycle all materials. Modern society uses a LOT of steel, which tends to dwarf all other metals combined. In the United States, roughly 71 percent of all steel produced in 2003 was from scrap, leaving 29 percent to be produced from virgin ore.

Steel recycling began to “work” with the advent of the electric arc furnace, a means to re-melt steel from scrap using only one third the energy of that required for virgin ore.

With the appropriate policies, metal can be used and reused indefinitely. Mature industrial economies with stable populations will find it easier to get most of their steel from recycled scrap, simply because the amount of steel embedded in the economy is essentially fixed. Countries in the early stages of industrialization have little steel for recycling, and there is little enough raw material left.

Another recycling example is breaking down old buildings into their component parts so they can be recycled and reused. As with old-time efforts to deconstructing a barn or building, the same thought and care applied today can allow most of the material in a building to be recycled.

It SHOULD be a “no brainer” to design all products such as automobiles, appliances, and equipment so that they can be easily disassembled and their component parts recycled. Once “free” energy, and “free” raw materials are a thing of the past, linked with whomever wants to throw things “away” must pay for the long-term costs of such tossing, better design and reuse/recycling efforts will be in the best interest of business.

Relatively recent governmental responses to encourage recycling is to ban various materials from garbage/landfills. What about simply eliminating the government involvement in trash collection completely? Make businesses, and individuals, find their own means to safely dispose of trash, if there is such, or otherwise avoid generating trash in the first place. The legislative involvement here is to simply protect general property rights, no one can legally dump on your site without permission, AND you cannot allow effluent from your site to be imposed on your neighbor.

A refillable glass bottle used over and over requires about 10 percent as much energy per use as an aluminum can that is recycled. Cleaning, sterilizing, and relabeling a used bottle requires little energy, but recycling cans made from aluminum, which has a melting point of 660 degrees Celsius (1,220 degrees Fahrenheit), is an energy-intensive process.

Even more fundamental than the design of products is the redesign of manufacturing processes to eliminate the discharge of pollutants entirely. Many of today’s manufacturing processes evolved at a time when the economy was much smaller and when the volume of pollutants was not overwhelming the ecosystem. More and more companies are now realizing that this cannot continue and some, such as Dupont, have adopted zero emissions as a goal.

“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” Simply put arrange industrial activity such that the waste from one process can be used as the raw material for another. (As it is in nature.)

2. Effectively fully use area and resources. Animals claim territory, yet do not show aggression to other species who claim the same territory, and cooperate with others of their species. - Niches for Decomposers, Scavengers & Miners - Multi-Layer / Multi-Use

3. Balance energy supply & demand: - Solar (Photovoltaic, heating, wind, hydroelectric, biomass) - Geothermal - Nuclear (Theory) - Minimize regular movement of mass and people - Minimize temperature extremes

4. Optimize rather than maximize - More nutritious and greater variety and quantity of food for lesser numbers, vs a starvation diet for many - Minimized energy needs vs toxic generation methods - A productive thinking population vs a mass of uneducated welfare recipients - Select annual crops for minimal residue - Perennial crops are a standing investment - Repair/Update vs Demolish and Build Anew - Quality vs Quantity

5. Use materials sparingly - Form fits function - Use fits need - Design for durability - Think "Lending Library"

6. Don't foul nests - No toxic releases - Bioremediation - Zero Fossil Fuel Burning - No garbage dumps (Find a way to recycle, or stop producing the item)

As an example, the environmental effects of gold mining raises doubts about the net benefit to society. It involves extensive release of mercury and cyanide into the environment. To produce 2,500 tons requires the processing of 750 million tons of ore--second only to the 2.5 billion tons of ore processed to produce 1 billion tons of raw steel.

To get an honest market price for gold means imposing a tax on it that would cover the cost of cleaning up the mercury and cyanide pollution from mining plus the costs of landscape restoration in mining regions.

Such a tax, which would enable the price of this precious metal to reflect its full cost to society, would likely raise its price several-fold.

