Neo-Urbanism & the 3rd Industrial Revolution

The First Industrial Revolution was the introduction of coal and steam power to extend the power and speed of man.  It was characterised by a rapid centralisation of capital and political power amongst the new class of industrialists.

The Second Industrial Revolution took place with the introduction of petroleum and the internal combustion process managed through the aegis of the new era of telecommunications.

The Third Industrial Revolution is now rising with the accelerating shift to renewable energy and LFT reactors resulting in the distribution of the creation of information and electrical power creation medeiated by the Internet.

The five pillars of this Third Industrial Revolution are:

1. shifting to renewable energy;
2. transforming the building stock of every continent into micro-power plants to collect renewable energies on-site;
3. deploying hydrogen and other storage technologies in every building and throughout the infrastructure to store intermittent energies;
4. using Internet technology to transform the power grid of every continent into an energy-sharing intergrid that acts just like the Internet (when millions of buildings are generating a small amount of energy locally, on-site, they can sell surplus back to the grid and share electricity with their continental neighbors); and
5. transitioning the transport fleet to electric plug-in and fuel cell vehicles that can buy and sell electricity on a smart, continental, interactive power grid. ¹

Architects and planners have an important role to play even before we get to the first step: a shift to renewable energy. That role is in energy conservation.  Those best suited to the tasks are the neo-urbanists whose every action moves in the direction of energy conservation simply because of their application of the lessons taught by our grandfathers and grandmothers... well, mine, anyway.

The Congress for the New Urbanism says of the movement “New Urbanism is lighter on the pocketbook, more efficient with tax dollars, safer for pedestrians, bikers and drivers, easier on the environment and is a healthier way to live. It just performs better.”²

And that is exactly what the Third Industrial Revolution needs.

The densely populated urban areas of Asia present a particularly great challenge, and yet, when we look around the world we find many densely inhabited pockets within cities that are extremely livable because their construction preceded the flowering of the Second Industrial Revolution in the Fifties and Sixties when cities were still being made for humans and not for cars.

Unfortunately, the cities of Asia are by and large learning all the wrong lessons from what has gone before in the west, putting the automobile before people and manufacturing huge numbers of low-efficiency appliances just to keep the prices down, ignoring the high running cost, short lives and damage to the environment that results.

It is urgently necessary that governments learn that there is much more to be gained from the lessons gleaned from the past via the new urbanism than persisting in their pursuit of sterile modernist environments suitable only for machines.

One of the most conspicuous examples of the failure of governments to understand the needs of their societies is the hideous gargantuan triptych that destroys the cohesiveness of the otherwise salvageable public space around Marina Bay in Singapore. If it were visually interesting, that might have some redeeming value, but instead it looks like a cabin cruiser marooned on top of three giant gravestones as a result of a horrendous tsunami and is surrounded by pedestrian-hostile streets and motorways.  What could possibly have been going through the mind of anyone associated with giving this design the go ahead?  Certainly providing a livable environment for future generations wasn’t it.

This particular cloud’s silver lining is that it provides as splendid an example of architecture gone madly awry as one could want - and we get to see it every day as a reminder.


1  The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin,  Palgrave Macmillan 2011
² http://www.cnu.org/

Next... Man vs. Machine

Contributed by Frank Bouman