Faced with a shortage of available land in Europe, reindustrialisation would necessitate new approaches to construction, and some seriously creative thinking. Could tomorrow’s production be enmeshed in novel ways in landscapes and even within our cities? What if a factory could move and mutate to build a product where and when it was needed? What if infrastructure doubled as protective environments for flora and fauna? Could we re-engineer our technologies to run on the overlooked resources around us, such as the kinetic energy created by movement on roads and sidewalks? (Tourist footfall would take on a new significance). There is enough necessity at the moment to mother some significant invention.
You’d need to have a significantly free market environment to be able to do that. Because there would have to be endless experimentation for it to be able to work. Most importantly you’d have to kill the licensing and permission Raj – REACH and on and on – so that people can change and experiment as the results of iteration 1 come in and iteration 2 is developed.
Therefore there’s absolutely no chance of it happening in Europe, of course.
“Could we re-engineer our technologies to run on the overlooked resources around us, such as the kinetic energy created by movement on roads and sidewalks? ”
Um no. Well you could possibly but it would amount to paying a toll to move about. At which point it would be far simpler to demand a toll. And the good news is no new tech is required See Mr S Khan for details.
You would be paying a toll. If you’re extracting energy from vehicles & pedestrians, it’s costing them that energy. It’s not a perpetual motion machine. The energy has to come from somewhere.
True. But if he understood schoolboy physics he wouldn’t be hired by the Guardian.
yep hence. “it would amount to paying a toll to move about”. But yeah my fault for using same word toll in 2 senses. The first as in requiring energy input and as you say it can’t be avoided and sense two pay up matey.
Unfortunately BiS, a lot of people do believe in free energy. Our Energy Minister Chris Bowen for one. Zero fuel costs for wind and solar, must be cheap!
There is no kinetic energy created by movement. Movement (in circumstances like these) consumes kinetic energy as friction converts it to heat, requiring it to be continuously replenished to maintain continuous movement.
The Industrial Revolution initially started in England in places where Coal, Iron Ore and water could be extracted in close proximity. The other important pre-requisite was a workforce. They were available because they were more than willing to move away from where they were scratching a subsistence living from the land.
Generalizing the prerequisites we need cheap energy, available raw materials, tolerance to environmental effects and a cheap workforce that is both willing and permitted to do the work.
Europe, especially Northern Europe, fails spectacularly as a location suitable to start any form of heavy industry. It gets even worse when you factor in high land costs and a bureaucratic system that slows everything to a snails pace and diverts vast sums of future profit into the pockets of lawyers before any new venture is approved.
“The Industrial Revolution initially started in England in places where Coal, Iron Ore and water …” Not quite: there were early textile mills around the moors in S W England, using water power. The advantages that Lancs and Yorks had for textiles included the fact that they could eventually move from water power to steam power using local coal.
For iron-making with blast furnaces you needed limestone too. How about the early iron-makers who used charcoal? Did they need limestone? Google AI says yes.
Ah, someone’s looking for a free lunch. If you’re extracting significant energy from vehicle and pedestrian movement, then by definition they’re expending more energy to get where they’re going. Fuel, food, whatever. This is not an untapped resource.
There are some cases where you can do that. Heaters in ICE cars for example. The heat is getting produced anyway, transferring it to the cabin is fairly trivial.
Generally though, TANSTAAFL.
What if we used the place where the abandoned factory is to build thre new factory, and build that the way a factory has to be for productivity without wasting resources on other bien-pensant fads.
Only if that location makes economic sense and has the necessary prerequisites, as andyf points out. If your dead factory was the single industry/employer in that location and that industry has died, it was the reason why that location became populated in the first place. Without that industry there’s no reason for that population to remain other than inertia. It’s certainly not a given that any other industry can succeed there.
And there, in a nutshell, is the story of Northern England.
I recognise this! Its Blue Sky Thinking! From the utterly clueless. My god, there’s silly cunts, and then Silly Cunts With Lanyards.
Blimey
How many times has this been tried ?
Swindon, Sunderland, Northern Ireland, Silicon Glen…
Where are the IBM and Oracle hardware factories now ? Taiwan, Korea or Red China.
If it’s *RE*industrialisation, why not just use the land that was *DE*industrialised? The land is still there, it doesn’t get destroyed. (Well, other than coastal erosion.)
“Hans Larsson is an architect”
Would seem to be all we need to know.
Then he should be shown the room with the rotating knives…
Scanning Europe on Google Earth shows vast areas of little used land.
Europe is made of land. What makes it unavailable? Government?
Isn’t that something the Germans used to get worked up about?