7. Don't draw down resources - Maintain groundwater levels and quality - Don't Kill the "Golden Goose"

8. Remain in balance with the biosphere - Avoid population expansion incentives

9. Run on information - Feedback on benefits and consequences

An option for reducing the use of raw materials would be to eliminate subsidies that encourage their use. Whether the cost of irrigation water to farmers, paying farmer to NOT grow food, depletion credits to oil companies, etc. tax incentives seriously “skew” economic and therefore ecological decisions.

The most pervasive policy initiative to dematerialize the economy is the proposed tax on the burning of fossil fuels, a tax that would reflect the full cost to society of mining coal and pumping oil, of the air pollution associated with their use, and of climate disruption. A carbon tax will lead to a more realistic energy price, one that will permeate the energy-intensive materials economy and reduce materials use.

10. Shop locally - Import / Exports limited to luxuries

As the total mass of the human population has grown, instead of providing for greater, or faster recycling loops, and a more complex yet human centered ecosystem, we've broken feedback loops, destroyed much of nature, and isolated ourselves from the biology needed to sustain us. Considering the biological matter and water that have and continue to flow into the city, one might expect it to be a lush oasis. Instead for the most part we continue to have a one-way flow where materials enter the city only long enough to become trash, to then be shipped away.

ECOLOGY

It seems clear that a human optimized ecology is incompatible with a "natural" ecology. I'm not thrilled about jackrabbits in my garden, rattlers napping on the porch, or stepping on scorpions as I enter a dark room, but they're part of the "natural" ecosystem. And we as humans want to exclude them.

Which would you think is a better house pet, an angora cat, or a captured bobcat kitten? We can, and need, to live in a self-regulating ecosystem, BUT it needs to be "domesticated" flora and fauna. We can reemphasize "biological" means of meeting our life support needs, obtaining materials, etc., but we've already over-run enough of "nature".

Resources. An ecocity needs to provide it's own food resources. Consider, a hunter-gatherer in a good area may need a square mile per person. For a population of 1 million, you're spread over an area 1000 miles on a side. That's not likely to support a high-tech civilization. High population density appears a civilization prerequisite. High density, indeed simple high numbers of humans, requires a deliberately engineered food system. Without an engineered food system, there will be large numbers of untimely and unpleasant deaths.

Preserve Civilization. It appears clear that making changes such that some city scale communities survive the crash is a requirement for maintaining civilization. The further we fall, the more knowledge, skills, and technology we are likely to lose. The further we fall, the harder it will be to regain ground. Fossil fuels have allowed us to make great advancements - let's not lose the achievements and waste the expended fuel, human creativity, and lives.

In a post fossil fuel era, I don't see how large scale long distance surface freight or travel is practical, nor is the extensive personal motor vehicle use of today. A city will encounter limits in sustainable population, most significantly in food and water.

As sprawl and suburbia (as we now know them) become impractical, the scale will need to be more "human" in terms of commute for regular daily activities (work, school, shopping, etc.) It doesn't mean that we have to lose civilization.

The infrastructure of human communities can be a unique ecology tailored not only our physical needs, but to our individual and collective aspirations. Properly developed, the need for external input for "life support", other than the sun, and occasional rain, can be minimized and essentially eliminated.

Noise is unwanted sound - sound pollution, which has actual physical consequences on the human body. We can reduce noise by producing less or, deadening it, or masking it with other "white noise". Earth sheltering, plants, avoiding hard straight surfaces, etc. helps greatly in noise abatement. Eliminating the sound of engines will do are great deal to bring a quiet to a city. Running and falling water, wind thru the trees, etc. generates white noise. Noisy events or processes can be either confined to special areas of the city, but again earth sheltering of homes makes a huge difference.

Animals and insects. They are part of an ecology, and can either BE pests, or used to control pests. TECHNOLOGY

What are your thoughts for appropriate technology in a post fossil fuel era?

With liquid fuels a premium commodity. With electricity in far more limited supply than today.

Long distance shipping (at least on land) inhibited by limited fuel and electricity.

