15 ms·

How air-conditioning created the modern city

138 points by scribu 8y ago

colanderman 8y ago
I would argue that the elevator is at least as influential if not more. As I look around from my 9th story office, nearly every building I see and the density provided thereof, would have been impossible without the elevator or something very much like it. (A series of escalators?) How many people want to climb 20 stories of stairs every day of their life, nevermind the transportation of equipment, etc.
- dmreedy 8y ago
  I heard a little nugget the other day that, at its height in the early Roman period, the city of Antioch had a population density of about 190 people/acre (~500,000 souls, with a diameter of ~4 miles); by comparison, modern day NYC has a population density of around 100 people/acre. Granted, a much higher overall population in the modern city. However, very rarely did buildings in that era reach five stories, and almost none exceeded that height.
  - bobthepanda 8y ago
    Part of it is living standards; even the poorest of the poor in New York generally don't live in the cramped, slumlike conditions of the 1900s. 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-side-expressway.html https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/you-cant-set-shop-si...
    - derekp7 8y ago
      Ok, something is off with the info in that link. I just looked up Florence Italy on Google maps, and it measures about 5.5 miles across. I couldn't find that exact interchange in the article's picture, so I picked the largest one I saw by eyeballing the map of Atlanta (I85 and I20), and it appears to measure about 2000 feet across.
      - kingaillas 8y ago
        He's using what must be the core downtown area of Florence, Italy. Matching the picture in the post - on google maps, what is bounded by SS67 road on the north side of the Arno river: counterclockwise to Piazza della Liberta and back to the river; and on the south side the road down to Porta Romana and back to the river. That section eyeballs to be around roughly ~1.5 mi across. Larger than 2000 ft but a lot less than 5.5 mi.
      - rootusrootus 8y ago
        Yeah the author seems to be trying to make some point, but even using a very narrow definition of the city of Florence, and a very expansive view of the interchange, he's practically off by an order of magnitude.
        Dylan16807 8y ago
        The interchange image is 5x too wide, and the Florence image is more than 3x too narrow. That's more than an order of magnitude in length. And more than two orders of magnitude in area.
      - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
        He appears to be defining "Florence" as "the urban core of Florence," and "Atlanta cloverleaf" as "Atlanta cloverleaf plus a Florence-sized chunk of adjacent land."
        emj 8y ago
        Highways create alot of dead space that can not be used for other things than really low value stuff. So it's a fair comparision, considering we are talking about walking in a city center vs. people polluting the same size of land
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    > the city of Antioch had a population density of about 190 people/acre (~500,000 souls, with a diameter of ~4 miles); by comparison, modern day NYC has a population density of around 100 people/acre. 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_throughout_history 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.
  - Retric 8y ago
    Mostly that's due to commuters and tourists. Hotels and office buildings take up a lot of space without increasing 'population density'.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- Rotdhizon 8y ago
  They were influential, but not critical per say. Many modern buildings, especially business building would be uninhabitable without air-conditioning. In general,food, water, and shelter are necessities for survival. If that had a modern spin, you very well might add air-conditioning onto that list.
  - azernik 8y ago
    I'd count that under "shelter"
    - CompuHacker 8y ago
      "Energy management" can replace "Shelter", especially with climate change and space exploration. 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.
  - bluntfang 8y ago
    I think A/C belongs in the shelter category, no?
- jeremy7600 8y ago
  >How many people want to climb 20 stories of stairs every day of their life, nevermind the transportation of equipment, etc. Ask all those people in NYC with walkups.
  - jackcarter 8y ago
    I was curious about the highest walkups in NYC. Apparently, there are a few seventh-floor ones still around, and the rent for about a 15% discount relative to the third floor. Since 1929, elevators have been mandatory for buildings >6 floors. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903639404576516760467809064 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903639404576516...
    - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
      I think I'd go for that, save on the rent and save on the gym membership.
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    Which constitutes a very small portion of the population. And considering many people in NYC live in apartments with pests, no windows, or whatever else, I'm not sure "want to" is necessarily the right choice to describe everything they end up doing.
- libraryatnight 8y ago
  Indeed! The Economist not long ago printed this wonderful piece on elevators: https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2017/12/19/new-lift-technology-is-reshaping-cities https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2017/12/19/new-...
- opencl 8y ago
  Ancient Rome was full of 5-7 story apartment buildings and had a population of around a million. Higher density than a whole lot of modern cities, the vast majority of which are not seas of skyscrapers.
  - raverbashing 8y ago
