I have just come with an idea. One of those big ones, the kind that pushes you to write a business plan and some scientific stuff as well. Here is the idea: a network of ponds and waterways, made in the close vicinity of a river, being both a reservoir of water – mostly the excess rainwater from big downpours – and a location for a network of small water turbines. The idea comes from a few observations, as well as other ideas, that I had over the last two years. Firstly. in Central Europe, we have less and less water from the melting snow – as there is almost no snow anymore in winter – and more and more water from sudden, heavy rain. We need to learn how to retain rainwater in the most efficient way. Secondly, as we have local floods due to heavy rains, some sort of spontaneous formation of floodplains happens. Even if there is no visible pond, the ground gets a bit spongy and soaked, flood after flood. We have more and more mosquitoes. If it is happening anyway, let’s use it creatively. This particular point is visualised in the map below, with the example of Central and Southern Europe. Thus, my idea is to utilise purposefully a naturally happening phenomenon, component of climate change.
Source: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/floodplain-distribution last access June 20th, 2019
Thirdly, there is some sort of new generation in water turbines: a whole range of small devices, simple and versatile, has come to the market. You can have a look at what those guys at Blue Freedom are doing. Really interesting. Hydroelectricity can now be approached in an apparently much less capital-intensive way. Thus, the idea I have is to arrange purposefully the floodplains we have in Europe into as energy-efficient and carbon-efficient places as possible. I give the general idea graphically in the picture below.
I am approaching the whole thing from the economics’ point of view, i.e. I want a piece of floodplain arranged into this particular concept to have more value, financial value included, than the same piece of floodplain just being ignored in its inherent potential. I can see two distinct avenues for developing the concept: that of a generally wild, uninhabited floodplain, like public land, as opposed to an inhabited floodplain, under incumbent or ongoing construction, residential or other. The latter is precisely what I want to focus on. I want to study, and possibly to develop a business plan for a human habitat combined with a semi-aquatic ecosystem, i.e. a network of ponds, waterways and water turbines in places where people live and work. Hence, from the geographic point of view, I am focusing on places where the secondary formation of floodplain-type of terrain already occurs in towns and cities, or in the immediate vicinity thereof. For more than one century, the growth of urban habitats has been accompanied by the entrenching of waterways in strictly defined, concrete-reinforced beds. I want to go the other way, and let those rivers spill around their waters, into wetlands, in a manner beneficial to human dwelling.
My initial approach to the underlying environmental concept is market based. Can we create urban wetlands, in flood-threatened areas, where the presence of the explicitly and purposefully arranged aquatic structures increases the value of property so as to top the investment required? I start with the most fundamental marks in the environment. I imagine a piece of land in an urban area. It has its present market value, and I want to study its possible value in the future.
I imagine a piece of land located in an urban area with the characteristics of a floodplain, i.e. recurrently threatened by local floods or the secondary effects thereof. At the moment ‘t’, that piece of land has a market value M(t) = S * m(t), being the product of its total surface S, constant over time, and the market price m(t) per unit of surface, changing over time. There are two moments in time, i.e. the initial moment t0, and the subsequent moment t1, after the development into urban wetland. Said development requires a stream of investment I(t0 -> t1). I want to study the conditions for M(t1) – M(t0) > I(t0 -> t1). As surface S is constant over time, my problem breaks down into units of surface, whence the aggregate investment I(t0 -> t1) being decomposed into I(t0 -> t1) = S * i(t0 -> t1), and the problem restated as m(t1) – m(t0) > i(t0 -> t1).
I assume the market price m(t) is based on two types of characteristics: those directly measurable as financials, for one, e.g. the average wage a resident can expect from a locally based job, and those more diffuse ones, whose translation into financial variables is subtler, and sometimes pointless. I allow myself to call the latter ones ‘environmental services’. They cover quite a broad range of phenomena, ranging from the access to clean water outside the public water supply system, all the way to subjectively perceived happiness and well-being. All in all, mathematically, I say m(t) = f(x1, x2, …, xk) : the market price of construction land in cities is a function of k variables. Consistently with the above, I assume that f[t1; (x1, x2, …, xk)] – f[t0; (x1, x2, …, xk)] > i(t0 -> t1).
It is intellectually honest to tackle those characteristics of urban land that make its market price. There is a useful observation about cities: anything that impacts the value of urban real estate, sooner or later translates into rent that people are willing to pay for being able to stay there. Please, notice that even when we own a piece of real estate, i.e. when we have property rights to it, we usually pay to someone some kind of periodic allowance for being able to execute our property rights fully: the real estate tax, the maintenance fee paid to the management of residential condominiums, the fee for sanitation service (e.g. garbage collection) etc. Any urban piece of land has a rent tag attached. Even those characteristics of a place, which pertain mostly to the subjectively experienced pleasure and well-being derived out of staying there have a rent-like price attached to them, at the end of the day.
Good. I have made a sketch of the thing. Now, I am going to pass in review some published research, in order to set my landmarks. I start with some literature regarding urban planning, and as soon as I do so, I discover an application for artificial intelligence, a topic of interest for me, those last months. Lyu et al. (2017[1]) present a method for procedural modelling of urban layout, and in their work, I can spot something similar to the equations I have just come up with: complex analysis of land-suitability. It starts with dividing the total areal of urban land at hand, in a given city, into standard units of surface. Geometrically, they look nice when they are equisized squares. Each unit ‘i’ can be potentially used for many alternative purposes. Lyu et al. distinguish 5 typical uses of urban land: residential, industrial, commercial, official, and open & green. Each such surface unit ‘i’ is endowed with a certain suitability for different purposes, and this suitability is the function of a finite number of factors. Formally, the suitability sik of land unit i for use k is a weighted average over a vector of factors, where wkj is the weight of factor j for land use k, and rij is the rating of land unit i on factor j. Below, I am trying to reproduce graphically the general logic of this approach.
