What Happened to the Creamy Filling?

What Happens When the Filling Disappears?

Will Cities Become Shells?

Did you know that houses have a lifespan?

There is a lifespan for buildings. They are built to last a given number of years on average. Perhaps it is 75 years, perhaps 50, perhaps 100, but they do have a lifespan. I am not sure about the lifespan of current residential construction, but I suspect many residences built since the Second World War were built with a 75 year lifespan. I am not sure what happens when a building exceeds this lifespan.

I know that there are buildings aging with grace and good upkeep that have become heritage buildings. But I know others don't and have been torn down or rebuilt. However, since WWII there have been huge residential districts where the whole district has been built over a period of perhaps 5 years. What happens to those districts when nearly all the houses reach the end of their functional lifespan at the same time?

I don't have any solutions of course and haven't heard too much of it being a problem. Perhaps it isn't one and something that takes care of itself?

I just remember hearing how houses had a lifespan and was surprised -- thinking they were immortal for some reason. I guess it might be because of all the heritage homes I have seen. The only "falling down" sorts of houses I have seen were abandoned ones.

I do imagine if you own a house you might come upon walls with studs that need replacement because they have rotted, or plumbing that needs to be redone. You might renovate and replace whole walls already and know what is within. Foundations might need to be re-poured. I think that buildings once lasted longer and districts were not built up all at once. Neighbourhoods maybe grew a bit at a time?

We do see apartment blocks come down in groups, but that is because it is time to replace them with newer construction -- the old ones are no longer viable. That works with rental buildings, but what of the more modern idea of strata-condo buildings where each owner might have to be bought out before a building comes down?

So you have a city growing outwards and the core is gradually a cluster of uninhabitable buildings destined for destruction, and whole neighbourhoods might be ready for wrecking ball... what will replace them? I have seen some whole blocks replaced with "monster houses" -- houses that are outsized to the lots -- built to the maximum outmoded bylaws might allow -- which don't suite the character of the neighbourhood at all.

I know that cities that do plan, are working on actual bylaws that fight things like those "monster houses". At the same time they work to solve problems of increased population, transportation, and other pressures by intelligently increasing population density while keeping neighbourhood character.

I don't think that some neighbourhoods will end up like a hollow left if you squeezed the filling out of a doughnut when the houses have reached retirement ages. Land is far too valuable... still the transition will be... is interesting.

Later!
~ Darrell

109.

All day I face the barren waste without the taste of water*

Cool Water -- What if Water Drives City Growth?

I used to live in Calgary, Alberta, Canada and our drinking water came from the Glenmore Reservoir which was fed by the glacier fed Elbow River. I used to figure the water supply pretty secure as the glaciers had been their for tens of thousands of years as opposed to aquifer supplied ground water in areas where the water tables seemed to be dropping regularly as consumption exceeded local rainfall or areas where river fed systems were reliant on winter snowfall and rainfall in watersheds.

But now with glaciers shrinking at what I am led to believe are alarming rates it makes me wonder...

While it is true we might get desalination plants running economically and at scales where it is useful to supply cities with and conservation efforts would make huge differences -- perhaps many cities in some areas of the World might have populations slowly shrink while others would gain based on the availability of water?

Coastal cities may grow at much larger rates than projected and landlocked cities while not shrinking might stay at current sizes -- shrinking relatively speaking.

Of course in a sense over decades you might move a city's population, but what about food production? Perhaps the bread baskets of the world might simply shift north or south a number of degrees latitude which will make some farms boom while others bust, but it might be more drastic. I just watched a news piece on grape harvest in Spain having problems. You see they are at the southern-warmest-driest limits for wine grapes and with weather getting hotter and drier the varieties of grapes they have been growing traditionally have started producing less well. For instance there is increased activity of pests associated with the grape vines and the picking is happening days and weeks earlier in the season. Growers are starting to plant new vineyards higher up the slopes of the mountains than ever before because it is cooler up there. Northern producers of wine are having excellent crops though with the weather improving for them.

I am sure that some varieties of some foods might be a problem.

However how will this effect the cities of our World? In addition to populations perhaps moving to places where there is more water -- and perhaps that being where salt water might be desalinated -- those might also be the areas more prone to problems of storm surges and flooding with any rise in world sea levels?

It makes you think.

Later!
~ Darrell

96.

__________
*Lyrics to Cool Water -- Sons of the Pioneers is on CowboyLyrics.com

Life On a Fragile Planet

Life - Elsewhere?

From time to time I hear fairly educated people talking about the importance of space travel and one part of there argument goes that right now we have all of our eggs in one basket - the Earth - and if there were to be a global catastrophe human life would disappear from the universe. They go on to say that with global warming that catastrophe may be coming and that we could be looking at "terraforming" Mars or Venus for mankind to call homes and thus avert this possible catastrophe.

Maybe I have just read too much, but I see some flaws in this. The first and biggest one is that the "terraforming" of Mars or Venus is a project many orders of magnitude greater than actually controlling any problems of global warming that we might have created unintentionally or that might be happening naturally and that with the Earth we are starting with something a lot closer to what we want to end up with than where we would be starting with Mars or Venus. That being said, it only speaks to the issue of space exploration in order to escape from the damages caused by global warming. Meaning that if we can terraform Mars or Venus - then surely we can cure the problems of global warming on the Earth.