    7 seems like a stretch, "modern" liftless buildings (think 18/19th century European buildings) are usually around 3/4 floors, some go to 5 but it's not the majority
  - philipodonnell 8y ago
    Suprised me to learn that the top floors were the cheapest because the buildings were made of wood with no organized fire service and burned down all the time, so being upstairs was a death sentence.
    - iguy 8y ago
      Indeed. But not only fire risk -- stairs are a pain. 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.)
      - JackFr 8y ago
        Top floors in 5 story walkups are definitely cheaper in NYC this minute. Apart from the stairs being a pain, your water pressure is also weak.
        TomMarius 8y ago
        Is it? I lived in the 13th floor of a communism-era building my whole childhood and it was completely OK. Are US standards different than European?
        TheCoelacanth 8y ago
- iguy 8y ago
  Depends on what time-period you take as "modern". NYC circa 1920 had lots of tall buildings but no AC at all (I think, from memory). But absolutely was not possible without elevators. (And steel frames for buildings, too.) 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.
  - Aloha 8y ago
    Arguably, those cities are quite livable without AC - but not working a 9-5 schedule - as its almost impossible to do productive work during the hottest part of the day. Hence in hot weather climates, the siesta.
  - JackFr 8y ago
    Back when buildings had windows that opened, paperweights more more than decorative.
- avar 8y ago
  Sure, let's imagine a world without elevators. > How many people want to climb 20 stories > of stairs every day of their life. I'd guess a lot. How long does it take you to climb 20 stories if you're having to do it every single day of your life so you're used to it? Let's say a generous 10 seconds per floor, so that's around 3 and a half minutes. 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. Almost all of the tall houses in Amsterdam built in pre-elevator times have a hook on the top floor that can be used to hoist cargo up. Some similar arrangement could be worked out for modern houses if they didn't have elevators.
  - Sharlin 8y ago
    > How long does it take you to climb 20 stories if you're having to do it every single day of your life so you're used to it? Let's say a generous 10 seconds per floor, so that's around 3 and a half minutes. 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.
    - WalterBright 8y ago
      I'd try to run up the 8 floors. Never made it past 6 without having to stop before my heart exploded.
    - mirimir 8y ago
      Well, I'm an old man, in not such great shape. And I can go up five floors in less than a minute. If I'm tired, I just walk up, two steps per stride, with help using the hand rail. That's actually easier for me than going up one step per stride. And going down is harder on my knees.
- WalterBright 8y ago
  Combine that with the advent of cheap structural steel.
- hammock 8y ago
  >How many people want to climb 20 stories of stairs In SimTower you can only build to four stories with stairs and escalators, I believe.
- brenschluss 8y ago
  Reyner Banham's The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment [1] argues that it's three factors: - 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-Environment-Reyner-Banham/dp/0226036987 https://www.amazon.com/Architecture-Well-Tempered-Environmen...
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    Water and sewage both sustaining that height don't hurt either.
    - brenschluss 8y ago
      Yes, but that technology existed before the 1900s. Banham has a great graph that illustrates the sudden mass adoption of lightbulbs/refrigerators/air conditioning within the span of 10-20 years from 1910-1930.
      - dredmorbius 8y ago
        Water-at-height is a bit of a different creature. 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/plumbing14.pdf http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/hygiene/plumbing1...
- DanielGee 8y ago
  Or water pumps. Imagine no water to drink or flush the toilet above the 10th floor.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
grendelt 8y ago
A/C drive westward expansion and allowed Houston (and other cities not on the East coast) to thrive. 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.
- wild_preference 8y ago
  Of course, Houston also isn’t the place I want to be when a hurricane comes, either.
- derekp7 8y ago
  Not sure about more desert conditions, or office buildings, but I do know that houses used to be built a lot differently before air conditioning. For example, my parents' house was built just after 1900, and they only put in central air in the last decade (so I grew up without air conditioning). Even now, they rarely turn it on, and it is quite comfortable inside Lots of trees around, smaller windows, covered porch, air flow from the basement, etc. 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.
fisherjeff 8y ago
Always interesting: Historical populations of Phoenix[0] and Tucson[0] – note the huge 1960s AC booms. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix,_Arizona#Demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix,_Arizona#Demographics [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Demographics
mrfusion 8y ago
I’ve always wondered how houses would be built in hot areas if AC wasn’t available.
- ghaff 8y ago
  Depends if you're talking dry or wet heat. 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-center.htm https://www.nps.gov/zion/learn/nature/zion-canyon-visitor-ce...
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    Yeah, I visited the Andrew Jackson home and there were a bunch of corridors basically designed to convey wind (though ironically they keep them shut now because the moisture would damage the home)
  - bitwize 8y ago
