Survival Strategies in Megacities.

I live on the edge of a city, which has a population of around of around 150,000, surrounded by fertile farmland to the north and a river estuary to the south (where you can still catch a sea trout or a salmon if your lucky). The city has at one point in human history had the very first railways, the first systems electrification such as public street lighting and public transportation, the worlds largest factories, the worlds longest bridge (all now of course surpassed in the last 130-150 years) and even had some notable technological firsts such as the invention of the postage stamp. Much of the finance to build the United States of America originated from these parts and had a one point the highest density of millionaires in the world (around 120-150 years ago). Yet it never materialised into a Megacity. For folks who live in modern Megacities the contrast would I suspect would be quite amusing as many folks from my city could well still be living in substantial Victorian and Georgian properties getting on for 150 years old (before electricity became widely available) where chimney pots (for burning coal) still abound everywhere. The small and narrow and winding streets were laid out for a human scale and not motorised vehicles (although the town planners had tried darnedest to fix this during the period 1960-2000)

How do you cope in a Megacity when the interconnectedness of the global economy (finance, energy requirements such as peak oil or even insurrection due to inequality between the rich and the poor) or even mass casualty catastrophic events in the future such as earthquakes or when its just all starts to decay away and begin to fall apart such as large post industrial conurbations such as Detroit?

Why don't you ask a tough question?

You move out.

Not sure if this is the answer your looking for but I think my bonafides are there.

I live in a Megacity known as the Phoenix Metropolitan Area or "Valley of the sun". Close to 4 million people. I live on the east outskirts so while my urban sprawl looks almost exactly like the urban sprawl covering the other 475 square miles, I have great egress to several routes if I have to G.O.O.D. (get out of Dodge) North or East.

Our fear here is large and small; a nuclear power plant w/ prevailing winds covering some of our valley if there was a release. We have a real issue with drug smuggling, people smuggling, violent crime and illegal aliens. We are the kidnap capital of the world. Over 600 a year. As most people move here, there is little depth to city/state pride, like say being a New Yorker or a Red Sox fan. No real feel of community. As such people from other parts of the country feel they can change the historical uniqueness of Arizona to what they had in their place, (thinking most of Californians bringing their version of social politics)

What really binds us together is suffering through hot summers.

I live on the west coast of Florida, just north of the Tampa/St Petersburg population clusters...as I live on a peninsula, my escape routes are severely limited... I have two major east/west multi lane routes available... they intersect with four major north/south routes that would be carrying the evacuees of everyone to the south of me in case of a major tropical storm....

on the other hand, living on the coast gives me a pretty good option for food sources in a non weather related problem...

bottom line is.... I don't plan on running too far...and have been working towards a 6 months store of staple goods

1. You do the best you can for as long as you can, then...
2. You leave and try to find a better place.

Unfortunately, the decay and falling apart is already in progress, but many/most people are hoping it will reverse soon, and may wait too long. Where does acceptable end and despair begin?

Sue

Speaking as an archaeologist, cities rise, they prosper, decline, and may become vacant, hollow shells - think Tikal, Cahokia, and all kinds of "Lost Cities" the world over. Usually people move away when they figure they have a better chance somewhere else. The process provides job security for us diggers....

It is well known that the decline of Detroit is not something new or recent. This city has been in an economic free fall for decades and it is now being exacerbated by the economic issues of it's own country.

As for escaping during during disaster, Getting out of any large city is next to impossible when there is a large exodus. Look what happened in Houston Texas a few years back when they tried to evac the city that was in the path of a hurricane. If I recall, the hurricane weakened and or turned away from the city. In any case, I remember seeing on the news, miles and miles of cars moving only a few feet per hour. I am sure there are some members of this forum who may of witnessed or had first hand accounts of this botched evac.

I would think that a similar mass exodus of any large city would have the same bad results...

Telsin, - Who is currently content (except for the man eating mosquitoes) to be 400 miles away from any metro area.

I'm not seeing the problem here. Could it be because I live in an area which is still growing even in a recession?

Jeanette Isabelle

I'm in Bay Area, California. High security high rise gated community with ~1000 people - army! Powerful diesel generator. Pool. 500' from fish infested bay water and piers full of yachts. 2 underground creeks are surfacing nearby (~1000'). We can definitely bug in for some time. Plan to get a yacht soon or at least a fishing boat to improve my sustainability and bug out options (roads to the mountains, ocean, rivers).