Pedal Power. Certainly devices that are manually operated. Thinking… playfully… for a moment, can a computer be operated on the electricity generated by a pedal driven generator?

What other pedal driven devices? A rule of thumb goes something like this: a human's peak power is 200W, and can sustain 50W to perhaps 75W for longer durations. Add a "buffer" (lead/acid battery and charge regulator) to smooth out the output, would there be enough to power a small desktop computer (Case + CRT), and even more so, a laptop (energy efficient Case + LCD screen).

Wind driven. Would you like an intermittent breeze in your home? Consider a direct driven inside fan, turned when the wind blows outside.

Solar thermal. Relatively minor temperature differences can be used to circulate gas or liquids. The movement can be used to just move heat, or generate power. Solar can be used directly, or indirectly for cooking or heating. .

Flat panel.

Concentrating. In what technology other than solar can something as in-substantial as a sheet of shiny mylar be used to transform the diffuse warmth of the sun into a burning or melting tool capable of easily destroying the mylar performing the service?

Biological. Early man started by “taming” those plants and animals that readily submitted. With genetics, we have far greater potential, and of course far greater RISK in what we can achieve. Drugs from bacteria, food or fuel from algae. Potentially custom designed species, or “to order” humans.

Biogas. Biological waste, composted in a sealed container, can produce gas such as methane that can be collected in relatively simple water-traps, and used as fuel on demand. It is not readily efficient as fuel for motors, but it is a means to provide “stored heat” to cook in non-sunny periods, vs trying to store solar heat directly.

Sewage processing in "living machines" to fertilizer (if not applied directly)

Wood. For all our "scientific progress", we ever managed to replicate this wonderful "chlorophyll" thing, just to make non-renewable, non-self-replicating, chemical imitations (photovoltaics).

Electronics. Components and simple devices, while perhaps not at energy efficient as present circuits, can be hand-made. CPUs (central processing units), the heart of any computer, is probably the most technically difficult thing to develop and build on this planet, together with "rocket science", building and launching rockets and satellites. A "fab" (short for fabrication facility, the huge white room places that build CPUs) costs billions of dollars to build, not including costs to operate, the research and development, all of this of course null and void once we no longer have enough oil to power tractors and the such, let alone for extravagant energy use like spending millions of barrels to find ways to cram up as many transistors as possible on a surface less than an inch wide. At what level of civilization and what type of technology, can computers be sustained?

Simple Devices. Electronic components can be made by simple technology, but the larger hand-made components use a great deal more power, and waste much of it has heat.

A question: Does such a city have the technology and technique to repair or replace a broken plate or cup? A p/v panel? If each homestead has twenty five 100 volt panels, the collected homesteads of the city have 3,125,000 panels, with an expected lifespan of 30 years.

A replacement schedule could then require production of around 100,000 panels per year. If p/v panels are broken, or fail on a regular basis, the city needs to produce or re-work 285 p/v panels every day. The Tucson MEC estimates that 8% of the p/v panels actually in use (2005) need to be replaced each year, which would be a daily replacement rate of around 685 panels.

Is P/V, at least as we know it today, practical long-term? Can a city of a million do better?

TRANSPORTATION

Movement of people, and things. At the present, things tend to be moved by a human controlling a heavy powered vehicle. For the relatively slow need of cargo movement within a city, can we switch to some type of "pipeline" system where only the cargo moves, perhaps in an underground canal system?

Intercity.

Vehicles with solid wheels, running on a relatively smooth and level track, are probably at the top of energy efficiency and effectiveness in moving bulk or heavy cargo on land, long distances, between distance points of origin and destination. If a train car is 10' wide, and 60 long, it' has around 600 ft. sq. of roof surface. Using primitive estimates, 1 KW of sun per sq yard, 20% efficiency panels, the car can generate up to 13 KW in direct sun. I think that's around 17 horsepower. It's an approach which can work to keep some type of between city travel going. Steep grades could get a boost from trackside panels, or how about a trackside connection between trains going up and down the grade… The down train uses generators to brake, feeds the slope grid, and it's used to help the up train. Or the power could be stored for later use, with some further losses.

