Abstract
This paper investigates how natural resource conditions impact the physical development of cities and how, once built, the urban spatial structure leads to different patterns of resource use. The point of departure for this research is the common “resource urbanisms” assumption that cities are directly affected by the availability and costs of natural resources, and that in turn, different urbanisms result in substantial differences in resource use and consequent impact on the environment. Considering extreme and divergent, higher-income urban models of Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong and Singapore, the paper focusses on two resources, land and energy, and the case of building cooling and transport energy demand. The research uses a mixed methods approach which includes qualitative methods such as expert interviews, analysis of planning documents and historic planning decisions, alongside quantitative methods such as remote sensing, GIS and data analysis and energy modelling. The paper suggests that land availability is a major driver of urban form while energy prices may play a secondary role. It also finds that urban form-induced energy efficiencies for transport and cooling energy diverge in the four cities by a factor of five and two, respectively.
Highlights
Advancing our understanding of global urbanisation and urban change increasingly involves making better connections with related resource conditions, resource use and environmental sustainability [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Our paper is aligned with the growing number of studies that confirm that the shape and physical configuration of cities directly impacts on energy requirements and resource efficiency, making urban morphologies a critical factor for global sustainability, as infrastructure investments result in considerable time lags and lock-in effects
While increasingly sophisticated software and higher resolution photographic material will assist in a better differentiation between building typologies and urban infrastructures in the future, the available data for this analysis and the historic datasets required complementary qualitative assessments of categorising land uses
Summary
Advancing our understanding of global urbanisation and urban change increasingly involves making better connections with related resource conditions, resource use and environmental sustainability [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Cities are commonly understood as complex systems-of-systems [9,10,11] which incorporate infrastructure systems and sub-systems that have an interconnected and co-constitutive character [12]. To address this complexity pragmatically, empirical research tends to isolate urban subsystems to allow for a more robust and bounded study of causal relationships. A broad understanding of urban form is the “spatial configuration of fixed elements within a metropolitan region” [20].
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