    Swamp coolers are incredibly useful for efficiently keeping cool in 100+ degree days, but are only usable in "dry heat". 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.
- gascan 8y ago
  More emphasis on airflow, more earthworks, more trees, and more passive solar design. That means fewer south facing windows, open features like patios, less bare lawns, building into berms, and various forms of sunshading. 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.
doombolt 8y ago
St. Petersburg is one of the finest cities and it will be so without either air conditioning or elevators. It also has 1.5M population capacity walkable urban core so car isn't needed either. 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.
- jonknee 8y ago
  St Petersburg, London and Amsterdam are not "modern cities". Obviously there are tons of large cities that have been around before AC, but the article cites the rise of cities (and population) in places that were previously undesirable because of the warm climate. AC has caused a migration of sorts towards warmer places. > 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.
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    The article also mentions developments which affect even those old cities that A/C made possible -- such as the glass skyscraper
- emodendroket 8y ago
  Don't know what you mean, chief. St Petersburg, Florida is quite hot.
zkms 8y ago
LKY concurred on this as well: > 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.
dmritard96 8y ago
I have always been fascinated by Air conditioning. Back in highschool, I wrote a paper all about how South Florida became inhabitable as a result fo AC. After college, I started an air conditioning related startup oddly enough.
elliottkember 8y ago
"her husband came from Wisconsin. He liked a log fire. So they would turn up the air conditioning and light one." I found myself really unsettled by this. Light a fire, and turn up the air conditioning?
- nickthemagicman 8y ago
  Agree wholeheartedly.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  Not sure if it is for temperature contrast or just because the aesthetic but not liking the heat that is insanely wasteful. 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.
  - rootusrootus 8y ago
    I do the "open windows, A/C on" thing sometimes in my car. Too warm to really be comfortable with just the window down, but I really like the fresh air a lot more than the super dry cold air coming from the vents. I wonder if that's the same motivation for people who open windows in an air conditioned house.
    - jdmichal 8y ago
      We have awning windows at my house, and I try to open them when it's raining to get some fresh air flowing through the house without completely killing the AC system. Luckily summer is the wet season here so it works out.
- Johnny555 8y ago
  Open fireplaces are inefficient heaters, the house probably lost more cool air due to the fireplace sucking in unconditioned air from outside than from direct heat from the fireplace.
ajuc 8y ago
In some climates I guess. Most of Europe doesn't even have AC, it's rarely needed.
- redct 8y ago
  Neither do big parts of the US. Most residential buildings in New England, New York, parts of the Pacific Northwest... even the Bay Area.
- tallanvor 8y ago
  More and more Europeans have some form of AC, even if it's just at work. Even in homes portable units are becoming much more common. --In much of southern Norway stores haven't even been able to keep them in stock due to the heat wave we experienced that started in May and only recently ended.
usaphp 8y ago
> Air conditioning is anti-social. It buys its owner comfort at the cost of shifting the surplus heat somewhere else You could make the same argument for heating, no?
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  You don't usually do heating in cases where you're worried about surplus heat. You could make the same argument for every productive activity except heating...
  - rconti 8y ago
    You could argue we should all be worried about surplus heat, all the time. 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.
    - writinghawk 8y ago
      Heating need not be 'all waste'. An air (or ground) source heat pump heats a room, counterintuitively, by pumping heat from the colder air outside. It uses less energy than the amount it releases into the room.
      - MrStonedOne 8y ago
        (also known as an ac in reverse)
        rootusrootus 8y ago
        I've heard this term twice in this thread. Do most people not just call them heat pumps? Certainly that's what they're known as here in the PNW.
gandreani 8y ago
> The US expends more energy on air conditioning, for example, than the whole of Africa does on everything. Then again, it expends even more energy on hot water, which doesn’t get the same rap. 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
- rconti 8y ago
  Sure, but even if that's true, new construction homes probably represent a minuscule fraction of the housing stock in the US. Not to mention what minuscule percentage of new construction is built in an energy neutral fashion.
  - Too 8y ago
    And replacing all existing houses is not an easy task, compare with the potato paradox posted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17750480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17750480
  - nerdponx 8y ago
    Then again, new-construction homes are much more efficient. Insulation and window technology is much better than it used to be.
- gascan 8y ago
  Supposedly photovoltaics are cheap enough thanks to scale that photovoltaic plus electric water heater is more cost effective than solar water heating. 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.
  - 8y ago
web007 8y ago