Intracity. Trains / trolleys / electric bus on a fixed route, central power allows a lighter vehicle (no battery weight), regenerative braking to distribute to the grid of vehicles. If these vehicles are to travel at any rate significantly faster than a walking pace, they need to be isolated from the surface pedestrian traffic. The two obvious options are putting them on raised track, or as subways. With either option, “stations” higher than the track conserves energy, using the uphill to slow the transport on entering the station, and downhill to resume speed on leaving.

A subway tunnel approach offers the opportunity for much heavier cargo, with less ongoing maintenance of the system. The subway does not necessarily need to be a large or luxurious. Think in terms of a large concrete storm drain pipe, with a sit-down only scale subway car. The city has 121 square mile grids, which if limited to one "station" per grid (not necessarily so limited) would put everything in the city within two six minute (brisk) walks, and a few minutes subway ride. In a similar below ground pipe system, heavy cargo could be floated in an enclosed canal, moved by low power pumps moving water to the “high” side of the system.

Personal transportation. Lightweight, low power, streamlined vehicles can still provide relatively "high speed" personal transport, especially in a compact city. Although pedestrians can cross flow at corners without stoplights, it doesn't work for vehicles. But stop and go wastes energy. Thinking in terms of human powered vehicles, or neighborhood electric vehicles, "roads" would only need to be improved walkways, and could be elevated to be essentially level and permit crossings without the typical city stoplight every 1/8 mile. Pedaling a bicycle / human powered vehicle, the "engine" needs exposure to clean and flowing air, further making this a "fit" with raised tracks.

Emergency response vehicles hybrid / fueled (i.e. alcohol or biodiesel), able to travel unrestricted by power connections or track.

LOCATION

Which existing community, if any, do you believe has the greatest potential for development into a "sustainable" human centered ecological environment, and what steps do you suggest to assist / guide such development?

A whole new city does not normally just happen. Cities typically develop at sites because of a natural resource, trade route intersection, etc. An ecocity starts with one of these existing cities and evolves.

Relative isolation from other large communities…

Walking to the city presents too much of a challenge in distance and/or conditions.

Adequate renewable resources within walking distance of the city center, which are or can be under control the city or city citizens. In particular for the author’s location in the desert southwest of the U.S., fresh water.

A variety of small businesses with potential post oil era viability. A climate tolerable without mechanical HVAC or burning fuel for heat.

Government / residents willing to accept/allow alternative construction, graywater use, etc.

Access to reliable power. A good stream/river drop for hydro, windmills, solar p/v, solar "steam", SOMETHING. (I don't see any practical substitute for electricity for nighttime lighting, or of course electronics, which seem to be a "floor" for continued progress)

ECONOMIC THEORY

Heirloom, one of enduring value. Design / engineer / build for quality and durability. In example, the author is still using a glass door bookcase inherited from my grandfather, meanwhile numerous "particle board" bookshelves I've purchased have crumbled, snapped, or otherwise quickly passed their useful life (not to mention the fumes from the particle board…)

Reduce. Design / engineer / build for zero toxics release. Act as though the city is inside a sealed bubble of its land footprint.

Reuse. When do you recall the metal structure of a washer or dryer wearing out? We need to engineer so that such durable parts can continue to be used without costly and energy intensive reprocessing. We need to have components that are easily disassembled and if still viable reused. Think of used item stores, or "ebay" where people auction off their "trash to treasure" items.

Recycle. Design / engineer / build for upgrading or recycling. Obviously bio-degradable products can be returned to the soil by microbes and re-grown into something else. Complex, high tech materials or artifacts probably need to be collected, categorized, and stored, or disassembled and stored, for re-use.

Self constructing / Self Replicating. Design / engineer / build to emphasize use of biological systems. Wood for example remains an incredible engineering / construction resource. Alcohol is a practical fuel where free roaming quick refueling power is required.