Growing and expanding cities need vast quantities of energy. Megacities (cities > 10 million population - there are only 2 in the US = New York and LA) need mega quantities of energy for industrial production (for employment prospects and the insatiable demand for fiat paper is why there is growth towards the Megacity) and to sustain the population. They also need vast quantities of fresh potable water and sewerage systems etc. And I haven't even mentioned transportation energy requirements and air pollution. The average city has approximately 3 days of food storage and requires a constant flow of this input. The flows of finance regulates this system. Megacities can only really continue to exist within a global domain as they sink the natural resource on a global scale. It could even be argued that the fall of a Megacity on one side of the planet could make the other 30 megacities fall one by one in a domino fashion as one relies on the other for its existence with a consequence for the majority of the worlds population.

Interruption of the flow of energy (electrical grid), Transportation fuels (gasolines), water and food and the typical Megacity of today would become a catastrophe within 7 days.

These interruptions could be the result of instability in the global financial system (highest probability in the short term), peak oil (highest probability in the medium term) or even a solar storm.

The wars to control the petroleum reminder of the peak oil problem started years ago and they continue a pace.

Of course the decline of the Megacity after its peak around 2030 might be quick (very very nasty), it might be managed ("If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face -- forever".)

There are no easy technological or scientific solutions to this issue as they have been tried before;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ6t5JA7OBA

As for escaping a failing Megacity then I'm afraid the original ending of Bladerunner will remain a fiction as the elites security forces will instigate reverse sieges.

It is not a megacity, using the correct terminology; with a population of 6,371,773 the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex is the fourth largest in the United States. It is in a state which has its own power grid serving a population of 25.1 million residents and, as I have heard, it is quite stable. We have the natural resources to keep it running. The only problem we have is in the power distribution. Severe weather can leave many homes in the cold.

Water is a problem where I live. We have had several droughts in my life time with water conservation measures in action.

We have ozone alert days and people are encouraged to carpool or take public transportation.

As I have said, even in a recession we are growing so I am not seeing a decay until the end of this decade at the earliest.

As I said in another tread, I would head South on U.S. 67, one of thirteen major routes, if we had to get out of Dodge. And since I know the area around U.S. 67, I know some alternate routes in the event something is not moving.

Jeanette Isabelle

I think you need to expand your field of vision.

So Texas has it's own power grid --- what if a disgruntled group of employees decide to take it down, having the knowledge and access to do it?

What is the source of water for the DFW area? Is it dependent on power? Oops! How long do you think business would continue as usual without water?



Neither DFW, nor Texas, nor the U.S. are economically independent entities. The world is now totally interconnected, and dependent on each facet working.

Weren't there some reports in January that Texas was somewhere between 18 and 25 BILLION DOLLARS in the hole? That means broke or close to it, to me. Have things improved drastically in the last six months?

If as few as four countries (even small countries) default on their loans to the U.S., economists estimate that will be the beginning of a world crash, a spiral of collapse that, once begun, can't be stopped.

Our federal government is broke, printing money to make up part of the difference, and fueling a recession. The last I heard, 46 of our 50 states are also broke. Where do you think this is going? No quick fixes seem to be in sight.

If our economic woes worsen, and we go into a severe 'Greater' Depression, is it just going to be the rest of the country, with Texas down there cheering us into solvency? I don't think so.

Sue

Not for long, the Texas interconnect is being integrated into a North American grid via the Tres Amigas SuperStation. The future Tres Amigas Superstation will become a supercritical node, which could cause a cascade failure of all electrical power in North America. Even more astounding is the high temperature DC superconductor technology being planned for its operation. Lets hope the liquid nitrogen plumbing and pumps are up to the job. 30GW into a single node would make for quite a bang.

Lets hope its not a ruse for an Anti-hydrogen production facility. Thats some pretty dangerous stuff to store and handle.

I suspect that you're 180 degrees out of phase with the cycle of deterioration and rebuilding in cities. Deterioration started in the 50s as the combination of easy mortgage creation, tax benefits, highway building outside cities all combined to gut previously vibrant cities and create suburban sprawl.

In some ways this process has been slowing down and may have reversed in the 90s. The housing crisis was one of the clearest signs that the reversal of the process is well under way. The mortgage deduction has been mentioned as going under the axe. That, and a whole lot of people are questioning assumptions about the received wisdom of 'home ownership', really renting from a bank until you clear the mortgage and state through property taxes, versus simply renting outright.

The Watts riots in 1965 and Chicago riots in 68, and a whole lot between and after were symptoms of what happens when cities are emptied out, face declining tax bases, but browner people are stuck, unable to move out to the suburbs because of red lining and discriminator lending practices. It wouldn't have been so frustrating for them stuck in the cities if jobs had stayed but with a unemployment rate many times that of their white counterparts, deteriorating physical situations, overstressed services and wide swaths of unoccupied housing it was only a matter of time before they rioted.