99% Invisible (design podcast) had a story about this as well, how the American south and west became habitable due to air conditioning. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thermal-delight/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thermal-delight/
jdlyga 8y ago
I wish the US had more ductless air conditioners. Window and wall AC's are old technology, loud, and bulky.
- gascan 8y ago
  The US is full of large, leaky, poorly insulated houses designed without any mind paid to thermal performance. Until that changes, ductless simply doesn't work for many people. I think ductless will come on its own as US houses improve.
  - amag 8y ago
    Not just the US.. A friend of a friend moved to the UK and built a house the way we do in northern Europe. Her neighbors pitied her in the winter because the roof of her house was covered in snow...
gdrift 8y ago
The rise of Hollywood in the 1920s would have been slowed if, as previously, theatres had needed to close in hot weather. Reminds me of a movie theater were I grew up that had no roof at all just open sky above. Obviously only good for night time at summer.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  I wonder to what extent AC contributed to the decline of drive-in theatres.
jandrese 8y ago
I was talking with my parents about what people did in New Orleans before they had air conditioning. Turns out that what they did was die. There were quite a number of heat related deaths every year before A/C came along, something like 15% of the population would die off. 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.
- batiudrami 8y ago
  I don't doubt that there were heat deaths in summer (Europe sees them every year as air conditioning is not normal for many countries) but 15% a year is insane - you'd need to be at least an order of magnitude off to have a sustainable population.
  - jandrese 8y ago
    Sustaining the city required a continual influx of residents. To be fair, a lot of the deaths were from slaves, but it was something of a deathtrap between the high heat, humidity, hot nights, disease carrying insects, flooding, and hurricanes. Were it not such a valuable port the city would probably have died out.
mirimir 8y ago
There's no mention of cross-season heat/cold storage, in places where it's cold in the winter, and hot in the summer. I wonder why that hasn't taken off.
- mmirate 8y ago
  Perhaps because it is science-fiction?
  - mirimir 8y ago
    There have been some demonstration projects.[0,1] But yeah, maybe it's not workable. 0) https://www.delta.tudelft.nl/article/can-underground-heat-storage-replace-gas-netherlands https://www.delta.tudelft.nl/article/can-underground-heat-st... 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_storag...
    - mmirate 8y ago
      Apologies; I just find it rather absurd that thermal energy could be stored in what apparently are water tanks, for months at a time, without losing most of the energy to conduction/convection with whatever surrounds the tanks. 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.
      - mirimir 8y ago
        For underground storage, it's basically just brute force. Or rather, a riff on geothermal. 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.
      - 8y ago
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
This is silly. Most of European cities were build densely and with 4-5 stories buildings centuries before air conditioning.
mnm1 8y ago
Great article but I was hoping to read arguments about why we should turn off air conditioning as the headline promised yet none were provided. I guess the author couldn't think of any despite alluding to costs and a lack of public spaces. Interesting piece nonetheless.
- dharma1 8y ago
  I guess it's quite obvious - energy consumption, particularly non-renewable.
m1sta_ 8y ago
https://www.csiro.au/en/Research/EF/Areas/Solar/Solar-cooling/Solar-cooling-air-conditioning https://www.csiro.au/en/Research/EF/Areas/Solar/Solar-coolin...
blt 8y ago
I live in Los Angeles, where the sun is often hot but the air is dry, and it cools down at night. You only need A/C during the hottest 2 or 3 months of the year, and many humbler homes don't have it. Those places are pretty unpleasant during peak summer. 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.
- vondur 8y ago
  This summer has been far more humid than I can remember. I'm glad I had my AC repaired in April after having it not working for the last three years. The electric bill has been ugly though.
- vostok 8y ago
  Los Angeles has very pleasant summers by East Coast standards. Many even fairly well off homes do not have air conditioners. 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.
  - EADGBE 8y ago
    In my only experience with the East Coast (CT), I also noticed the general lack of air conditioning, even in homes which to my Midwestern mindset surely had to have state of the art HVAC systems (they didn't). Oh how I long for 70-degree summers. That is the general appeal of these places, for sure.
- yiyus 8y ago
  In Andalusia, Spain, the weather can get really hot and you rarely see AC in houses (it's still common in buildings such as malls and hospitals, for example). I am sure there are many features of Andalusian architecture that would be applicable in LA and other places in the US.
swasheck 8y ago
Timely post as I sit in Seoul on holiday in the midst of their hottest summer. It's the hottest, muggiest, most sticky heat I've experienced and air conditioning is driving the majority of my experiences right now.
akashtndn 8y ago
I live in New Delhi, India and it can get unbearably hot here during the summer. Temperatures as high as 40 degree Celsius and above are taken for granted. Air conditioning is of immense value in a region like this. But for majority of the population, it is a luxury. Even those with air conditioning use it in moderation to keep electricity bills in check. 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.

