How air-conditioning created the modern city
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It is necessary to move heat around to get useful work done. More people will have to become familiar with this idea personally to maintain their way of life.
Ask all those people in NYC with walkups.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903639404576516...
Part of it is household size; the modern household has decreased in size dramatically, now that raising children has moved from "we need as many children as possible so that at least a few of them make it to adulthood" to "giving children a quality life is expensive".
A good deal of it is transportation. In 1800 most people walked, and the rich used horses. By 1900 we had railroads and streetcars; by 1920 we had metros; by 1950 we had automobiles. The effect of the automobile has been strongest in America; a single highway interchange in Atlanta takes up as much room as the city of Florence, Italy. https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/you-cant-set-shop-si...
That section eyeballs to be around roughly ~1.5 mi across. Larger than 2000 ft but a lot less than 5.5 mi.
Living standards affect density, but they're not the reason we can't fit 190 people per acre.
Let's say you're in 1900 making 6 story apartment blocks. You could set up a residential district that's 30% road, 20% open space, and 50% building.
Make your average apartment be 600 square feet with a 20x12 living room, two 10x12 bedrooms, a 10x6 kitchenette, a 10x6 bathroom, and an occupancy of 3. Probably slightly reshaped for the sake of windows.
With some extra space for hallways and stairs, you can reach an average ground impact of 75 square feet per person.
That means it only takes a third of an acre to house 190 people, leaving the other 2/3 for businesses. For comparison NYC is currently 75% residential.
Such an apartment isn't huge but it's still twice the size of college dorm.
These days you could build 3x as high and give each person over twice that much space and have lots of elevators and still fit 200 people into a third of an acre. Rent out the bottom floor to shops too.
Until 1961, New York had a zoning code that was concerned with exactly none of those things, and planning for services and basic infrastructure was haphazard at best. While the current zoning code is overly restrictive, it at least prevents growth in places that would not have the services required to handle it. (It also prevents the growth in a lot of other places as well, but that's beside the point.)
That's why I looked up how much of the city is residential right now. If you only spend 1/3 of the city on apartments, that leaves you a lot of room for everything else.
> What about playgrounds and parks?
Oops. I had a thing about making an entire block into a park out of every 3x3 but I lost it in editing. So yes there's lots of room for parks.
> And can all these workers get to work using the available infrastructure?
The base idea was set in 1900 and housing the same number of people but in better buildings, so yeah they can still get to work.
For the idea of fitting more people into the current city, I'm not sure, but it would probably work out. Have more mid-rise housing right next to jobs, and use the tax boost from having more residents to add more mass transit.
As far as zoning, the issue is not housing vs. services and infrastructure, it's the size of the housing. Detached houses have an awful use ratio.
Unfortunately NY is set up as a centralized archipelago; existing transport infrastructure is pretty much saturated, and encouraging outlying areas to gain jobs is not workable because Manhattan is the only place accessible to every single part of the metro area within one or two seats on public transport.
It's hard to use the tax boost to add more mass transit, because you'd have to bond based on projected revenues, which is fickle at best. The only places that tie redevelopment and transit together successfully seem to be in Hong Kong and Japan, but in those places the mass transit operator either already owned the land being redeveloped, or got it for pennies on the dollar as a de facto public subsidy, which would be impossible in the US due to the Just Compensation clause of the Fifth Amendment.
Manhattan has a density of 72,000 people per square mile. If it were its own city, that would make it the 6th densest city in the world[0]. The top three are Manila and Mumbai, at 108,000, 74,000, and 74,000 people per square mile, respectively. So, regardless of levels of development, modern cities cap out under 80,000 people per square mile, with Manila being a slight outlier (but not by much).
190 people/acre - what you cite for Antioch - is 121,600 people per square mile. I'm not able to find any reputable sources that back that statistic, and estimating populations of cities from antiquity is inherently a bit tricky. 500,000 people would also put it at 50-80% of the population of Rome during the same time period, and more populous that Constantinople, though it's not included in any of the four lists of populations of large cities on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_through...
