Tag Archives: urbanisation

Sounds of the city

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cornerRegular readers of this blog will know that I spent a relaxing day painting railings a few weeks ago [see post entitled ‘Engineering archaeology‘ on July 23rd, 2014].  A day or so later, I went out with my pail of whitewash to paint the walls of the light-well that the railings protect.  ‘The summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life’ but unlike Tom Sawyer I was not looking for Jim to do my white-washing for me.  I was looking forward to another therapeutic session painting the walls at the front of our house.  It was an interesting standing in the light-well facing the wall, un-noticed by most passers-by.  We live on a city street close to tourist attractions and there is a constant stream of coaches and taxis stopping to drop-off and pick-up tourists. I have written about the noise insulation in our house before [see Noise Transfer on April 13th, 2013] which means that we don’t notice the constant growl of diesel engines outside but I did while I was painting.  However, there were other sounds in the city.  The voices of pedestrians  deep in conversation as they passed by on the pavement just above my head.  I recognised Chinese, French, Italian and English but there were many different languages that I didn’t recognise.  There were young children asking parents questions as they walked down the street.  For a while I could hear cathedral bells.  When there was a pause in the traffic then it was possible to hear the cooing of pigeons, a neighbour’s radio or television and an ever-present idling diesel engine which I discovered was an ice-cream van dispensing a constant trickle of black soot and an occasional ice-cream.  It is curious that as a society we tolerant high levels of noise pollution at tourist attractions, especially ones that are meant to be places of calm and contemplation. Most tourists are, almost by definition, on holiday seeking relaxation and a lowering of stress levels – how much more pleasant would it be to glide to your destination in a silent electric coach or taxi?

We have the technology to provide such a service [see Are electric cars back? on May 28th, 2014]. Yes, it requires some investment by tour operators and taxi firms in hybrid or electric vehicles and by the city council in re-charging facilities. Induction charging stations at tourist attractions would allow vehicles to recharge while dropping off and picking up passengers. The technology is available and has been used by buses in Genoa and Turin for more than a decade.  So a little bit a regulatory pressure and investment from city councils acting together could create a calmer, quieter and cleaner environment for everyone.

Can we look forward to solar-powered ice-cream vans?

Sources: Thank you to Richard for reminding me about Tom Sawyer.

Year of Air: 2013

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I mentioned some time ago (Noise Transfer on 3rd April, 2013) that we are privileged to have magnificent views of the river and hills beyond from our city centre house.  From the back bedroom window you can just about see the sea and we are certainly aware of it in most days due to the almost constant sea breeze (or gale).  So despite living in a city centre we are not amongst the 95 percent of EU city dwellers who are exposed to fine particles levels that exceed WHO guidelines.  However, the EU levels are well below those in Beijing that are 300 times the guidelines and probably comparable to those in London during the Great Smog of 1952 that caused cows to choke to death and contributed to the death of about 3000 people.  London has come a long way in the intervening 60 years with current levels of fine particles at about half the WHO guideline, which is 25 micrograms per cubic metre, whereas Beijing has recorded levels of 400. it has been estimated that 13,000 people die prematurely in the UK due to combustion related pollution compared to 1.2 million in China

In my post entitled ‘Extraordinary Technical Intelligence’ on 10th April, 2013 I wrote about the process of urbanisation and industrialisation that has been seen repeatedly across the world.  The progress of this process in a region can also be measured in the levels and type of pollution being generated.  The West has been where China is now, and where India and Africa are likely to go next.  Air pollution on this scale effects the neighbours of the polluter so we have an incentive to help alleviate the problem.  We should also feel a moral obligation because much of the pollution is associated with factories producing goods that we buy and probably don’t repair or recycle at the end their useful life [see ‘Old is Beautiful’ posted on May 1st, 2013] .  If we drew the system boundaries more appropriately then the pollution generated during the manufacture of these goods is as much our responsibility as the manufacturer’s [see my post on 19th December, 2012 about ‘Drawing Boundaries’].

This is the Year of Air, maybe it should have been called the Year of Clean Air to make it absolutely clear what it is all about, i.e. giving everyone on the planet the chance to live and breathe clean air!

BTW, a fine particle is one of diameter less than 2.5 microns or 1/30th diameter of one of your hairs.  One my PhD students is working on tracking nano-particles about a hundred times smaller as they interact with biological structures such as human cells, but that’s another story [see last week’s post].

Sources:

‘Under a Cloud’ by Pilita Clark in the Financial Times, July 13/14, 2013 [ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/83ef4b78-eae5-11e2-9fcc-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2cgRhFXMs ].

Yim SHL and Barrett SRH. Public Health Impacts of Combustion Emissions in the United Kingdom. Environmental Science and Technology, 2012, 46 (8), pp 4291–4296.

