The Energy for Growing and Maintaining Cities
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The Energy for Growing and Maintaining Cities David N. Bristow, Christopher A. Kennedy
Received: 6 December 2011 / Revised: 12 July 2012 / Accepted: 4 September 2012 / Published online: 22 September 2012
Abstract Herein we develop a means to differentiate between the energy required to expand and the energy required to maintain the economies of cities. A nonlinear model is tested against historical data for two cities, Hong Kong and Singapore. A robust fit is obtained for Hong Kong, with energy for maintenance close to that for growth, while Singapore, with a weaker fit, is growth dominated. The findings suggest that decreases in either of the per unit maintenance or growth demands can simultaneously cause gross domestic product (GDP) and total energy use to increase. Furthermore, increasing maintenance demands can significantly limit growth in energy demand and GDP. Thus, the low maintenance demands for Hong Kong, and especially Singapore, imply that, all other things being equal, GDP and energy use of these cities will continue to grow, though Singapore’s higher energy use for growth means it will require more energy than Hong Kong. Keywords Urban energy Urban economics Maintenance and growth Scaling Urban metabolism Sustainable cities
INTRODUCTION Over the course of history energy has served a pivotal role in the organization, construction, and unfortunately the occasional destruction, of complex systems like human civilizations (Goudsblom 1992; Sieferle 2001; Smil 2008; Spier 2011). From a physical sciences perspective energy gradients are a necessary, though not sufficient condition, for the formation and maintenance of local order in any open system, such as non-equilibrium chemical systems (Nicolis and Prigogine 1977), life and ecosystems (Schneider and Kay 1994). The concentration and availability of high quality
energy has allowed for increasingly larger and denser agglomerations of energy use over time (Chaisson 2008). Cities are one of the more modern outcomes of this energetic development; in them can be found the bulk of society’s inhabitants, their buildings, transportation vehicles, and industrial production, as well as numerous other innovations. Contemporary industrial processes, buildings, and transportation vehicles require large quantities of high quality energy in the form of electricity and fossil fuels, whose supply is decreasing (Westley et al. 2011); while the inhabitants of cities rely on food energy so that they may live, innovate, and prosper. The sourcing of energy to meet these demands are, however, a large contributor to adverse environmental impacts, from local air pollutants (Mage et al. 1996; Parrish and Zhu 2009) to global greenhouse gas emissions (Kennedy et al. 2009; Hillman and Ramaswami 2010). Energy use in cities is pivotal to their growth and maintenance, as is the case with any open system. The demand for energy in cities, as per Bettencourt et al.’s (2007) examination of urban resource use, broadly includes that which is required for growth and that whi
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