[0] There are two more, at 108K and 80K, but they both have populations under 70,000, so they're not comparable.
I believe that the upper floors of all the pretty buildings in Paris were cheaper before elevators, too. (Perhaps the streets were quieter then too.)
Apart from the stairs being a pain, your water pressure is also weak.
In a five story building, the water can get that high just with pressure from the mains, though the pressure will be much weaker than on lower floors, so the building doesn't need to have any mechanism for increasing the pressure. It probably wouldn't be done for newer buildings, but when the older walk-ups were constructed it would have been considered acceptable as a way of keeping costs lower.
My understanding is that this was fairly standard in tall buildings everywhere.
Obviously there were no elevators.
The top floors in most prewar walkups in NYC are the cheapest today, even though all have sturdy fire escapes. People don't want to walk up 5 flights of stairs every day, and they also get swelteringly hot on the top floors during the summer, whereas lower floors stay cooler.
That isn't my experience with the top floors of NYC prewar walkups today (and trust me, I've had a lot of that!), but I could see that being an issue in other places or in previous times.
I don't think that'd have been a driving factor in ancient Rome, though, given how different their uses of their plumbing technology were from ours. They had public toilets and baths (at ground level), so water pressure for washing and bathing wouldn't be a concern for top-floor apartments the way it would be for us today.
Being on the top floor of a building without A/C can definitely be an issue with respect to heat.
However, while having to lug a bunch of groceries (or whatever) up multiple flights of stairs can be an pain, is "walking up 5 flights of stairs a day" really a big issue? [Obviously for some people with infirmities it will be.] I work--well, when I commute--in a 4 story office building and most people, including myself, take the stairs when we move between floors for meeting, cafeteria, etc. We at least used to have signs encouraging taking the steps.
Just thinking anecdotally, myself and many of my neighbors in NYC are probably dealing with a dozen or more flights or stairs up and down on a daily basis (two flights down out of the apartment building, half a flight up to the street level from the sunken entrance, another 2 flights back down into the subway station, 2 flights up on the other end of the train ride, a flight in the grocery store, two flights at the gym, etc, etc, etc). Escalators are often present, but many people walk up those anyways. I'd feel comfortable saying people living here are generally in far, far better stair-climbing-shape than most of the country.
Some examples:
- I biked to work. Carrying my bike up 5 stories of narrow stairs, bumping into everything, every evening was not a fun way to end my day.
- Moving any heavy/bulky object will make even paid movers cry.
- It makes coming and going feel like a sizable task.
That said, I still preferred it over a lower floor, because it meant no noise from above and less street noise.
How common is this? I never see people take the stairs when there's an elevator. I always take the elevator even if it's just one floor and I have to wait a while.
Also, if you had heating, somebody had to lug up coal, and parents (about everybody was one, at the time, and the mothers were pregnant quite often) would have to lug up small children.
And it isn’t “5 flights of stairs a day”. Chances are the toilet was at least one stair away, too.
This all depends of course on the overall state of your fitness, and how heavy you are. Ideally, one never would use an elevator and hence be very fit and less overweight. And this doesn't count in any kind of medical condition which limit or even prohibit you from taking many (or any) stairs.
For all the practical benefits both elevators and cars have brought to the modern human, they certainly have a big drawback on the average fitness. I try to use stairs as much as possible, and on an average day I certainly klimb 12 flights, but would no longer consider an appartment in the 3rd floor without an elevator for when it is needed.
I think every single apartment having its own kitchen and every person having their own set of cutlery/dishware/pots/pans/etc is very, very new.
People. Furnishings. Possessions. Food. Water. Waste.
If something didn't move independently, you moved it personally.
Privies tended to be outside, at ground level. Pisspots were standard items.
Gardyloo!
