patrickjford wrote:I spent only a very limited time in Singapore back in 1998, so its interesting to see what has transpired in that well thought-out city. For me as an up-and-coming planner in school, I was pretty amazed with what the Singapore govt could get away with doing. The model of develoment is vastly different than ours here in the US.
patrickjford wrote:The new mass-built blocks are quite bland on first appearance but over time I would expect all of those neighborhoods to eventually take on some character.
patrickjford wrote:Question: Do some or all of the average apartment block towers contain commercial establishments on the ground floor? More generally on the street level, are there sidewalks and store fronts? I had seen new developments in China and Malaysia that encorporated the street front element as well as those that did not.
patrickjford wrote:I do not know what would be worse, an endless series of apartment towers or a sprawling mess of disconnected US suburbia.
patrickjford wrote:I do not know where food originates in Singapore, but my guess is most is NOT home grown (WHERE??). When I was in Gungdong (?) Prov. of China, I did get to see that close agglomeration of urban and near-urban farm operations near the big cities so I can see that some countries or regions can get some of their food closeby.
patrickjford wrote:I have already gone on the record about my skepticism about the viability of Suburbia USA. I will postulate that Suburbia Singapore will not be pretty either. If the government can take further control and allocate dwindling resources to the maintenance of existing infrastructure, the decline may be managed. If those empty green areas are pressed into intensive raised bed agriculture and every last rooftop contained water harvesting, solar panels or gardens the decline may be survivable. If Singapore can get along with Malaysia or not be overrun by some other hostile force, the decline may be pleasant. But in the end, the declining economy will render many types of employment useless, while at the same time increasing the demand for more labor in previously automated professions such as textiles, farming, or manufacture. The shift back to manual labor especially in farming will reduce the number of people that need to live in the city as more rural areas will gain in population. In the end though, I cannot see Singapore remotely resembling its peak form. It just wouldn't make any sense.
People were pushed to the cities by the advent of cheap energy. The end of cheap energy will drive them away.
lowem wrote: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 wrote: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 wrote: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 wrote: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.
lowem wrote:But the "rot starts at the edges" theory still bugs me. So it not only depends on the timing and speed of the crash/decline/collapse, it also depends on the *model* - Roman? Byzantine? Mayan? Or, *gulp*, Easter Island??!
BorneoRagnarok wrote:I really don't know what will happen in Singapore when TSHTF
Choon wrote:What's a total footprint point of view?
BorneoRagnarok wrote:You can use your wife's name to acquire some land in Melaka without any red tape. When TSHTF , your family can run there unless you have means to stay safe and sound in R&D research facility with your love ones.
lowem wrote:That's one bug-out scenario, yup - buy some place in Malacca (/Melaka) and put that on stand-by
BorneoRagnarok wrote:
Maybe you can use some portion of your income to buy land in Malaysia.
You can use your wife's name to acquire some land in Melaka without any red tape. When TSHTF , your family can run there unless you have means to stay safe and sound in R&D research facility with your love ones.
rostov wrote:Wait a minute guys. Lowem : PR and/or citizenship-wise, assuming that your wife does purchase a piece of land in .my, does that mean you can stay as long as possible without a PR/citizenship? Or are you bounded by other contraints?
Then again, PO-wise, will such paper requirements stilll stand when the government is on the brink of falling apart WTSHTF?
rostov wrote:Neither do I. That's why I'm been scratching my head as to what the agenda is when the government allowed such an article to be printed on hard copy media like "Today".
rostov wrote:One thing is for sure : with the current population density with negative self-sufficiency and tons of really desperately hungry people in multiple high-packed high-rise residential areas bodes extremely terrible, compared to having a fighting chance of either a dig-in / bug-out scenario. Choices here are zero. No capacity to produce anything (food, energy), no access to resources, no place to run.....I'm going mad here!
Lowem, rot starting from the edges? *sigh* At least we can start to study that. I'm still hoping for a Terminus-like scenario........
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