The Visible Cost of Urbanisation

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Densification, also called urbanisation, is a double edged problem. The first problem is that bringing more people closer together you increase noise pollution. The more people live nearby, the more people need to learn to be quiet. The second cost is an inability to shelter from the heat on a hot summer’s day.

In Paris, Geneva, Nyon and London plenty of people have moved from villages and houses to apartments. The result of this migration from a multi-level house to a single floor apartment is that during a heatwave people are stuck in hot apartments with nowhere to flee.

In a house, if it gets hot, you can move to the ground floor, and you can close windows and shutters, and control the entire column of the building. You also have a garden to flee to, to escape from the heat. In theory you might even have a prairie. That’s what I had, when I lived in a house rather than an apartment.

When you live in a minergie building, and apartment buildings in general, they are good, for staying warm in winter, to the point that you can keep windows open, by design, even in winter.

In summer though that design backfires especially with Minergie. During a heatwave opening windows and doors at the wrong time heats up the structure, not just the air. The result is that if heat lasts for long enough the walls soak up enough heat to become radiators.

Last night we had a torrential downpour. The OAT was just 22°c or so, and the air was cooled, including with hail. In a healthy building that hail, and rain, would have cooled the structure.

Last night the rain arrived, and fell, but my apartment stayed at 32°c in the bedroom.

I went for a run yesterday in the late afternoon with a group. I was showing signs of heat exhaustion and the paradox is that running and fresh air actually cooled me down, and I felt better, from being outside, from running.

According to Xiaomi my bedroom heated to 32.1°c after the rain so I decided to use the air conditioner and I got a 2 degree drop in temperature. At 3am it was 30°c and at 6am it was back up to 31.8°c.

I hate everything that air conditioning stands for. In my eyes air conditioning is amplifying global warming first, through requiring energy to run, and secondly by super heating the air that it exhausts.

I find it absurd that a minergie building requires air conditioning in summer, to remain habitable. They were so focused on saving energy in winter that they force people to waste far more energy in summer to cool their “homes”.

By moving people from villages to towns, and by removing gardens, and trees in villages we are ensuring that villages, as well as towns are heating up. Where a forest once provided a park for fresh air and a buffer from the heat of other buildings, we now have a concrete jungle.

It’s not just that urbanisation removes nature, but that it removes natural solutions to keeping temperatures down. Grass and trees are essential. By removing them a prairie is replaced with a heat sink that absorbs heat energy during the day, and radiates it at night.

In the past, during canicules, and in hot weather, I knew that I could return to a cool cavern/home. Now I know that a walk in the mid-afternoon heat will feel refreshing compared to the Minergie building where the walls radiate heat, especially during a heat wave.

Global warming is making summers hotter, and dryer, but we’re not making things better by cutting down trees and forests, and replacing villas with gardens and trees with apartment houses with tarmac parking. Where villages were once rural, they are now becoming suburbs.

France is discussing air conditioning, but the forests and trees that were cut down for densification, as well as grass gardens, all result in heat islands no longer being separated by green belts. This amplifies the heat island effect. That’s why cities like Basel are seeing 39°c, and yet the RTS don’t address that topic.

We have record heat because we pumped too much methane and CO2 into the atmosphere, but we’re not helping by turning green towns and villages into grey suburbs.

Given the yearly summer heat waves I believe that moving away from rural villages is a mistake, because in so doing we are crowding people into smaller spaces. By removing, plants, bushes, grass and gardens we are reducing nature’s opportunities to cool the environment we live in. Densification has a negative impact on quality of life, especially during a heatwave.