This isn't really true - the Aurelian walls were about 14 square kilometers, but a significant portion of the city's 1 million people lived outside the Aurelian walls. We don't have a good sense of how many people lived within the Aurelian walls, but number that's often cited (1 million people/14 square km = 70,000 people/square km, 2.5 times the most dense city in the world today) is not actually representative of what ancient Rome looked like at any period in history.
But the article seems to take modern to mean present-day Houston, and Dubai, Singapore... these were not devoid of human settlement before, of course, but could not look as they do now without AC.
> How many people want to climb 20 stories
> of stairs every day of their life.
Just waiting for and taking the elevator will easily take a minute at least. So we're left with just over 2 minutes.
This is on the order of time that it takes many people to walk from their parked car to the front door at work, or even just to park their car!
That would be nothing compared to the alternative of there being 1-3 floor houses everywhere, so you'd need to commute even further than that.
> nevermind the transportation of equipment.
People would certainly be more fit in such a world. In ours, climbing 20 stories is not something many people can do at all, never mind do willingly every day. But even for a fit person, 20 stories at 10sec/story is definitely not "generous", more like a great athletic achievement given how strenuous it is to climb stairs compared to walking or running on flat ground. Gravity is a bitch.
But tell you what. I'll try the experiment later today.
Absolutely not. Before elevators most buildings would stop at around 5 stories. Climbing 20 stories is not just time-consuming[0], it's also quite tiring, you're dragging your own mass 60m upwards on a very steep slope.
And that's basically discarding older adults entirely, according to "Functional predictors of stair-climbing speed in older adults" individuals ascend about 1.3 steps per second for 8~10 steps.
> That would be nothing compared to the alternative of there being 1-3 floor houses everywhere, so you'd need to commute even further than that.
The alternative would be necessarily rethinking the entire mess and either creating much wider buildings or going back to a much more decentralised model.
> This is on the order of time that it takes many people to walk from their parked car to the front door at work, or even just to park their car!
Walking level ground and climbing stairs is not the same effort at all.
[0] and 10 seconds per floor is absolutely not generous, it corresponds to a high-cadence stair-stepper setting (100 steps/mn, assuming 16 steps/flight which is about what you get in a residential building, an office building would be 18~20 steps/flight)
And before elevators housing prices and density aren't what they are now. You'd find a lot of people willing to traverse 20 stories if it meant not living a 30 minute commute away. So we really don't have any real-world data for this.
> Walking level ground and climbing stairs is not the same effort at all.
Sure. But I think my point of this comparing favorably to commutes stands. Also, given the statistics of adults who under-exercise this is a win-win, traversing stairs at every opportunity is a great way to get a workout in.
> 10 seconds per floor is absolutely not generous
Those 10 seconds per floor was probably overly optimistic. FWIW I live on the 4th floor and (I just timed it) it takes me around 35 seconds to go up from the ground floor at the pace I usually do, and would be comfortable maintaining for 5x that distance. I take every second step. That's 8.75 seconds/floor.
> which is about what you get in a residential building, an office building[...]
Keep in mind that those office buildings have more distance between floors partly because they're designed in a world where the elevator exists. If we're supposing that elevators hadn't been invented there would be a market pressure to construct buildings that made it easier to go up the stairs.
In one of my previous jobs, our office was on 17th floor, and one day each week before lunch we'd all take elevator to floor level, and then climb these 17 floors back up. Let me tell you, last 4 floors are nothing like first 4 floors. Just try it for yourself one day -- find a 20 story building, climb to the top, see how tired you are, and how much time it took you, and then consider that you'd have to do it 2-4 times a day on average.
I suggest you actually try it once, it will probably be eye-opening.
And then of course you may want to consider that not everybody is a fit healthy young adult.
> Keep in mind that those office buildings have more distance between floors partly because they're designed in a world where the elevator exists. If we're supposing that elevators hadn't been invented there would be a market pressure to construct buildings that made it easier to go up the stairs.