“The challenge is to get the market to tell the ecological truth.” - Ernst von Weizsäcker, Sustainability is a broad concept, with a problem for sustainable economics exampled in the "529" college savings plans. In general, there is a choice between investment plans, and pre-paid tuition plans. If we were NOT saddled with an inflating currency, the cost of a college education would be virtually the same now, or 18 years from now, varying essentially based on the quality of the services and demand. In that scenario, the investment approach would seem to make more sense. In an inflating economy though, you are chasing a rising target, and the pre-paid tuition may work out to be a better bet.

Jobs. Performing a particular service for the same entity on a regular basis.

Professions. Performing a particular service for a variety of entities on a regular basis.

Repair or replacement would appear to take a higher place then expansion or completely new facilities (at least not those that simply provide the same use or service as something already in existence. Without resources being wasted in ongoing construction of new facilities, to perform the same “old” services (housing or providing for an expanding population) “new” facilities would rationally represent completely NEW needs or capabilities, vs rehashing of the old.

Even in so far as law, as personal responsibility and “common sense” is brought back into the picture, one would hope that frivolous legal cases would fade into the background. (Yes folks, this is an attorney commenting that we have far too many “B.S” – and I do not mean Bachelor of Science – cases in the legal system.) Far too many times, I’ve seen lawyers for parties “churn” cases, make motions, file documents,    interrogatories, demands for discovery, etc., not necessarily for vital information, but as a means to harass the other party in a case while running up fees.

We need creative thinkers, those who can look at what we have, and what we know, and envision something that is better.

INFRASTRUCTURE

The city can be composed of individual family homesteads, of whatever construction each family can manage, or a single large arcology. What matters is the relationship of numbers of people, and reuse of resources.

Night outside illumination for paths, placed below eye level. If electrical consider centralized bulbs with fiber optics for the individual walkway lights. Just enough to light the ground but leave the night sky visible.

Venturi effects of terrain and structures which increase air velocity may be used to improve the harvest of wind energy.

Water collection. All rain should be directed into cisterns or on to a stream system. Wind could be used to pump water to "high ground" for gravity pressurization of the delivery system.

Modification and upgrades. The physical structure of the city, when physically modified, needs to be modified with future upgrade in mind. For example, how many times have the streets in your community been torn up and repaved because a particular pipe or wire was being repaired or added?

Multi-purpose Zoning. Interweaving work, play, learning, socializing, and other activities. So long as the noise, light, and visual interference of a home and a restaurant don't intrude on each other, why can't such be side to side? It is generally undesirable to have isolated areas devoid of "eyes watching". All of those facilities "needed" on a "day to day" basis should be within walking distance of the homes served.

Energy Co-generation. Using waste energy from one process in a different process which needs it.

AGRICULTURE

Present cities rely on the production of widespread markets to supply food. Absent cheap transportation the city MUST have a more direct connection with the food source. It must recycle the human and resident animal effluent safely, efficiently and effectively back in to the food production system. The city be able to feed itself from within the resources under it's control

Open field agriculture is the present standard. This method, at least as practiced, is dependent on fossil fuel to operate farm equipment, process and deliver food to cities, and is also dependent on chemical fertilizers to feed the crops. It is an open ended process which moves from oil to food to cities to the dump or the sea. It is not sustainable.

Attempts have been made to use processed sewage sludge as fertilizer, but these have encountered the problem of contamination. Not everything that ends up in a city sewer has first been eaten and digested by a human. The typical city sewage is contaminated with metals, toxic chemicals, etc. that go down our drains.

Closed loop agriculture. We've go to close the loop on recycling the nutrients from human effluent as close to the source as practical, while also minimizing the opportunity for contamination. The closer that the recycling is to home, the more the residents will take personal responsibility for ensuring the safety of the system.

Urban Landscaping. City landscaping can be a food source. Microclimates created within the city can make for a rich urban ecology and substantial biodiversity.

Farm Staff. Current U. S. farming has I believe 2% of the population working to feed the rest of us. Shooting for the same %, the city needs 20,000 people working in food production.