In a city approached analytically with the general method presented above, Lyu et al. (2017[1]) distribute three layers of urban layout: population, road network, and land use. It starts with an initial state (input state) of population, land use, and available area. In a first step of the procedure, a simulation of highways and arterial transport connections is made. The transportation grid suggests some kind of division of urban space into districts. As far as I understand it, Lyu et al. define districts as functional units with the quantitative dominance of certain land uses, i.e. residential vs. industrial rather than rich folks’ estate vs. losers’ end, sort of.
As a first sketch of district division is made, it allows simulating a first distribution of population in the city, and a first draft of land use. The distribution of population is largely a distribution of density in population, and the corresponding transportation grid is strongly correlated with it. Some modes of urban transport work only above some critical thresholds in the density of population. This is an important point: density of population is a critical variable in social sciences.
Then, some kind of planning freedom can be allowed inside districts, which results in a second draft of spatial distribution in population, where a new type of unit – a neighbourhood – appears. Lyu et al. do not explain in detail the concept of neighbourhood, and yet it is interesting. It suggests the importance of spontaneous settlement vs. that of planned spatial arrangement.
I am strongly attached to that notion of spontaneous settlement. I am firmly convinced that on the long run people live where they want to live, and urban planning can just make that process somehow smoother and more efficient. Thus comes another article in my review of literature, by Mahmoud & Divigalpitiya (2019[2]). By the way, I have an interesting meta-observation: most recent literature about urban development is based on empirical research in emerging economies and in developing countries, with the U.S. coming next, and Europe lagging far behind. In Europe, we do very little research about our own social structures, whilst them Egyptians or Thais are constantly studying the way they live collectively.
Anyway, back to by Mahmoud & Divigalpitiya (2019[3]), the article is interesting from my point of view because its authors study the development of new towns and cities. For me, it is an insight into how the radically new urban structures sink into the incumbent spatial distribution of population. The specific background of this particular study is a public policy of the Egyptian government to establish, in a planned manner, new cities some distance away from the Nile, and do it so as to minimize the encroachment on agricultural land. Thus, we have scarce space and people to fit into, with optimal use of land.
As I study that paper by Mahmoud & Divigalpitiya, some kind of extension to my initial idea emerges. Those researchers report that with proper water and energy management, more specifically with the creation of irrigative structures like those which I came up with – networks of ponds and waterways – paired with a network of small hydropower units, it is possible both to accommodate an increase of 90% in local urban population, and create 3,75% more of agricultural land. Another important finding about those new urban communities in Egypt is that they tend to grow by sprawl rather than by distant settlement. New city dwellers tend to settle close to the incumbent residents, rather than in more remote locations. In simple words: it is bloody hard to create a new city from scratch. Habits and social links are like a tangible expanse of matter, which opposes resistance to distortions.
I
switch to another paper based on Egyptian research, namely that by Hatata
et al. 2019[4], relative
to the use of small hydropower generators. The paper is rich in technicalities,
and therefore I note to come back to it many times when I will be going more
into the details of my concept. For now, I have a few general takeaways. Firstly,
it is wise to combine small hydro off grid with that connected to the power
grid, and more generally, small hydro looks like a good complementary source of
power, next to a regular grid, rather than a 100% autonomous power base. Still,
full autonomy is possible, mostly with the technology of Permanent
Magnet Synchronous Generator.
Secondly,
Hatata et al. present a calculation of economic value in hydropower projects,
based on their Net Present Value, which, in turn, is calculated on the grounds
of a basic assumption that hydropower installations carry some residual capital
value Vr over their entire lifetime, and additionally can
generate a current cash flow determined by: a) the revenue Rt from the sales of
energy b) the locally needed investment It c) the
operating cost Ot and d) the maintenance cost Mt,
all that in the presence of a periodic discount rate r.
I am consistently delivering good, almost new science to my readers, and love doing it, and I am working on crowdfunding this activity of mine. You can communicate with me directly, via the mailbox of this blog: goodscience@discoversocialsciences.com. As we talk business plans, I remind you that you can download, from the library of my blog, the business plan I prepared for my semi-scientific project Befund (and you can access the French version as well). You can also get a free e-copy of my book ‘Capitalism and Political Power’ You can support my research by donating directly, any amount you consider appropriate, to my PayPal account. You can also consider going to my Patreon page and become my patron. If you decide so, I will be grateful for suggesting me two things that Patreon suggests me to suggest you. Firstly, what kind of reward would you expect in exchange of supporting me? Secondly, what kind of phases would you like to see in the development of my research, and of the corresponding educational tools?
[1] Lyu, X., Han, Q., & de Vries, B. (2017). Procedural modeling of urban layout: population, land use, and road network. Transportation research procedia, 25, 3333-3342.
[2] Mahmoud, H., & Divigalpitiya, P. (2019). Spatiotemporal variation analysis of urban land expansion in the establishment of new communities in Upper Egypt: A case study of New Asyut city. The Egyptian Journal of Remote Sensing and Space Science, 22(1), 59-66.
[3] Mahmoud, H., & Divigalpitiya, P. (2019). Spatiotemporal variation analysis of urban land expansion in the establishment of new communities in Upper Egypt: A case study of New Asyut city. The Egyptian Journal of Remote Sensing and Space Science, 22(1), 59-66.
[4] Hatata, A. Y., El-Saadawi, M. M., & Saad, S. (2019). A feasibility study of small hydro power for selected locations in Egypt. Energy Strategy Reviews, 24, 300-313.