No. Office buildings have more space between the floors for conduits and the like. You can bet your damn ass if they could pack more floors in the same vertical space they'd do so.
I'd guess very few -- I work in a 23 story office building (on the 20th floor, coindidentally), and from my desk I can see the stairway door in the hallway.
Other than maintenance staff, I don't remember seeing a single person use that door. We have another office on the 15th floor, and I know of no one that uses the stairs to travel the 5 floors from office to office.
So I think the number of people that want to climb 20 stories by stairs every day is very low.
I live 270 ft up a hill, and regularly walk up. At 10 feet per story, that's 27 floors. I'm also the only one on the hill who walks up it.
I have a feeling the people who installed elevators in buildings thought it through.
In SimTower you can only build to four stories with stairs and escalators, I believe.
- Elevator (making high-rises socially possible)
- Air conditioning
- Electric lighting (making windows less necessary to fill interior space with workplaces, and much safer than ceiling gas lights)
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Architecture-Well-Tempered-Environmen...
Steel suitable for pipes, and long-distance water pipes, really did not exist before the 1860s, and mostly arose for and from the Pennsylvania oil industry. The earlier options were generally ceramic pipe (OK for horizontal flows, but prone to breakage), and open acqueducts (dating to Roman times), with wood or bamboo used for some shorter runs (tens to 100s of meters generally).
I don't know much about skyscraper plumbing at all, though I doubt it's just scaled-up 1-4 storey kit.
And by 1931, the Empire State Building was 102 storeys tall (443m).
For more on multi-storey plumbing considerations:
http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/hygiene/plumbing1...
Galveston (where I currently live) was here long before A/C. The Storm of 1900 is what drove Houston to grow. Houston is more inland and better situated to weather the threat of hurricanes than a barrier island. The railroad allowed Houston to become a nexus of trade (in cotton shipping out of Galveston originally). The oil boom continued that growth. A/C didn't come along for many years later. It fueled the cities growth but plenty of people lived on the Gulf coast to benefit from the breezes off the water. In fact, it was those breezes that drove the University of Texas to start its medical hospital, UTMB, in Galveston.
How people managed to live further inland where there was no wind is beyond me. (There are too many mosquitoes to spend too long outside or have open windows without screens - besides, even then they'll still find a way to get through.)
A/C drove folks to move where the climates are warmer but land is more plentiful. A/C, like the railroad before it, made westward expansion more doable (bearable?).
Cities like Las Vegas and other desert metropolises sprang up as a direct result of A/C.
Compare this to the house I bought built in 1998, it is unlivable without the air turned on. And even with it running it is still uncomfortable when the temps get into the mid 90s. It has huge windows, but even with the curtains closed it was horrible -- there was just no natural airflow in it.
One of my favorite houses was one that a relative had in Mississippi, which was one roof with three separate living areas and a T-shaped breezeway running through the house. Another design item was apartments with sun rooms, where you could open various windows to always catch a cross breeze.
- Leaky ("breathable") home constructions vs. air-tight tolerances required to code now.
- Region-specific cooling and design practices which aided in the dead of the summer (or winter!)
- More geographically-minded decisions: Mature, treed lots for shade (double points for deciduous trees in winter which let the sun radiate through), more E/W facing vs N/S.
- Architecture: Smaller, closed off rooms (shut the door to trap the heat/cold), breezeways, enclosed porches all seemed a lot more popular then vs. now when keeping cool (or warm, in the rooms' case) was a priority.
Of course, mileage will vary, but this is something interesting I've found comparing the house I grew up in (built 1952), my first home (1986), and our recent build (2018) which are all within <5 miles of each other. FWIW, if the HVAC doesn't run all day at the new home, it's a noticeable "stagnant air" when you get home.
To put this into some perspective, some 2 billion live in Asia, Africa, and Latin American regions with the same or worse conditions re: heat and mosquitoes.
It would be so easy to make every building comfortable. Design for high airflow - the air is not muggy. Include long awnings over all windows. This is obvious: even on the hottest day, it's usually comfortable under a tree. But the home builders have stubbornly ignored these old and simple solutions. Most houses are sealed boxes with no window shade at all. I don't understand it.
It's not great, but it's a lot better than lots of more northern cities like Boston. I literally cannot sleep in Boston during the summer without air conditioning.
That is the general appeal of these places, for sure.
Every time there's a thread on air conditioning, we get smug comments like this, usually from places where the climate is so comfortable to begin with that air conditioners are the least necessary. Okay, Los Angeles needs them two or three months a year. Anyone from San Francisco, on the other hand, forfeits the right to talk about air conditioners in my opinion.
I'm sitting in a major metropolitan area in Asia. The temperature right now is 39'C (102'F), and can easily go over 45'C (113'F) in the sun. The humidity fluctuates between 50% at midday and 90% at night, and the temperature remains above 30'C (86'C) through most of the night, too. I would love it if you could make every building comfortable under these constraints. Hint: increased ventilation only brings in more heat. Any cooling solution that relies on evaporating H2O does not work, either, so don't bother bringing those Kickstarter gadgets here. Most of the old world is in the same boat. Coastal California is the exception, not the norm.
Hell, we run our air conditioner sometimes just to get the humidity down below 50% indoors.
My home is equiped with what would translate to a "heatpump". Its a system that uses the warmth deep in the earth to help heating up the home in the winter, but also cools it down in the summer storing excess heat in the well drilled underneath the home or garden.
What it does in summer is basically run cold water through the underfloor heating system.
We've had some very hot days for our climate recently (35 to 38 degrees centigrade, which is around 95 to 100 Fahrenheit) and the temperature inside remained steady at a comfortable 23 degrees centigrade (around 74 Fahrenheit).
The system uses a lot less energy than air conditioning.
There are traditional outside air conditioner units that run in reverse which use heat in the air, as well.
I found myself really unsettled by this. Light a fire, and turn up the air conditioning?
There are also some extraordinarily stupid out there doing stuff like opening the windows and turning on the air conditioner on full blast despite explict and clear instructions on to close all of the windows before. Or thinking that rabbit ears tv antennas were illegal - in the later half of the 20th century no less. All adults too young to be suffering dementia too.
You should be, I've never seen anyone in Texas do this. Many fireplaces throughout the state (that average both colder and hotter than Houston which fluctuates temp much less than other places) are used as they are in other states, just less frequently and the fireplaces are not designed to heat as well. And people don't run A/C in the winter in places like Houston unless there was a very rare situation.
Domestic AC is very rare in the UK so I may have misunderstood.
I'd like to know where the author got that information from. I recently thought that a lot of homes (not apartment buildings) could be made energy neutral with a combination of geothermal hvac, solar water heating, and solar panels
The geothermal would help drive up the efficiency of the HVAC systems (considerably), and the solar heating would take care of the second highest energy user in the home. My guess is that with those two options most houses could then handle their other energy needs with a modest 3-5kw solar array and "small" battery bank
And we can't really call solar panels "energy neutral", whatever they drive is still part of our energy consumption and their electricity could have driven another load.
A group of panels, install costs, wiring, an inverter, is less expensive than the alternative?
Solar hot water was never trivial either.
And don't forget about electric heat pump water heaters.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.php?page=electrici...
Residential AC: 1380 billion kWh * 0.158 = 218 billion kWh
Commercial AC: 1350 billion kWh * 0.106 = 143 billion kWh
Industrial data is from 2014 and grouped the heating, ventilation, and cooling together, so we can't break that down from this data.
Totaling residential and commercial is 361 billion kWh in 2017 for the US. I'm not sure about total energy use in Africa.
My apartment is energy neutral. I purchase only renewable energy sources from my electrical utility.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix,_Arizona#Demographics [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Demographics
In the event of the apocalypse New Orleans will be one of the first cities to go. Between losing the pumps, the oppressive heat (exacerbated by global warming), and the insects the survivors would be forced to flee the city if they wanted to survive.
You could make the same argument for heating, no?
I heard an interesting argument about the efficiency of air conditioning the other day. It pointed out that, while removing heat from a room is of course not 100% efficient, it is merely shifting heat from one place to another (plus some waste).
Whereas heating is ALL "waste". So more waste heat should be generated from, and more energy used in, heating vs air conditioning.
We definitely have a bias to accept that the New Englander is virtuous in heating his or her home in the winter, but the Arizonan is wasteful in cooling their "inhospitable" house in the summer.
Maybe we should rethink this.
"air conditioner" - a machine which keeps one or more rooms in a house cool, powered by a heat pump.
"heater" - a machine which keeps one or more rooms in a house warm, usually not powered by a heat pump.
"refrigerator" - a machine which keeps its own interior cool, powered by a heat pump.
"freezer" - a machine which keeps its own interior below freezing, powered by a heat pump and usually attached to a refrigerator.
All of which is to say, a heat pump is a machine that moves heat. It's named after its effect. But "heaters", "refrigerators", and "air conditioners" are named after their purpose, not their mechanics, and include heat pumps--if they do--incidentally, as the mechanism by which they achieve their purpose. If somebody came up with a refrigerator that still kept your food cold but didn't use a heat pump, I wouldn't hesitate to call it a "refrigerator".
> Whereas heating is ALL "waste".
> So more waste heat should be generated from, and more energy used in, heating vs air conditioning.
This is a logical mistake. It doesn't matter whether you think the heat produced in heating is metaphysically "wasted" or not; the energy used in heating vs air conditioning is a function of the temperature differential you want to maintain. Air conditioning means you're doing work to keep a certain volume of space at an artificially low temperature, and heating means you're doing work to keep a volume of space at an artificially high temperature. The amount of energy you use in order to achieve that goal depends on the amount of work you need to do, not on whether you're doing the work in order to lower or raise the temperature.
Both processes involve doing work by consuming energy. In one case, the work is moving heat, and in the other case, the work is producing heat. The term "waste" is pretty meaningless in this context; what you really have is the question "how much energy does this process consume?" The answer to that question won't change depending on how you label the products.
https://blogs.agu.org/geospace/2016/06/17/study-waste-heat-m...
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/waste-heat-from-cities-ma...
You have yet to advance an argument that a space heater produces more heat than an air conditioner does! In general, that is the case, but that's an artifact of the temperature range that people find comfortable (combined with the temperature range of climates where people live). It has absolutely nothing to do with whether their machines are in a state of metaphysical grace.
Imagine that people enjoy a temperature between 60 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and some people live in a wintery area where the outside environment is -20 degrees, while others live in a sweltering area where the outside environment is 105 degrees. The Arizonan chilling his house down to 70 is maintaining a temperature differential of 35 degrees between the house and the outdoors. The Michigander heating his house to 60 is maintaining a differential of 80 degrees. That much larger differential means much more work needs to be done to maintain it, and the Michigander will consume more energy and produce more heat in the process of keeping his house comfortable.
If the climates were the same and the human temperature target were 10 to 20 degrees, then the Arizonan would be trying to chill his house by 85 degrees, while the Michigander would be heating his by a modest 30. The Arizonan's air conditioner would still be producing "useful work" in the form of moved heat, and "waste heat" in the form of emitted heat, and the amount of emitted heat would be large because a very large amount of work is being done. The Michigander's heater would still be producing "useful work" in the form of emitted heat (or as you call it, "waste heat"), and the amount of emitted heat would be low, compared to the air conditioner, because the Michigander is willing to stay much closer to the environmental temperature than the Arizonan is.