138 points by scribu 8y ago

I would argue that the elevator is at least as influential if not more. As I look around from my 9th story office, nearly every building I see and the density provided thereof, would have been impossible without the elevator or something very much like it. (A series of escalators?) How many people want to climb 20 stories of stairs every day of their life, nevermind the transportation of equipment, etc.

dmreedy 8y ago
I heard a little nugget the other day that, at its height in the early Roman period, the city of Antioch had a population density of about 190 people/acre (~500,000 souls, with a diameter of ~4 miles); by comparison, modern day NYC has a population density of around 100 people/acre. Granted, a much higher overall population in the modern city. However, very rarely did buildings in that era reach five stories, and almost none exceeded that height.
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  Part of it is living standards; even the poorest of the poor in New York generally don't live in the cramped, slumlike conditions of the 1900s. 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-side-expressway.html https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/you-cant-set-shop-si...
  - derekp7 8y ago
    Ok, something is off with the info in that link. I just looked up Florence Italy on Google maps, and it measures about 5.5 miles across. I couldn't find that exact interchange in the article's picture, so I picked the largest one I saw by eyeballing the map of Atlanta (I85 and I20), and it appears to measure about 2000 feet across.
    - kingaillas 8y ago
      He's using what must be the core downtown area of Florence, Italy. Matching the picture in the post - on google maps, what is bounded by SS67 road on the north side of the Arno river: counterclockwise to Piazza della Liberta and back to the river; and on the south side the road down to Porta Romana and back to the river. That section eyeballs to be around roughly ~1.5 mi across. Larger than 2000 ft but a lot less than 5.5 mi.
    - rootusrootus 8y ago
      Yeah the author seems to be trying to make some point, but even using a very narrow definition of the city of Florence, and a very expansive view of the interchange, he's practically off by an order of magnitude.
      - Dylan16807 8y ago
        The interchange image is 5x too wide, and the Florence image is more than 3x too narrow. That's more than an order of magnitude in length. And more than two orders of magnitude in area.
    - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
      He appears to be defining "Florence" as "the urban core of Florence," and "Atlanta cloverleaf" as "Atlanta cloverleaf plus a Florence-sized chunk of adjacent land."
      - emj 8y ago
        Highways create alot of dead space that can not be used for other things than really low value stuff. So it's a fair comparision, considering we are talking about walking in a city center vs. people polluting the same size of land
- chimeracoder 8y ago
  > the city of Antioch had a population density of about 190 people/acre (~500,000 souls, with a diameter of ~4 miles); by comparison, modern day NYC has a population density of around 100 people/acre. 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_throughout_history 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.
- Retric 8y ago
  Mostly that's due to commuters and tourists. Hotels and office buildings take up a lot of space without increasing 'population density'.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
Rotdhizon 8y ago
They were influential, but not critical per say. Many modern buildings, especially business building would be uninhabitable without air-conditioning. In general,food, water, and shelter are necessities for survival. If that had a modern spin, you very well might add air-conditioning onto that list.
- azernik 8y ago
  I'd count that under "shelter"
  - CompuHacker 8y ago
    "Energy management" can replace "Shelter", especially with climate change and space exploration. 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.
- bluntfang 8y ago
  I think A/C belongs in the shelter category, no?
jeremy7600 8y ago
>How many people want to climb 20 stories of stairs every day of their life, nevermind the transportation of equipment, etc. Ask all those people in NYC with walkups.
- jackcarter 8y ago
  I was curious about the highest walkups in NYC. Apparently, there are a few seventh-floor ones still around, and the rent for about a 15% discount relative to the third floor. Since 1929, elevators have been mandatory for buildings >6 floors. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903639404576516760467809064 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903639404576516...
  - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    I think I'd go for that, save on the rent and save on the gym membership.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  Which constitutes a very small portion of the population. And considering many people in NYC live in apartments with pests, no windows, or whatever else, I'm not sure "want to" is necessarily the right choice to describe everything they end up doing.
libraryatnight 8y ago
Indeed! The Economist not long ago printed this wonderful piece on elevators: https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2017/12/19/new-lift-technology-is-reshaping-cities https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2017/12/19/new-...
opencl 8y ago
Ancient Rome was full of 5-7 story apartment buildings and had a population of around a million. Higher density than a whole lot of modern cities, the vast majority of which are not seas of skyscrapers.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  7 seems like a stretch, "modern" liftless buildings (think 18/19th century European buildings) are usually around 3/4 floors, some go to 5 but it's not the majority
- philipodonnell 8y ago
  Suprised me to learn that the top floors were the cheapest because the buildings were made of wood with no organized fire service and burned down all the time, so being upstairs was a death sentence.
  - iguy 8y ago
    Indeed. But not only fire risk -- stairs are a pain. 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.)
    - JackFr 8y ago
      Top floors in 5 story walkups are definitely cheaper in NYC this minute. Apart from the stairs being a pain, your water pressure is also weak.
      - TomMarius 8y ago
        Is it? I lived in the 13th floor of a communism-era building my whole childhood and it was completely OK. Are US standards different than European?
        TheCoelacanth 8y ago
iguy 8y ago
Depends on what time-period you take as "modern". NYC circa 1920 had lots of tall buildings but no AC at all (I think, from memory). But absolutely was not possible without elevators. (And steel frames for buildings, too.) 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.
- Aloha 8y ago
  Arguably, those cities are quite livable without AC - but not working a 9-5 schedule - as its almost impossible to do productive work during the hottest part of the day. Hence in hot weather climates, the siesta.
- JackFr 8y ago
  Back when buildings had windows that opened, paperweights more more than decorative.
avar 8y ago
Sure, let's imagine a world without elevators. > How many people want to climb 20 stories > of stairs every day of their life. I'd guess a lot. How long does it take you to climb 20 stories if you're having to do it every single day of your life so you're used to it? Let's say a generous 10 seconds per floor, so that's around 3 and a half minutes. 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. Almost all of the tall houses in Amsterdam built in pre-elevator times have a hook on the top floor that can be used to hoist cargo up. Some similar arrangement could be worked out for modern houses if they didn't have elevators.
- Sharlin 8y ago
  > How long does it take you to climb 20 stories if you're having to do it every single day of your life so you're used to it? Let's say a generous 10 seconds per floor, so that's around 3 and a half minutes. 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.
  - WalterBright 8y ago
    I'd try to run up the 8 floors. Never made it past 6 without having to stop before my heart exploded.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Well, I'm an old man, in not such great shape. And I can go up five floors in less than a minute. If I'm tired, I just walk up, two steps per stride, with help using the hand rail. That's actually easier for me than going up one step per stride. And going down is harder on my knees.
WalterBright 8y ago
Combine that with the advent of cheap structural steel.
hammock 8y ago
>How many people want to climb 20 stories of stairs In SimTower you can only build to four stories with stairs and escalators, I believe.
brenschluss 8y ago
Reyner Banham's The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment [1] argues that it's three factors: - 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-Environment-Reyner-Banham/dp/0226036987 https://www.amazon.com/Architecture-Well-Tempered-Environmen...
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  Water and sewage both sustaining that height don't hurt either.
  - brenschluss 8y ago
    Yes, but that technology existed before the 1900s. Banham has a great graph that illustrates the sudden mass adoption of lightbulbs/refrigerators/air conditioning within the span of 10-20 years from 1910-1930.
    - dredmorbius 8y ago
      Water-at-height is a bit of a different creature. 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/plumbing14.pdf http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/hygiene/plumbing1...
DanielGee 8y ago
Or water pumps. Imagine no water to drink or flush the toilet above the 10th floor.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