The cities are not back to what they were in the 50s but the shine has come off the 'good life' in the suburbs while many cities have shown remarkable improvements in livability.

Some of this shift is also being driven by energy costs. Fact is that city dwellers use less energy per person, and are generally healthier, than their suburban counterparts. Living in a city where you can walk to most of what you need to get to, where public transport makes makes up the difference, where vehicle ownership is entirely optional, means you spend less time in traffic, save money, stay healthier, and are more attuned to your neighborhood.

Cities are machines for living. They are also economic powerhouses. In any disaster cities are gong to get emergency services and relief faster and in great abundance. Partly this is because that is where the people are, partly because that is where the money gets made, and partly because that is where the people who make the money hang out.

Ok, I'm confused.

Not that I disagree with all that you say Art, but a city, by definition, contains a lot of people. The same bunch that will be competing for limited resources after a major disaster.

Out here in suburbia, I can find water (creek), food (rabbits, deer, wild turkeys), fuel (deadwood in the nearby forest) and have room for a garden. No, I don't walk to work, or take public transport (don't see how that is healthy) but I do take walks around my neighborhood and into the surrounding woods. "More attuned to my neighborhood" - does that mean I know where the bangers and dealers hang out so I can avoid them?

One big thing - disposal of waste. I can dig a latrine if forced to. I can burn my garbage if I have to. What about a city, where trash piles up during strikes. Heaven forbid a lack of water for toilets.

I think I will stay out of cities.

And they work well only when well balanced. When something goes out of whack (economic disaster, natural disaster), the sheer number of inhabitants vs commodities available causes a lack of balance.

Cites are heavily dependent on incoming materials of all kinds: power, food, water, useful goods. Cut off any ONE of them and what happens? Stop two or three of them?

Sue

I don't see that happening even with disgruntled employees. If something goes down, others would notice it quickly. I am confident in our power grid. A bigger problem would be a power distribution center.


The biggest threat to our water supply is a drought.


That sort of problem can affect any place and it may even be catostrophic but unless the economy freefalls, I don't see decay any time soon since we are growing even now.


I have not heard of this. I have heard that the Department of Transpotation is strapped for cash. Therefore it would seem other state departments would be hurting as well.

Jeanette Isabelle

Now I see a problem.

Jeanette Isabelle

There's a flip side, too. Access to power from other grids when the Texas grid is short of power will prevent blackouts and increase the reliability of the grid. Like when those recent winter ice storms led to blackouts in Texas--if spare capacity from, say, California could've been shunted to Texas, those blackouts might have been preventable.

Actually, from what I've read, Texas could be heading for a power shortage in just a few years. New regulations will require Texas power plants to be upgraded but electricity rates are quite low now so the upgrades may not make financial sense and the utilities would rather shut those gas-fired plants down. Eventually, supply and demand will raise rates enough to make those upgrades worthwhile, but in the meantime, Texans may suffer with barely enough capacity and perhaps more blackouts.

While I agree that a lot of progress in commerce, technology, and many other facets of civillization were made possible by cities, there can certainly be a point where cities are too large for their own good.

Cities--especially megacities--are such complicated creatures, it's hard to really make blanket statements. And they are different from each other so what works in one place may not work in another. New York City and Tokyo are vastly different on many levels from Lagos and Rio de Janeiro.

However, as the human population continues to climb, more and more cities will enter the ranks of megacities, so it's certainly an important issue.

I doubt we're reaching the apex of magacities and I don't think we'll see the sudden collapse of one either. Unless personal transportation is so improved as to make travel from rural areas to the city cheap, fast, and effortless, more people will move to cities. Baghdad is a good example of how resilient large cities can be. Since the early 90's the critical infrastructure (water treatment, electricity, etc) has been in shambles and still is today. Yet even with sanctions, invasion, ethnic cleansing, and horrific daily violence, millions of people still live there. How much worse could it get than that? Nothing even remotely close to that will ever happen in an american city, so I think we'll be fine. As for the popular survivalist scenario of a mass exocus of desperate citydwellers ravaging the countryside for resources I say, keep dreaming.

You make a good point. We, the allies, bombed Berlin to rubble and then two Russian armies set about redecorating the place while the Third Reich had its last gasp and old men and children set about to make the remodeling job as messy as possible. Then it was split in two. But Berlin remained a great city.

It is late, early, and I can't come up with any city of any size that was abandoned in the last few hundred years.

I go down a list of cities with major issues and disastrous conditions and I can't think of one where people just gave up.

Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo in WW2. Sarajevo during the Balkans conflict wasn't abandoned even as it was blasted, tortured, and converted to an open air shooting gallery. Baghdad, Fallujah in more recent times.

Cities are remarkably resilient. City dwellers are quick to adapt and quite tenacious.

I suppose that there is some degree of damage that would force a city to be abandoned. Soviet war planners had, according to one account, a plan that included 24 nuclear warheads, in sizes up to twenty megatons, going off over Washington DC. Hard to imagine rebuilding but I'm not entirely sure about it.

The Texas power grid is solid. We only have a problem when an electrical substation went down and when severe weather knocks out the power lines.


That was because the power lines went down. It has nothing to do with the grid.

Jeanette Isabelle

Icing on power lines was only one of the issues during that time. Among the problems, the cold actually shut down power plants themselves. And a huge increase in residential natural gas use caused the utilities to shut down many natural gas fired power plants to divert natural gas to their residential customers. (I get the impression that the hassle and danger of turning on millions of pilot lights for residential natural gas customers was a bigger concern than letting the gas fired power plants shut down.) This article describes that episode and how the blackouts happened. It says that 50 Texas power plants dropped off the grid. The wholesale price of electricity spiked from $70 MW/hr to over $3,000.

The article also mentions the deregulated Texas power market. The energy companies aren't required to build enough power plants, or even any power plants, if they can get their power from someone else. That's why the shutdown of gas-fired plants in the next few years will happen in Texas, as I mentioned in my previous post.

As long as there is just enough power to meet demand, then prices will remain too low for these Texas energy companies to have a financial incentive to make those expensive upgrades to those gas fired plants. Therefore, any sudden loss of capacity, like that winter episode, or a sudden spike in demand will lead to blackouts.

Let's not forget Grozny. The Russians leveled that city more than once, but it is still inhabited.

The only city I can think of is Pripyat, in the radiation exclusion zone around Chernobyl.

There must be any number of cities in the Russian interior that have declined considerably since Soviet times. Of course, none of these are megacities, which is the OP's interest.

Oh, certainly not a megacity, but Ajdabiya in Libya essentially emptied out completely due to the fighting there. Of course, once the dust settles, residents will likely return, I presume.

However, certain events in recent memory make me wonder how soon before we see a major city actually abondoned for one reason or another. If things had gone a bit differently, what might have happened in the short term or longer term with certain recent events. Events like Katrina and New Orleans, the recent Mississippi River flooding, Deepwater Horizon and the Gulf ecosystem, the surprise massive earthquake under Chrischurch, NZ, the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear situation in Japan, etc.

Especially in Japan, what if the earthquake and tsunami had occurred closer to Tokyo? Or what if the prevailing winds from Fukushima Daiichi had blown radioactive particles southwest towards Tokyo most of the time instead of straight out to sea? This situation in particular really concerned me considering the size and importance of a megacity like Tokyo.

This had nothing to do with the grid. Grid-related issues are technical. This was not technical. The major problem is the coal-burning power companies did not prepare. The second problem was only minor and it may not have made a difference. Oncor did not have all of the information they needed.


Jeanette Isabelle

Quite right. What I described in my last post wasn't a grid problem, but the circumstances of an event that illustrate a weakness of the Texas grid, which is what I was talking about in the post before that one. I got too wrapped up in the details.

The bottom line is that the problem for the Texas grid was that it couldn't compensate for the loss of generating capacity by getting more power from outside. And in relation to Tres Amigas, I said in an earlier post, "Access to power from other grids when the Texas grid is short of power will prevent blackouts and increase the reliability of the (Texas) grid (to deliver power to its customers)".

Ultimately, whether the power customer is sitting in the dark or not is what really defines a reliable grid for people, not whether all the transmission equipment is intact.

Of course, isolation can also be a strength in other circumstances.

I know of two instances within my life time where grid-related issues caused an entire system in other parts of the country to shut down for a number of days. I would rather have rolling blackouts (because not all of the coal-burning plants are online) than that.

If a grid our grid is hooked up to goes down, our grid goes down with it.

Jeanette Isabelle

There is also the problem of Black Start if a wide area grid outage occurs.

A terrorist network attack of the electrical grid targeting the transmission lines from black start generator sets could be absolutely devastating to a countries economy enough to cause chaos from many a megacity (which itself could cause other Megacities to fail esp if the initial targeted Megacity was a finance centre) , the clock may easily get past that 3-4 days grace. 7+ days could be extremely challenging.

Knocking over the grid initially would be relativity simple especially during the high heat of the summer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGJHwzsPdpY