The Transformative Power of Energy in Urban Development
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Consider the Georgian terrace, now a widely admired model of traditional city-building. Its most important material was not those of which it was ostensibly made, but coal: coal fired the kilns that made the bricks and the lime for the mortar; it helped make the glass for the large windows; it smelted and melted the iron for the railings and nails. It was burned in the fireplaces whose serried chimneys rose above the roofline, and was stored in the coal holes beneath the pavement. Without coal, these houses would have required impossible acreages of forest to supply the timber to generate the heat to manufacture these products. From the mid-18th to the mid-19th century, pig iron production in Britain rose by a factor of about 65, which without coal would have required an area of woodland almost the size of England. Coal would power the factories that would concentrate production and wealth in ways that would change cities. It would feed the railways that would allow people to live further from their work, in suburbs, and would enable food to be brought from distant locations. It would also allow architects to play with building materials from distant locations and with an array of new techniques.
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For most of history, energy was mostly human and animal labour, and the food that had to be found or grown to fuel it. Most hunter-gatherer societies demanded economy in construction – a day spent building is a day not finding food – so they tended to use the materials closest to hand. Hence the shelters built of bones and tusks by mammoth hunters in what is now Ukraine and Russia. Then agriculture brought the possibility of surplus, plus the buildings needed to store and manage grain. With agriculture and surplus came hierarchic societies, whose rulers might find themselves in command of colossal resources of food and labour, which enabled them to build such vast redundancies as the pyramids of the Egyptian pharaohs. Such works may even have had the useful aspect, from the rulers’ point of view, of employing bodies that would otherwise have been dangerously idle. Later, after Anthony and Cleopatra were defeated by the future Emperor Augustus, ancient Rome took control of Egypt’s grain supplies, which helped it finance its own huge monuments.
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Even then, there was some carefulness with resources. The Romans used timber sparingly, it being a land-hungry material needed for other essentials such as shipbuilding, choosing instead the masonry construction that exploited the abundant labour they had at their disposal... Then coal changed everything. Later, oil changed things some more. Cities could expand exponentially, and building types could develop in new ways – railway stations, factories, office blocks, coal and cotton exchanges, mass housing, skyscrapers, shopping malls, airports. Electricity could free building interiors from their dependence on natural light, and eventually, air conditioning would equalize indoor climate around the world. Concrete and steel – both energy-intensive materials – made possible unprecedented efficiencies and scales, as well as breathtaking feats of engineering and new ways of shaping architectural space. All of which, we now know, came with a huge price: the potential devastation of the planet through climate change.
