> For one thing, having higher density...My concern was around our civilization's poor understanding of the interplay between ecosystems, high density, energy flows, authority flows and fiscal flows. I'm a proponent of organically learning by building in incrementally higher densities in both cold and hot-dry deserts; it frees up more arable land elsewhere, and might have the least environmental impact of other build patterns. "Might" because that is a pure supposition based upon the lower densities of life supported by those climate zones. But small, rapidly iterative experiments because I think we need lots of time and small failures to understand how to maintain sustainable, equitable high-density urban cores over long durations (hundreds to thousands of years), that do not exacerbate the centralization of socioeconomic power and authority which seem to plague lots of large-organization decision matrices.
I've been looking for many years for literature that studies these kinds of inter-relationships. Our civilization seems to have a pretty good grasp of how to start building an urban core area (see China as the latest example, and many currently less-developed nations in elsewhere I expect will follow suit in the coming decades). But the wheels start to come off when land and improvements speculation (driven by the unique leverage+asset treatments real estate enjoys in law) drives up the pricing of a successfully started urban core, and emerges suburban and other anti-pattern responses when no other solutions to stay within high-density urban come forward.
In the context of the desert builds, I'm reasonably confident after looking into the patterns I've researched so far, that absent some pretty fundamental changes in how high-density urban cores are maintained after they are started, even successful starts will rapidly (within two generations, say 40-80 years) dilute and falter from their original excellent high-density-driven metrics as the expected anti-patterns emerge again.