Granted at some time in the future, we might want to spread our wings and spread humankind into space in the Earth-Moon system and beyond. Mars is a obvious candidate for we could with our current technology probably figure out ways to survive there. Venus might take a bit more for it would be like trying to set up camp in hell. I think the atmospheric pressures on Venus are like that of being deep undersea and the temperatures enough to melt lead in an atmosphere with enough of a sulphuric acid content to etch any metal you might have in your kitchen.

It would be simpler to create some sort of space colony than to live on Venus probably. Of course that is compared with converting the whole planet into another Earth. There is also a concept where you start by covering an area with a kilometre high dome and creating your biosphere under it and then gradually in a modular fashion expanding the area covered until potentially the whole planet is covered. That is called Paraterraforming or the "worldhouse" concept. Perhaps not with Venus, but perhaps Mars or even the Moon.

It does lead to questions like do we want to do something like convert Luna into another Earth? No longer would we have that creamy white or silvery white orb shining down on us, but would have a much brighter white and blue one potentially. We lose something to gain something. We do that every time a city expands.

Cities - which are most often built in a location where the farming was best - expand and most often cover up the adjacet farmland. You lose farmland when you gain residential and commercial land.

That is a lot like that expansion of mankind to a "New Earth" on the Moon. We lose the Moon and gain a New Earth.

The near future Moon missions planned by a number of countries of the world might lead to permanent colonies on the Moon which might in turn lead to thoughts on Paraterraforming the Moon. How much change to the appearance of the Moon are we going to be expected to accept? Should the general "man on the street"* have any say in it?

What of other places? How about "Earth Orbit"? The International Space Station is very visible from the surface of the Earth and in fact you can find charts and tables telling you when and where you might spot it flying overhead. I'm not sure but an observant person with a good set of eyes or binoculars might be able to even spot it during the daytime?

Will there be a time when the sky might be visually "crowded" where there will always be a number of objects flinging across the night sky - not unlike being near a major international airport at night? I rather enjoy watching planes go by, but there might be a time when there will be no place on Earth that one might escape that aspect of civilization without benefit of a cave or very steep mountain valley.

I don't know if we'll ever build cities in space - large rotating colonies where people can live in a shirt-sleeve environment essentially as if they were on the Earth. If they are in Earth-orbit they will be very visible. I wonder how safe we would ever be able to make them?

I wonder if we will have colonies on the Moon, Mars, and other Terrestrial and Ice Bodies of the Solar System? Will we have interstellar space colonies - which are travelling off to other stars where it will only be the decedents of the people who start off who reach them, and who essentially in the meantime are dwellers of the space between the stars?

I think that before we have the technology to terraform other planets, that same technology would allow us to save the Earth from any sort of runaway ecological disaster. But in the meantime I know we have to take care of our fragile planet. It is the only one we have.

Later!
~ Darrell

44.

__________
* Yes I mean the gender neutral "man" and in "humans" or "mankind".

"Green" House - An Earthy Proposition

An Earthy Proposition

There are many ways to create a smaller footprint on the environment. One way is to use local natural materials. The options in the country and pastoral areas are different from those of urban and suburban centres. The crossover areas between the suburbs and open countryside can be very flexible in just what sort of building you might construct, while in the city there may be problems with the more exotic of environmentally friendly dwellings and commercial buildings.

One such dwelling is a low impact woodland home built by Simon Dale*, family, friends, and passers by in Wales. This home built slightly into a hillside and constructed of stone and mud from the digging required for the structure; spare wood from the surrounding woodland (thinnings); bales of straw in floor, walls, and roof for insulation; a mud and turf roof (with a sheet of plastic); lime plaster; and much else salvaged from rubbish piles around. They use the mass of stone and plaster surrounding the woodburner to absorb heat, retain it and slowly release it and the fridge is cooled by natural cool air coming through the foundation. I could go on, but nearly every feature of the house is equally "green".

The house used little specialized labour to build and materials were very inexpensive - labour being the most expensive part. From the pictures it looks comfortable. You can find out much about this home on their website about "A Low Impact Woodland Home".

I have seen other projects more suited to more conservative tastes using "rammed earth" construction or straw walls. The rammed earth construction takes local soil and mixes it with a very small amount of cement then rams it with packing machines until it is hard as concrete. It is rather beautiful in a rustic fashion. There is one company that is doing this sort of construction and putting Styrofoam (tm) insulation in the centre of the walls. I believe they call it "SIRE" for Styrofoam(tm) Insulated Rammed Earth construction.

The straw walls, from what I understand consist of building walls with bales of straw and placing a mesh of metal on either side and essentially sewing the mesh on either side together by passing an arrow sized "needle" back and forth through the straw with rope sized thread. they then plaster the outside with a few coats of a plaster-cement mix. The walls breath but are very insulative. The SIRE walls also are very insulative.

Buildings are also using heat pumps for heating and air conditioning using the inherant heat of the earth as the energy source for the heat pump's workings and energy sink for cooling rather than the air. Some suburban plans call for grey water treatment at the home through the yard into marshes incorporated into the suburb designs.

Older buildings are being retrofitted with the heat pumps and improved insulation as well as systems to allow for fresh air from outside to be taken in without chilling the building in winter or heating it in summer.

There are so many other things I could mention, but that woodland home, nearly making no visual impact in the woodland is inspirational.

Later

~ Darrell

* I believe the name is Simon Dale, I extrapolated that from his email address, I couldn't find mention in the web site.