ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with two goals. The first was to develop a thermodynamic accounting of the value of location, and the second was to understand how the dynamics of urban self-organization alter the assumptions of environmental building design. The two are strongly interconnected. The spatial organization of cities constitutes a form of high-quality information, which amplifies the concentration of energetic potential and limits the range of possibilities for any individual project. As the scale of analysis expands, environmental building design increasingly becomes a matter of the social and economic activities of its household. The growth of urban areas and the increases in collective wealth of the last 200 years directly reflect the infusion of high-quality fuels. Cities and economies have evolved into ever more complex, hierarchical networks of production, driven both by the quantities of available energy and their enhanced quality.