grendelt 8y ago

A/C drive westward expansion and allowed Houston (and other cities not on the East coast) to thrive. 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.

wild_preference 8y ago
Of course, Houston also isn’t the place I want to be when a hurricane comes, either.
derekp7 8y ago
Not sure about more desert conditions, or office buildings, but I do know that houses used to be built a lot differently before air conditioning. For example, my parents' house was built just after 1900, and they only put in central air in the last decade (so I grew up without air conditioning). Even now, they rarely turn it on, and it is quite comfortable inside Lots of trees around, smaller windows, covered porch, air flow from the basement, etc. 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.

fisherjeff 8y ago

Always interesting: Historical populations of Phoenix[0] and Tucson[0] – note the huge 1960s AC booms. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix,_Arizona#Demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix,_Arizona#Demographics [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucson,_Arizona#Demographics

mrfusion 8y ago

I’ve always wondered how houses would be built in hot areas if AC wasn’t available.

ghaff 8y ago
Depends if you're talking dry or wet heat. 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-center.htm https://www.nps.gov/zion/learn/nature/zion-canyon-visitor-ce...
- emodendroket 8y ago
  Yeah, I visited the Andrew Jackson home and there were a bunch of corridors basically designed to convey wind (though ironically they keep them shut now because the moisture would damage the home)
- bitwize 8y ago
  Swamp coolers are incredibly useful for efficiently keeping cool in 100+ degree days, but are only usable in "dry heat". 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.
gascan 8y ago
More emphasis on airflow, more earthworks, more trees, and more passive solar design. That means fewer south facing windows, open features like patios, less bare lawns, building into berms, and various forms of sunshading. 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.

