Over the past few weeks, peak oil analyst Jeff Vail has written a series of essays for the Oildrum arguing that American suburbia is potentially much more resilient than most in the peak oil community believe—and that it may even have distinct advantages over urban centers. At the heart of his argument are a number of interesting and counter-intuitive observations, including:
- The probability that the feedback loop between declining home values and tight credit markets will combine with declining energy availability to make it all but impossible for the majority of suburbanites to sell and move into a more sustainable situation in the near future. (In other words, suburbia is a sunk cost—we’re stuck with it).
- Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, the biggest problem facing suburbanites post peak-oil is not the rising cost of commuting per se (relative to the base cost of owning a car, Vail argues, rising gas costs are negligible and can be mitigated by ride sharing, mass transit, telecommuting, etc.). Rather, the biggest problem facing suburbanites will be the general peak-oil related economic shocks that will confront everyone else as well.
- By making good use of large lot sizes, rainwater harvesting and solar and wind power, suburbanites are potentially positioned to provide a large percentage of their own water, food and energy—advantages that core urban dwellers don’t have.
Finally, in a declining energy economy, decentralization has many potential hidden economic advantages (using distributed manufacturing, for example).
As usual, Vail’s essays have sparked a lively debate at the Oildrum in which a number of posters questioned his conclusions. On thing I think that was missing from the discussion, though, was a clear definition of what, precisely, constitutes “suburb” “city,” and “country.”
The definitions of these terms are usually taken as self-evident, but I wonder if they are as useful for describing the prospects and possibilities of our urban agglomerations as many people think. The fact is that in the 20th century, inner-cities and suburbs alike suffered catastrophically from terrible planning decisions. Superficially, the outcome may have been different in different places, but the root causes—design flaws rooted in a monolithic, developer-centered gigantism—were the same. Focusing too narrowly on the distinctions between city and suburb can be highly misleading.
For example, in his 2005 book Sprawl: A Compact History, Robert Bruegmann defends urban sprawl (what we think of as suburbia) as an ancient form, dating back to Roman times. But as James Howard Kunstler pointed out in his review of the book, “Yes, it is true that ancient Rome had extensive suburbs . . .But was life there comparable in quality and character to Hackensack?”
Much more recently, the industrialization of the 19th century produced a kind of sprawl that would eventually give way to the street-car suburbia of the early 20th. Whatever their flaws, though, street-car suburbs had an entirely different character from the automobile suburbs that would soon follow.
Early 20th century urban planners like Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes sought to design suburbs as a way for urban dwellers to escape the industrial grime of the city. Decades later, their followers (among them Lewis Mumford) advocated applying their principles on a broader scale.
But Mumford was utterly horrified to see how the sprawl-building machine unfolded in the years after the second World War; the world of superhighways and malls and tract homes was not the one he had envisioned. It wasn’t the idea of people living outside of core cities per se that upset him; it was the form those suburbs took.
Meanwhile, in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs launched a full-scale assault on the what urban planners were doing to American cities. Jacobs is one of the patron saints of New Urbanisim, a movement that attacks the destructive policies that create suburban sprawl.
Jacobs, though, did not directly address suburbia; her attacks were leveled at those who would destroy the “urban” qualities of the central city itself—through segregation of use, slum clearance, “towers-in-a-park,” auto-centered planning and so forth.
But in spite of the success of Death and Life, urban planning continued on the destructive path planners set in the 40s and 50s—a path that was belatedly mitigated in some cases (by, for example, the historic preservation movement) but never stopped. As a result, even in or near their downtowns, many American cities—especially in the West—retain little that could be called traditionally urban. Furthermore, the advent of office parks and the “edge city” phenomena (the rise of “exurbs”) has served to make the traditional distinction between city and suburb muddy if not meaningless in most of America.
If we’re going to understand the problems that the modern megapolis will face in the coming decades, we need to look past such distinctions, to the design flaws that now lie behind not just suburbia but cities and even “rural” communities.
Over the years a number of authors have analyzed those flaws in detail, including Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, Andres Duany, Richard Register and Nikos Salingaros among others. These thinkers have not all reached precisely same conclusions, but their analyses point in a similar direction.
In his book Principals of Urban Structure, Salingaros argues that it is the “geometric fundamentalism” of 20th century planners and architects that has led to disconnection and dysfunction of modern cities and suburbs alike. In its historical form, Salingaros argues, the city tends to evolve in a fractal-like pattern, with complexity at multiple scales. In such a city, he says, every node of activity is connected to many others.
In modern suburb and city alike, however, a monolithic design ethic based around dumbed-down linear geometry has led to a situation in which nodes are connected simplistically, at only one scale. This, I would argue, is the core problem facing city and suburban design—a more fundamental problem than lack of density, lot space, etc. (though these things may in turn be functions of geometric fundamentalism).
Let me give you an example. My parents live in subdivision in suburban Denver. The closest drug store is in a strip-mall a two minute walk from their house—or it would be, if it were possible to walk there. But the way the subdivision is designed, there is no way to reach the store from the end of the cul-de-sac that abuts it, short of scaling a 20 foot wall. One can go around, of course, but that involves exiting the subdivision and walking single-file on a narrow sidewalk along a busy feeder road. The problem is not one of proximity, but of structure and connection.
This kind of critical design flaw has been repeated across this country more times than anyone could count. An analogous “urban” flaw is found in any number of downtowns, where tangles of highways have cut up the urban fabric and made pedestrian life difficult if not impossible.
These are the kinds of flaws that make the hypothetical future Vail posits—one in which suburbanites adapt by making use of their lawns for intensive food production and their homes for cottage industries—exceedingly difficult for me to imagine. Think of the sheer difficulty of setting up small-scale networks of economic activity in places where design has made walking even short distances painful if not impossible.
Not that we shouldn’t try. But from a design perspective, it is possible that most of the built environment of the 20th century is so riddled with what permaculture founder Bill Mollison calls “Type 1 Errors” in design that there is little hope for retrofit or salvage. (“if you make what I call a Type 1 Error,” Mollison says, “you can get nothing else right”).
Vail’s point is that we have so much invested in our suburban infrastructure that we have no choice but to adapt it to unfolding conditions—where is everyone going to go, after all, especially when they cannot afford to purchase something elsewhere?
The unfortunate answer is a scenario in which many houses are abandoned as more and more unemployed people move out of foreclosed homes to live with families or in tent cities (or first-world Hoovervilles and favelas). After all, people have built shelters for themselves for millions of years.
It is of course possible that some suburbs will be able to make use of their inherent advantages and mitigate their structural and design flaws. But the question we will face again and again is: when is it time to salvage and retrofit something—and when is it time to abandon it for something far more modest, but better designed?