Assuming 250,000 cultivated acres in a farming belt, it's about 12.5 acre for each person to work. With a shift to greater concentration on trees and other perennial crops in a permaculture approach and with "temporary" help is doesn't sound like an impossible task.

The city has 134,400 homesteads. If the home gardens are instead tended by master gardeners, working a 40 hour week, the gardener would have only around 1/2 hour per property. This again appears to point toward perennial / long term crops, vs annuals that must each year be coaxed up from a basic seed.

SECURITY

Keeping strangers away from one's back door is a significant design consideration.

Internal. An essentially pedestrian city provides a lot of eyes and ears in the public arena, and a mix of zoning minimizes regularly scheduled "abandoned" sites. Start with the concept of neighborhood watch, and expand.

Crime. We tolerate too much, and have abdicated too much responsibility to our elected and professionally paid law enforcement employees. Get off your butt, refuse to be intimidated, and act on the fact that you have arrest authority. If your state or local government does not allow you to do so, and does not allow you to be armed in the same manner as the police, perhaps you should consider it is time to gather and move your assets to somewhere that recognizes your independent right to exist and deal with the world.

External. The city must be prepared to exercise self-defense. Whether peacetime or war, a question is what about visitors? A city, that is NOT in collapse, in a world that is, will be a primary destination for many. But the city CANNOT accept everyone who approaches. There MUST be some approach, some “welcome center” where potential new recruits for residency are evaluated and an determination made whether there is excess resources, and whether they should be offered on a temporary / permanent basis to any particular individual, and the terms overall.

The next level up in government. In most locations at least in the U.S., a city can appoint as law enforcement whomever it wants. In argument, it could be every citizen of the city. If your state or higher government prohibits this, again, it may be time to move your assets.

Other governments. Your city, your state, your nation. What other government do you recognize as having authority to control your life? The United Nations?

Non-governmental organizations. If you did not vote for them, did not invest money in them, and do not care about their policies, don’t let them interfere with you.

POPULATION STABILITY

In theory the misery generated at the earlier discussed levels by an expanding population should make it clear the city also cannot expand. But if your city gains attention as the most advanced in sustainability, and we are in the post-peak oil era, who believes that the city WON'T be challenged by a population influx? How do you stop it?

POLITICS / GOVERNMENT

When the government falls, those to whom violence and force are no stranger will take over. They will not necessarily be the best, brightest, or even the strongest. They may simply be the first to use violence to impose their will. Consider if you will the "turf wars" among gangs, and their escalation if there is no organized police force to oppose them.

At each level, surviving communities will need some form of organized government, and defense. When our complex and oil dependent government system dies, Feudalism may again rise to replace the missing layers of government. I discount "elected" officials, because, at least in our present system, those elected are primarily there due to a popularity contest, based on their promises to tax and spend, rather than an understanding and ability to manage. In those large cities which manage to survive, the police commissioner may be the individual with the greatest power. For smaller communities, the natural leader to arise seems to be the County Sheriff.

During and immediately post-crash, there will be an excess of people, well beyond what can be sustained. I suspect that there will be little tolerance for criminal acts, or thought of scarce and valuable community assets taken to support a prison population. A "kind" sentence will be expulsion. A "standard" sentence will probably be death.

If the city is a governmental entity, while authority remains, it must comply, including with access, allowing protests, etc. If the city entity was a private corporation, it would under present law be able to exclude non members.

However the city is organized, the charter needs to be fixed, unchangable except by unanimous agreement of all votes. How about each village has 1 senator to the city, selected by the representatives of the Homestead associations. NO elected position to be paid.

A city of a million people, covering 121 square miles, with 134,400 homesteads surely presents a situation where some formal organization / governance is required. Doesn't it? What is the minimum required "government?

Radical concept? What if the government declined, or was unable, to register a lien on real property? You could and buy sell real estate, but it would not be available as security for a loan, or as an asset which can be attached in a lawsuit. Thoughts?