doombolt 8y ago

St. Petersburg is one of the finest cities and it will be so without either air conditioning or elevators. It also has 1.5M population capacity walkable urban core so car isn't needed either. 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.

jonknee 8y ago
St Petersburg, London and Amsterdam are not "modern cities". Obviously there are tons of large cities that have been around before AC, but the article cites the rise of cities (and population) in places that were previously undesirable because of the warm climate. AC has caused a migration of sorts towards warmer places. > 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.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  The article also mentions developments which affect even those old cities that A/C made possible -- such as the glass skyscraper
emodendroket 8y ago
Don't know what you mean, chief. St Petersburg, Florida is quite hot.

zkms 8y ago

LKY concurred on this as well: > 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.

dmritard96 8y ago

I have always been fascinated by Air conditioning. Back in highschool, I wrote a paper all about how South Florida became inhabitable as a result fo AC. After college, I started an air conditioning related startup oddly enough.

elliottkember 8y ago

"her husband came from Wisconsin. He liked a log fire. So they would turn up the air conditioning and light one." I found myself really unsettled by this. Light a fire, and turn up the air conditioning?

nickthemagicman 8y ago
Agree wholeheartedly.
Nasrudith 8y ago
Not sure if it is for temperature contrast or just because the aesthetic but not liking the heat that is insanely wasteful. 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.
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  I do the "open windows, A/C on" thing sometimes in my car. Too warm to really be comfortable with just the window down, but I really like the fresh air a lot more than the super dry cold air coming from the vents. I wonder if that's the same motivation for people who open windows in an air conditioned house.
  - jdmichal 8y ago
    We have awning windows at my house, and I try to open them when it's raining to get some fresh air flowing through the house without completely killing the AC system. Luckily summer is the wet season here so it works out.
Johnny555 8y ago
Open fireplaces are inefficient heaters, the house probably lost more cool air due to the fireplace sucking in unconditioned air from outside than from direct heat from the fireplace.

ajuc 8y ago

In some climates I guess. Most of Europe doesn't even have AC, it's rarely needed.

redct 8y ago
Neither do big parts of the US. Most residential buildings in New England, New York, parts of the Pacific Northwest... even the Bay Area.
tallanvor 8y ago
More and more Europeans have some form of AC, even if it's just at work. Even in homes portable units are becoming much more common. --In much of southern Norway stores haven't even been able to keep them in stock due to the heat wave we experienced that started in May and only recently ended.

usaphp 8y ago

> Air conditioning is anti-social. It buys its owner comfort at the cost of shifting the surplus heat somewhere else You could make the same argument for heating, no?

thaumasiotes 8y ago
You don't usually do heating in cases where you're worried about surplus heat. You could make the same argument for every productive activity except heating...
- rconti 8y ago
  You could argue we should all be worried about surplus heat, all the time. 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.
  - writinghawk 8y ago
    Heating need not be 'all waste'. An air (or ground) source heat pump heats a room, counterintuitively, by pumping heat from the colder air outside. It uses less energy than the amount it releases into the room.
    - MrStonedOne 8y ago
      (also known as an ac in reverse)
      - rootusrootus 8y ago
        I've heard this term twice in this thread. Do most people not just call them heat pumps? Certainly that's what they're known as here in the PNW.

gandreani 8y ago

> The US expends more energy on air conditioning, for example, than the whole of Africa does on everything. Then again, it expends even more energy on hot water, which doesn’t get the same rap. 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

rconti 8y ago
Sure, but even if that's true, new construction homes probably represent a minuscule fraction of the housing stock in the US. Not to mention what minuscule percentage of new construction is built in an energy neutral fashion.
- Too 8y ago
  And replacing all existing houses is not an easy task, compare with the potato paradox posted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17750480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17750480
- nerdponx 8y ago
  Then again, new-construction homes are much more efficient. Insulation and window technology is much better than it used to be.
gascan 8y ago
Supposedly photovoltaics are cheap enough thanks to scale that photovoltaic plus electric water heater is more cost effective than solar water heating. 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.
- 8y ago

web007 8y ago

99% Invisible (design podcast) had a story about this as well, how the American south and west became habitable due to air conditioning. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thermal-delight/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thermal-delight/

jdlyga 8y ago

I wish the US had more ductless air conditioners. Window and wall AC's are old technology, loud, and bulky.

