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Formerly Normal
James Howard Kunstler, blog
Venturing into the rural outlands of the upstate New York counties these days, you see new houses everywhere in what was, until about the 1970s, mostly farm country. Almost all of them are stand-alone houses; there are very few multiple-unit subdivisions up here, a la the vast beige housing monocultures found in the sunbelt. But they seem no less tragic to me.
These new houses all follow the “normal” programming of their time — a time that is stealthily ending. The program is as follows: Each house occupies an out-parcel of an acre or so of what used to be a farm or a woodlot. The house is set in the middle of the plot, surrounded by an apron of decorative foundation shrubs and grass lawn. The scheme derives from the English idea of “a manor in a park.” You can tell, because if trees remain (or get planted) on the lawn, they are always deployed arbitrarily, never in formal rows, as the French would do it. The idea is that every homeowner is the “lord of the manor.”
Of course, a major feature of this is the asphalt pad-and-driveway where the household stores (and not incidentally displays) its collection of cars, one for each adult family member plus “training” models for the adolescent offspring. This part of the package is indispensable, the umbilicus that connects the household to all the necessities of life, from paychecks to Slim Fast bars. Its continuation is assumed. In fact, the value of the house depends on that assumption.
The appeal of this program is obvious in the consumer-democracy of recent times.
(19 November 2007)
Walking Towns: Universities, Military Bases & Pre-Auto Urban Areas
Glenn, The Oil Drum:Local
Posted by on November 18, 2007 – 8:30am in The Oil Drum: Local
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: colleges, military, transportation, walking
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In one of the recent threads, I asked for good local statistical sources and got a few gems, including the Bikes at Work census data commute-to-work mash-up by zipcode. So I ran a quick search on the highest walk to work locations in the US for towns over 1000 population. The results were surprising to me in the lack of diversity:
…From this very high level look at this census data and Walkscore, it would seem that there are two major factors that influence the walkability of a city or town.
1. Major Institutions: Colleges, Military Bases where people live in dorms/barracks close to their employment/education as well as dining/entertainment/social destinations
2. Pre-Auto City/Village Design: Places created before/without the need for automobiles with close mixed uses of residential/commercial/workplace/dining/grocery/education/entertainment.
The keys to both seems to be co-location of people’s housing with the various destinations that they need/desire.
But there is a choice here that seems like one worth considering in greater depth. If we want to create a post-carbon society, creating more walkable communities seems like a major priority. But what kind of walking towns do we want?
(18 November 2007)
European-style bike-sharing programs head to US
AFP
American cities, eager for greener solutions to urban congestion, are rushing to set up bicycle-sharing programs similar to those launched in Europe in recent years.
The US capital of Washington will likely be the first in the nation to offer two-wheeled transport at various locations for a nominal fee, under a deal with advertising giant Clear Channel Outdoor.
San Francisco has reached a deal for a similar program with Clear Channel, while other cities including New York, Chicago and Portland, Oregon, are studying bike options.
(16 November 2007)
Middle Class Angst: The Politics of Lemmings
Stan Goff, Truth to Power
Suburbia is also a spiritual wasteland, a place where the wonder of nature is desecrated ubiquitously with corporate logos and all the artifacts of late technological society.
There is a common misconception among environmentalists and peak-oilers (I count myself among both) that cars created the suburbs. The car suburb, however, became what it is with regard to cars only incidentally. The real motive for the suburbs was plain garden-variety white supremacy. Cars simply became necessary to facilitate the spatial segregation that simultaneously confined African America largely to decaying urban spaces and built the ‘burbs as white enclaves. It’s not that simple any more, of course. All things change all the time – as we’ll see momentarily – but it was white fear and loathing of the Dark Other that set the whole process in motion.
The sudden discovery – still ongoing – that most of us (more than half the US now lives in Suburbia) are trapped here if and when our private automobiles run out of gas (or the money to buy it), came after suburbanization was a fait accompli. This is the stage in any historical process where people begin to indulge themselves in disambiguation of the past – simplifying what has happened until it appears that it was predictable all along. Since we believe this – that things are predictable – we are easily convinced that correlation equals causation in our reconstructions of history; and we apply those correlatives that are familiar and comfortable. Ergo, because oil companies and auto manufacturers participated in the development of Suburbia, they were the conscious agents of it all along. White environmentalists and many white peak-oilers are not well-versed in the history of race, and they have shitty heuristics for understanding how it is constituted.
Not surprisingly, their heuristic – the equivalent of what we call intuition, or common sense – is that of Suburbia, which has been the predominant mode of white American thought since the late 1960s. It is what Matthew Lassiter calls “the prevailing language of middle-class meritocracy and color-blind innocence.”
STAN GOFF is the author of Hideous Dream, Full Spectrum Disorder, The Military In The New American Century, and Sex And War. He also manages his Feral Scholar website and is familiar to many Truth To Power Readers as a result of his monumental series published at From The Wilderness on the death of Pat Tillman–a series to which many attribute Congressional investigation of that event.
(19 November 2007)
