Energy Patterns and Urbanisation Dr. Dermott McMeel School of Architecture and Planning University of Auckland New Zealand +64 9 373 7500 ext 81926 d.mcmeel@auckland.ac.nz ABSTRACT Transportation arteries have - by and large - emerged from what Jeremy Rifkin [1] calls‚ ‘energy systems’ and the associated nodes of energy production and consumption. He cites our reliance on - and continued adherence to - patterns formed during the first industrial revolution. Whether we choose to meditate on the historical development of canals, railways or roads, the energies of production and consumption would seem to still largely inform transportation networks in the 21 st Century. Public and private transportation systems appropriate these industrial arteries and we find habitation and commerce emerging as accretions round them. The information used by planning specialists to design transportation today continues to be informed by the energy patterns of production and consumption of habitation, commerce and industry. The primary foundations on which we continue to build and plan cities are these unquestioned historic pillars. Categories and Subject Descriptors Design, Theory. Keywords Distributed networks, amenity, urban design. 1. THE SHIFTING FOUNDATIONS OF URBANISATION Rifkin focuses his claims into what he calls the‚ ’third industrial revolution.’ Where the decline of fossil fuel energy and emergence of distributed alternatives – such as wind and solar power - combined with a new communication methodologies facilitated by the Internet, results in a radical economic shift. We hypothesize these shifting systems will alter our cities considerably; arguably we can already observe this through the quickly emerging and evolving forms of commerce and entrepreneurship that are enabled by Internet technologies and mobile devices. Comparatively the city changes at a glacial rate, however given the radically different energy structures being promoted by wind, solar and distributed production and consumption networks, combined with the growing possibilities of internet communication systems and location aware and context specific devices, it is conceivable we should be preparing for the emergence of radically different city forms and as a result radically different transportation requirements. 2. AN EMERGING PROBLEM If indeed the urban environment is decreasing its reliance on being governed by antiquated energy arteries there is a need to deepen our understanding of the linkages and dynamics that are emerging between these recreational, habitual and commercial (for example) networks. So that we can reconsider our models and assumptions for future transportation within the built environment. For sometime real-time traffic radio reports help drivers’ ‘tune-in’ to reconsider their travel time and route. Individually, we have local knowledge of rush hours and bottleneck patterns within our immediate environment. These patterns change over time with traffic on rush hour routes decreasing dramatically over a holiday period and conversely increasing on transportation routes leading elsewhere. We use this local information to assist our decision- making; by working from home for an hour in the morning, or strategically locating an afternoon meeting we tune routines and habits to exploit opportunities within transportation networks. However, increasingly it is possible to appropriate facilities dispersed throughout the urban environment (WiFi, good coffee, social or semi-private spaces), this also impacts potential transportation and mobility options. We are seeing emerge services like Waze where it is social capital generating the real- time data, revealing real gains that can be achieved through crowd-sourced data. Automotive traffic is one component of mobility, and mobility is one component of the situation outline in the previous paragraph. Applications like Foursquare could perhaps be conceived of as crowd sourced amenity data. Mobility connects us to locations of habitation, commerce and recreation, which are becoming less location specific and more and more fluid. Taking commerce or your current role as an example, consider day-to-day activities and for a moment consider how much is generic? Meeting, email, Internet data gathering or writing and administration? If travelling to a central business district for a morning meeting takes all attendees 1 hour, are there amenities that would facilitate a meeting in a different location? Using crowd-sourced transportation data can any of these locations be reached more efficiently? This is not to say place is unimportant. There are many examples of successful and unsuccessful workplaces; in the recent Steve Jobs biography the design of Pixar’s headquarters is given intense thought. The nature of the work requires intense specialisation, but the company’s success to that point had been largely attributed Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). MobiSys’12, June 25–29, 2012, Low Wood Bay, Lake District, UK. ACM 978-1-4503-1301-8/12/06.