gascan 8y ago
The US is full of large, leaky, poorly insulated houses designed without any mind paid to thermal performance. Until that changes, ductless simply doesn't work for many people. I think ductless will come on its own as US houses improve.
- amag 8y ago
  Not just the US.. A friend of a friend moved to the UK and built a house the way we do in northern Europe. Her neighbors pitied her in the winter because the roof of her house was covered in snow...

gdrift 8y ago

The rise of Hollywood in the 1920s would have been slowed if, as previously, theatres had needed to close in hot weather. Reminds me of a movie theater were I grew up that had no roof at all just open sky above. Obviously only good for night time at summer.

maxerickson 8y ago
I wonder to what extent AC contributed to the decline of drive-in theatres.

jandrese 8y ago

I was talking with my parents about what people did in New Orleans before they had air conditioning. Turns out that what they did was die. There were quite a number of heat related deaths every year before A/C came along, something like 15% of the population would die off. 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.

batiudrami 8y ago
I don't doubt that there were heat deaths in summer (Europe sees them every year as air conditioning is not normal for many countries) but 15% a year is insane - you'd need to be at least an order of magnitude off to have a sustainable population.
- jandrese 8y ago
  Sustaining the city required a continual influx of residents. To be fair, a lot of the deaths were from slaves, but it was something of a deathtrap between the high heat, humidity, hot nights, disease carrying insects, flooding, and hurricanes. Were it not such a valuable port the city would probably have died out.

mirimir 8y ago

There's no mention of cross-season heat/cold storage, in places where it's cold in the winter, and hot in the summer. I wonder why that hasn't taken off.

mmirate 8y ago
Perhaps because it is science-fiction?
- mirimir 8y ago
  There have been some demonstration projects.[0,1] But yeah, maybe it's not workable. 0) https://www.delta.tudelft.nl/article/can-underground-heat-storage-replace-gas-netherlands https://www.delta.tudelft.nl/article/can-underground-heat-st... 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_storag...
  - mmirate 8y ago
    Apologies; I just find it rather absurd that thermal energy could be stored in what apparently are water tanks, for months at a time, without losing most of the energy to conduction/convection with whatever surrounds the tanks. 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.
    - mirimir 8y ago
      For underground storage, it's basically just brute force. Or rather, a riff on geothermal. 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.
    - 8y ago

eeZah7Ux 8y ago

This is silly. Most of European cities were build densely and with 4-5 stories buildings centuries before air conditioning.

mnm1 8y ago

Great article but I was hoping to read arguments about why we should turn off air conditioning as the headline promised yet none were provided. I guess the author couldn't think of any despite alluding to costs and a lack of public spaces. Interesting piece nonetheless.

dharma1 8y ago
I guess it's quite obvious - energy consumption, particularly non-renewable.

m1sta_ 8y ago

https://www.csiro.au/en/Research/EF/Areas/Solar/Solar-cooling/Solar-cooling-air-conditioning https://www.csiro.au/en/Research/EF/Areas/Solar/Solar-coolin...

blt 8y ago

I live in Los Angeles, where the sun is often hot but the air is dry, and it cools down at night. You only need A/C during the hottest 2 or 3 months of the year, and many humbler homes don't have it. Those places are pretty unpleasant during peak summer. 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.

vondur 8y ago
This summer has been far more humid than I can remember. I'm glad I had my AC repaired in April after having it not working for the last three years. The electric bill has been ugly though.
vostok 8y ago
Los Angeles has very pleasant summers by East Coast standards. Many even fairly well off homes do not have air conditioners. 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.
- EADGBE 8y ago
  In my only experience with the East Coast (CT), I also noticed the general lack of air conditioning, even in homes which to my Midwestern mindset surely had to have state of the art HVAC systems (they didn't). Oh how I long for 70-degree summers. That is the general appeal of these places, for sure.
yiyus 8y ago
In Andalusia, Spain, the weather can get really hot and you rarely see AC in houses (it's still common in buildings such as malls and hospitals, for example). I am sure there are many features of Andalusian architecture that would be applicable in LA and other places in the US.

swasheck 8y ago

Timely post as I sit in Seoul on holiday in the midst of their hottest summer. It's the hottest, muggiest, most sticky heat I've experienced and air conditioning is driving the majority of my experiences right now.

akashtndn 8y ago

I live in New Delhi, India and it can get unbearably hot here during the summer. Temperatures as high as 40 degree Celsius and above are taken for granted. Air conditioning is of immense value in a region like this. But for majority of the population, it is a luxury. Even those with air conditioning use it in moderation to keep electricity bills in check. 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.