Rebuilding viable towns and cities

  1. I’m not telling people what to do and where to live… but…
  2. Not economists, not sociologists – but physicists discovered this!
  3. But how to get them to move?
  4. Condense for specialisation
  5. Condense for safety – suburbia is too vast to deal with climate change mega-fires
  6. My 4 Rebuilding pages

I’m not telling people what to do and where to live… but…

OK – before we start – this page might sound a little ‘authoritarian’. Like I want to be some grand Emperor running my own post-collapse scenario. Like I’m salivating at the idea of the apocalypse so I can trot out my little manifesto to tell the world how to live. Far from it! Unlike the doomers, I hate the idea of collapse.

This page is entirely optional. And I get that it’s controversial. It sort of impacts on personal choice and freedom, and I want people to be able to make their own choices.

But just as governments sometimes must choose one city to be their manufacturing hub for something important – say a port city for their naval shipyards – so too there is an important resource post-apocalyptic governments would need to capture for maximum efficiency in rebuilding. What am I talking about? A concentrated population rather than scattered villages. Concentrating the people you already have brings huge advantages!

Not economists, not sociologists – but physicists discovered this!

You can think of it as ‘economies of scale’ but it goes further than even that. Physicists studied cities like some kind of galaxy cluster or super-organism – and discovered some interesting correlations and rules. They drew up some very nerdy algorithms that could measure the average walking pace down in your city mall, and tell you how many hospitals and universities were in your city! It’s a crazy story, and I love it.

But here’s the bottom line. We all know the famous Moore’s law where computing power roughly doubles every 2 years? There’s a city version to do with population size. Are you ready?

Key concept: Every time you double a town’s population, you get an extra 30% GDP for free.

EG: say a place has 2 villages of 5,000 people. That government gets the GDP of 10,000 people. But just by combining these villages into a town of 10,000 people actually living together, they get a 30% bonus for free! Somehow, that town now produces the GDP of 13,000 people.

That’s the labour of an extra 3000 people for free. It comes from efficiencies. You don’t have to feed or clothe or house or even police efficiency. It’s just the efficiency gains of living together in shared infrastructure. Read Why innovation thrives in cities. Can you imagine passing up on the chance of getting an extra 3000 GDP for free? Concentrating people into viable towns and cities seems self-evident to me. I call it the City Size Bonus but I’m sure others have a better term.

But how to get them to move?

First, I’m not sure how hard it would be. People are close to starving, looking to rebuild stuff. Some might be sentimental. But think of any Great Depression movie you’ve seen. Just the rumour of work starting somewhere sent shockwaves through the local community. People were willing to walk hours before dawn to get work, to move across the country if it came to it! In a post-collapse world, even just hearing that things were ‘better’ interstate might help people be willing to get on the next government bus heading that way! Think of all the economic refugees fleeing poverty and arriving illegally in various first world nations hoping for a better life.

Second, start a rebuilding program. Create various economic incentives or outright government departments building stuff. Governors should choose strategic towns for fast development. A range of metrics could be measured. (Indeed, probably already are part of some emergency strategy!) They would consider access to good farmland, waterways, trade, sailing, resources, even cultural artefacts that might need to be protected.

Condense for specialisation

Get off the farm: This is not a go at farmers – who I admire. It’s more about societal policies to rebuild faster. The small farming village robs our ability to specialise. When a population is scattered across smaller villages, people become general farm labourers. When everyone is a generalist, none are specialists. We lose too much knowledge and expertise in specialist fields. EG: Smaller villages might have a mechanic or two, but it’s not like they can just walk next door to pick the brains of a whole metallurgy workshop on how to smelt new kinds of steel from the local resources. Everyone is too busy just trying to grow food, stay well, maintain the house and farm, and learn how to preserve fruits and salt meats. It’s a life focussed on the basics.

Higher concentration of people in towns means higher specialisation. Get the tractors running and slowly – over time as technology and resources allow – move people off the land and into towns. Picking strategic towns encourages trade between the agricultural towns and the industrial centres, and gets the population focussed into their specialised and productive hubs with the City Size Bonus helping everyone.

Condense for safety – suburbia is too vast to deal with climate change mega-fires

Generally, I expect many of our ticky-tacky boring suburbs are going to have their homes salvaged for materials and then be left to lie fallow. I don’t think suburbia has much to offer in a post-apocalyptic world. Once it’s stripped of building materials, it could be bulldozed and rehabilitated to local farmland. If they get time to do that. The way the climate is going – we could find many of our suburbs burned down in heatwave mega-fires. Mega-fires are already a term in Australian vernacular. 2019 was a real wake-up call.

It doesn’t take long for random trees to grow back and then the next thing you know the whole area could get taken out in a natural bushfire. Compare these shots of abandoned homes in Detroit over time. See what happens in less than 10 years!

The big house on the left gets demolished as it seems to have had a fire

Not even 10 years and it looks like bush. One Australian bushfire would take the whole street out.

In summary: condense your population into strategic towns for the City Size Bonus and have enough resources and a functioning fire department to deal with what may be coming – because climate change mega-fires are not pretty!

My 4 Rebuilding pages

Rebuilding after a full-scale nuclear war.

Rebuilding law and order after a super-virus: and why I think in some nations, order might emerge within a few months

Rebuilding a technical society after a super-virus: scavenging priorities and strategies after the apocalypse.

Rebuilding viable towns and cities after a super-virus: why a population concentrated into a few larger towns is better than scattered villages, and how suburbia is too vast to protect from climate change mega-fires when you have a tiny population.