Yet again, labeling the heat "waste" has no implications for how much of it there is.
When you run one of these systems, your New Englander and Arizonan are virtuous to the degree of the difference between inside and outside temperatures. ;)
There's even now some combined cycle AC systems which use the extracted heat to generate your hot water [1], sadly not yet available/cost-effective for small residential installations, but they're only off by a factor of 2 now (8kW is the smallest system I've seen, my central air is 4kW).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump [1] http://www.mitsubishielectric.com.au/air-to-water-hot-water-...
Having moved across three different apartments in the same locality over the past 2 years, I've experienced how even slight improvements in architecture can significantly decrease the effects of heat-wave. The author's point does hit home.
For dry, you see a fair number of examples in the US southwest. One of the things you do is take advantage of the fact that there are big temperature swings between daytime and nighttime. You can also use cooling towers. You get some idea from the design of the Zion Visitor's Center. [1] It's not hot-hot there (it's high but gives you some idea).
Wet hot is a lot harder. Utilize shade where you can. Lots of cross-ventilation. Basically very open buildings (subject to how big a problem biting insects are of course--though you can use screens in that case).
[1] https://www.nps.gov/zion/learn/nature/zion-canyon-visitor-ce...
Everywhere south of about Pennsylvania, kissing bugs -- carriers for deadly Chagas disease -- become a problem. So even with screens, you're going to want a well-sealed house.
I live in such a climate, and a pergola I built specifically to shade the west-facing sliding glass door has probably made a 10 degree difference in the temperature of that room. Great example of where A/C previously let the architect be lazy.
Whole house fans for cooling at night, insulation & air sealing up the wazoo for staying cool during the day. More focus on radiation-blocking windows.
Thick walls, emphasis on airflow (windcatcher structures and solar chimneys) and interesting canals engineering (underground canals — qanat — used as heat exchangers to cool down surface air before drawing it back up through dwellings).
Engineering around shade also becomes very important.
It was still uncomfortably warm on hot (and humid) summer days, but tolerable.
> Air conditioning. Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics.
> Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency.
The rise of Hollywood in the 1920s would have been slowed if, as previously, theatres had needed to close in hot weather.
0) https://www.delta.tudelft.nl/article/can-underground-heat-st...
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_storag...
After all, if we could do that, then certainly the same materials could allow smaller houses in cold climates to maintain a comfortable temperature throughout an entire winter without needing any active heating.
For building-scale storage, there are two factors. One is obviously very good insulation. Both for the building, and for the heat storage. The other is storing latent heat in a medium that changes phase, usually liquid to solid.
And yes, that's the idea. In summer, store heat from solar collectors, and from air conditioning. In winter, use that heat, plus PV electricity.
That's the general notion behind PassivHaus.
Integral design, internal thermal storage, situational orientation appropriate to site, thermal mass, extensive insulation, minimised building penetrations, and mitigations to address resulting consequences, particularly air exchange, moisture, and condensation.
The engineering is impressive. I recommend the videos, which are long, but information-dense and detailed.
1) In some cities CHP + district heating is used for heating in the winter, and the same (or parallel) piping is used for cooling in the summer. Eg https://www.euroheat.org/knowledge-centre/case-studies/helsi... & http://www.districtenergy.com/technologies/district-cooling/
2) In single building systems, ground source heat pumps are sometimes used for both heating and cooling. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_source_heat_pump)
I think ductless will come on its own as US houses improve.
I think the same, if not more, can be said about London or Amsterdam.
But, indeed, most of America's greatest cities are land reclaimed from heat.
> Cities have boomed in places where, previously, the climate would have held them back. In 1950, 28% of the population of the US lived in its sunbelt, 40% in 2000. The combined population of the Gulf cities went from less than 500,000 before 1950 to 20 million now. Neither the rise of Singapore, nor the exploding cities of China and India, would have happened in the same way if they had still relied on punkah fans, shady verandas and afternoon naps.