CITY CORE

Ecological Industry - A potential function of the city core is repair / recycling / manufacturing of complex products, and storage of parts / materials in the area most readily accessible by the bulk of the residents. Many aspects logically need to be centralized. Consider that a high temperature "foundry" can be solar powered, but the mirror set up would be a large device, requiring careful construction and operation, not practical to replicate or operate on a small scale.

The folks at Columbia University, New York City, New York, have worked up a theoretical food system where a city building is used to produce food for a significant number of city residents. Under typical present law, to actually implement such would require the support of city agencies such as building code, health, planning, sanitation, etc. Their model for concentrated commercial urban farming to feed 50,000 people in the City of New York is a 48-story building, either 90,000 ft2 or 250,000 ft2, depending on necessary requirements.

Doing the math, their preliminary statement appears to claim only between 1.8 & 5 square foot per person is needed to produce food, while their wheat discussion indicates a best non-stop production of 292 sq. ft. per person. Whether or not such a building is long-term sustainable given present knowledge and materials, it presents an interesting use for what may become abandoned city buildings. Outside of their food analysis, consider such a modified structure as a recycling, or bio materials resource. (See the book Biomimicry, by Janie M. Benyus) Use of a closed environment, provided the power is available to manage heat, light, and water condensation, presents a tremendous opportunity for the growth of water intensive crops (i.e. cotton) without the waste of the precious resource in open field evaporation. It provides a very controlled environment for plant cross breeding experiments.

If you contemplate it, machines and industries can be formed into food webs and ecologies, just as living creatures. So far, they just can't do it on their own. Within a long term sustainable, ecological city, where there can be no constant external input, and no "garbage" to continuously dispose of, we must arrange our industry so that the effluent from one process is the feedstock of another.

The raw materials on Earth have been here essentially since the planet coalesced. Atoms in your body may have been part of Julius Cesar, or ancient dinosaurs. In the biological arena, everything is designed to be disassembled to some level or another, and re-used. We need to apply the same rationality to our industry and products.

The new "raw material" for industry will be "old" products. The easier used or broken items are to disassemble to a useful level, the greater the ease for creation of a new product. A comparison though:

Aluminum cans are readily recycled, but they require a great deal of energy to melt and re-engineer into a new can. Glass bottles are readily recycled, potentially by just washing and putting on a new cap. Re-use of the unbroken, uncontaminated glass bottle requires MUCH LESS energy and handling than recycling of the aluminum can.

Technology such as cell phones can avoid processing and laying miles of copper wires, but present cell phones are much more fragile than most hard-wire phones, and dependent on batteries that represent a constant flow of toxics. To get an honest market price for any product containing toxic materials means requiring the industry bear the cost of recycling.

We need approaches to high-tech materials that do not require use of toxic materials and leave dangerous residue. I understand we already know the principles of zero-pollution production, but don't because it's still cheaper, in terms of money, to continue polluting. When dumping costs rise, business looks for alternatives. In the city (or on the Earth as a whole), there IS no "away" to throw things to. Even for substances well below the scale human can directly deal with, select organisms can remove remaining trace pollutants, and concentrate them for re-use.

Education. Higher education, or specialized programs are a natural, low energy, but high profit effort for a city. Even if the population of the future is concentrated in cities, there will be those who elect to live in less dense areas, who will nevertheless seek local services. They will need teachers, engineers, doctors, etc. The city offers clear opportunity for specialized education and experience that becomes a valuable trade item over a broad area.

Culture. Museums, libraries, art and entertainment, etc. are natural outcomes of the specialization possible in a city. A key aspect is NOT reaching the point where one aspect holds a gun to the head of another to force them to subsidize the lifestyle or choices of another.

ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE

A city of a million people, covering 121 square miles, with 125,000 homesteads surely presents a situation where it would seem some formal organization / governance is required. Doesn't it? What is the minimum required "government?

Do you want to live under a government that issues orders to you, or that reacts when someone interferes with your property rights? (Rights to your body, your personal items, and your real estate.)