‘Air Pollution Linked to 1.2 Million Premature Deaths in China’ by Edward Wong in the New York Times on April 1, 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/world/asia/air-pollution-linked-to-1-2-million-deaths-in-china.html?_r=0

Silva, R.A., et al., 2013, Global premature mortality due to anthropogenic outdoor air pollution and the contribution of past climate change, Environmental Research Letters, 8:034005. http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/3/034005/pdf/1748-9326_8_3_034005.pdf

Population Control

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The jury is out on whether the global population will reach 10 billion though there seems little doubt that our planet cannot sustain the current population, never mind 10 billion, with a Western life style.  Maybe some of you saw Stephen Emmott’s show ‘Ten Billion’ at London’s Royal Court Theatre last year; I didn’t but you can read his book of the same title.  As you will probably have guessed from the title, he thinks we are headed for a global population of 10 billion and that radical social and political action is needed because science and technology cannot avoid the impended disaster.  Erle C. Ellis does not believe that overpopulation is problem because he subscribes to Ester Boserup’s theory that population growth drives land productivity.  He suggested in the New York Times last week (13th September 2013) that we have transformed ecosystems to sustain ourselves in the past and will continue do so.

This idea could be extended to suggest that the human society or population is self-controlling that has parallels with the Gaia principle that the planet is self-regulating system in which organisms co-evolve with their environment.  The UN low-fertility model offers some evidence of self-regulation of the human population being to operate because it predicts the global population reaching a maximum of 8.34bn in 2050 and declining to 6.75bn by 2100.  At those levels engineering solutions could probably manage the rest and avert disaster.  Danny Dorling in his book ‘Population 10 Billion: The Coming Demographic Crisis and How to Survive It’ provides further evidence by pointing out that the global average family size has never been so small with the norm being less than one child per woman for more than half the planet and immigration to wealthier countries leading to further declines in birth rates.  If the UN low fertility model is right then perhaps we will be able to avoid overpopulation but  scientists and engineers will still need to redouble their efforts to provide sustainable goods and services.  Progress is being made but mainly through incremental improvements that many of us take for granted perhaps in part due to our ignorance of science and engineering or at least of the advances in living standards that it are being delivered to billions of people who previously did not access to the internet, mobile phones and medicines.

Sources:

‘Overpopulation is not problem’ by Erle C. Ellis in the New York Times on September 13, 2013 (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/opinion/overpopulation-is-not-the-problem.html?_r=0)

‘Crowded Planet’ by Clive Cookson in the Financial Times on July 13/14, 2013 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a7e5ba20-e7e4-11e2-9aad-00144feabdc0.html

‘Population 10 Billion: The Coming Demographic Crisis and How to Survive It’ by Danny Dorling, published by Constable http://10billion.dannydorling.org/

’10 Billion’ by Stephen Emmott published by Penguin http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780141976327,00.html

‘Damn the cynics and embrace the positive’ by Luke Johnson in the Financial Times on August 14th, 2013 http://www.ft.com/management/luke-johnson or http://www.ft.com/management/luke-johnson

Detroit

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978000655083970256Last week we drove from the south through downtown Detroit on Interstate 75.  Approaching from a distance along the shore of Lake Erie and the banks of the Detroit river, the city looks like many others in the US with glass-clad towers clustered together and stretching towards the clear blue sky.  Close-up and beyond the glass skyscrapers, Detroit offers a different view of derelict apartment blocks, factory buildings and offices covered in graffiti with weeds growing out of them.  These are not isolated buildings but whole city blocks.  It is reminiscent of Hadron in Doris Lessing’s book ‘Mara and Dann’, in which twenty-five towers built for city administrators are left abandoned in preference for fine houses in large gardens.  The mental picture that our drive brought to mind was from Lessing’s book; however, in searching out the book at home I remembered a similar image drawn by JG Ballard in ‘High Rise’ in which civilised life in a 42-storey degenerates as residents abandon all moral and social conventions and a hunter/gatherer culture of competing gangs developed.

Of course Detroit is infamous for having recently become the largest municipal bankruptcy when it filled for Chapter 9 Bankruptcy on July 18th, 2013.  However, not all is doom and gloom in Detroit; it might be suffering from entropic decay but they know how to conserve energy (available energy).  At Detroit  Metropolitan Airport they are replacing more than 6000 light fixtures with LED (light emitting diodes) lights in the parking structures (multi-storey car parks) as well as adding an extra thousand for a total cost of $6.2 million (£4M).  It is anticipated that the resultant reduction in energy consumption will be 7,345,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) worth about $1.2 million per year (£0.77M).  According to Ali Dib, Director of Infrastructure & Engineering for Wayne County Airport Authority, the energy saved by the light replacements will be “equivalent to powering 880 U.S. households for one year, and the reduction of 7,000 metric tons of CO2 per year is equal to taking 1,350 passenger vehicles off the road.” Not something they would be very happy about you doing in the ‘Motor Capital of the World’.  So the other way of looking at the CO2 production saved is that it is equivalent to  25,400,000 passenger air miles not flown or a thousand round-the-world flights.

Oh, and the LEDs will only need changing every ten years instead of every thirteen months for the current light bulbs.

For ‘Mara and Dann’ see: http://www.dorislessing.org/maraand.html And for reviews: http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/01/10/reviews/990110.10upch.html or http://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/may/29/books.guardianreview27

For ‘High Rise’ see: http://www.jgballard.ca/criticism/highrise.html

Information on changing light fixtures from The Metropolitan dEtroit, August 2013 (p.11) and http://www.themetropolitandetroit.com/

Passenger air miles CO2 production from http://www.transportdirect.info/Web2/JourneyPlanning/JourneyEmissionsCompare.aspx