How much authority over your property, your life, that that of your children are you willing to sign-over to someone else?

ETHICS / MORAL

Austerity will be a fact of life. To use a extreme example for us in the modern, "First World", what is going to happen, even in a city of a million, to an infant born with a lifetime crippling defect?

If the family is sufficiently wealthy, perhaps they could manage to provide for appropriate care/assistance, even in their own absence. But, absent the artificially robust economy, profits, and taxes provided by the cheap energy from oil, how could even a city of a million afford a "publicly funded" program to provide for this child, or any other person incapable of providing some service to "earn their keep"? And if a city of a million can't afford to provide a lifetime of care, what happens in smaller communities?

In the 1950's and 1960's, talk of atomic war prompted some to prepare fallout shelters. At the time, and perhaps in retrospect, some saw the shelter building activity as foolish. But if done well, those shelter spaces continued to be an asset, and may once again, in the coming crash, prove their value as fallout shelters. The shelters were, and are, a form of "insurance". So it is I see every aspect and level of "sustainability", from your one tomato plant, to a self-reliant city of a million. It is personal insurance. It is "life insurance" for your family and heirs. It is insurance for civilization.

DEMOGRAPHICS FOR THE LONG-TERM

Population evenly distributed across an age range of 1 to 80. Average births do not exceed replacement with children born to parents who in an age range of 20 to 40.

There is no need for new home construction. Family homesteads, each an area approximately 100' x 100' (about ¼ acre) house multi-generation families of 8 to 10 people.

Homesteads are arranged into neighborhoods, each a square six homesteads on a side, twenty total. These surround a central courtyard 400' x 400'. Each neighborhood association (about 40 acre) is a gathering averaging 160 to 200 people.

Neighborhoods are arranged into villages, each a square eight neighborhoods on a side (one square mile). The central 40 acres is reserved for shops, schools, etc., putting schools and business within roughly ½ mile of every homestead. Each village contains 60 associations and is a gathering of 9600 to 12,000 people, with around 120 to 150 people of each age (grade in school).

Villages are arranged in a grid eleven on a side, with a city core of nine square miles in a central “X”. The city has 112 villages and averages 1,075,200 people, around 13,400 of each age.

If basic education is considered as age 6 thru 18, there are 80,640 kids in school, requiring 4032 teachers.

Aiming for an educated workforce, and low stress "elder" years, consider the educated workforce to be ages 22 thru 56, this is around 407,400 people. Minus 4032 as teachers and 2% of the total, or 21,504 as gardeners, the employable population is 444,864. The city is large enough to sustain demand for specialists in education, medicine, sciences, etc.

CONSIDERING GREATER LEVELS

An eco-city of a million can be a tool to preserve education and skills, and continue development. It obviously exceeds the capabilities of a dispersed hunter gatherer society of the same population of a million, or any other non-urban approach.

I do not see how a dense, yet ecological community would be able to significantly exceed a population of 1 million, or occupy an area less than that set out above, which if you have limited rainfall, is an area 55 miles on a side (3025 sq. mile). Nor do I see how the same million spread less-dense could maintain the level of interaction necessary.

Yet to house 6+ billion people, it would take SIX THOUSAND such eco-cities, which would cover over 18 million square miles. The total temperate area of the Earth is around 37 million square miles.

What we actually have in place at this time is worse. We have 6+ billion people disbursed over the six continents of the globe, which logically means that our present cumulative human footprint EXCEEDS this area. Yet with our current "system", with all of the additional, non-renewable input, we still cannot provide adequately for the population.

To implement such low-energy eco-cities in sufficient time to provide for the entire present population appears to require magic.

If we wanted to limit ourselves to diverting say 10% of the total productive land space to human activity, it would be 3.7 million square miles, limited to around 1,200 of such cities, or a total global population of 1.2 billion. That population though could live in relative abundance, and peace.

Setting aside for the moment the arbitrary laws written by humans, what would be the minimum physical requirements of peaceful interaction of individual ecological communities?