The only incarnation of the city I have ever known has been the industrial metroplex. Ever growing hordes of human beings live in what are putatively urban settings, but it cannot be said that these people live in anything that might have passed for a civic environment before the transformations brought on by harnessing hydrocarbons in the industrial age. What we see today are city "centers" chockful of variously bland or shocking--but rarely beautiful-- highrise buildings and those centers surrounded by monofunctional urban and suburban zones. The megalopolis is the agglomeration of these cosmic suburban and urban spaces that have woven themselves together to form a nearly unbroken concrete and asphalt carpet over thousands of square miles: galactic "cities" composed of constellations of skyscraper farms, housing projects, subdivisions and commercial centers nestled in an ether of blacktop. In the age of cheap energy we have lost all sense of beauty, proportion and comprehension of the inherent good of recognizing natural limits, especially as embodied by a city with an actual edge that doesn't require motorized transport. The living arrangements of every human society prior to the hydrocarbon age had no choice but to recognize limits. Their practices and built environments reflected this, producing things that while not Utopian were pleasing in their rationality and appropriateness for human utility, habitation and ultimately human comfort by means of symmetry and proportion which are the underlying factors of beauty. The industrial desecration of urban space and its organic scale, aesthetics and defining lines is a result of refitting for the commonplace use of machines, especially in regards to mobility, i.e. inherent reliance on the automobile and the elevator to traverse formerly impossible dimensions of horizontal and vertical space. The true city today has little to do with arbitrary municipal borders denoting "Boston", "New York" and such, but is instead all the farflung zones of the metroplex connected by motorized transportation, dotted with central districts in which the quarters intended for regular use are placed several hundred feet above street level.
I'm sure that everyone everywhere notices that cities are growing uglier and more alienating and have been for several decades. I make this assumption because urban populations have been decamping to the automobile suburbs ever since industry began making cities into toxic engines of economic growth. The answer in the age of suburbanization has been flight from the cities as living places, yet retaining oily tethers of highway (and decreasingly rail) to them for work and entertainment. There seems to be a worldwide amnesia concerning the preindustrial urban environment. The Renaissance cities wrapping medieval cores may represent the highest such forms and look nothing like the edgeless sprawl that denotes industrial progress. Cities existed before industry scattered smoky factories, brutal skyscrapers, automobiles, roadways and parking lots all over them. Industrialization, despite all the promises of progress and comfort, has destroyed what makes places worth inhabiting. The coming energy descent will bring the industrial era to a decisive close and despite the human misery this implies, our species will be better off when the worst is over and we have been bushwhacked back to whatever the solar input carrying capacity really is . We will not be putting up any more skyscrapers because projects like these just won't be possible with solar-powered machinery with anything resembling cost efficiency. The use of limited access highways and suburban enclaves will end because the alternatives to oil just don't have the required energy density. Alternative energies will be sufficiently expensive to make building low-rise structures with pre-carbon age methods and human effort the natural choice; Whatever urban environment we fashion in the future will be scaled for people on foot, not riding in cars and elevators. City size will track the general population decline as the burgeoning numbers of working poor, underemployed and subsidized unemployed that we associate with the modern city are a product of industrial growth and industrial agriculture and their continued existence is not compatible with a world in energy decline freefall and the chaotic collapse and undoing of industrialization. The idea of cities of millions spread out over hundreds of square miles will seem ridiculous.
As I write this I am still living in a neighborhood in a borough of the City of New York. Though I live within the precincts of New York City, I am in truth part of the megalopolis that winds from Boston to Washington. The energy descent following peak hydrocarbon production will probably render megalopolis unlivable. Suppositions about the possible patterns of chaos, abandonment and retrofitting will be the subject of these pages. Though I live in an unsustainable mess, there are elements of my life here with which I am absolutely in love. This is a historic neighborhood with an amazing concentration of pleasing, prewar buildings. It's no Renaissance city, but it's far better than living in an imitation colonial in a cul-de-sac in the exurbs. Everything I need is within an easy walk. I have to commute a few subway stops to get to work, but aside from that my life is happily prescribed by a radius of 500 paces from my building's front door. Yet I recognise that this is only a very small aberration preserved mostly by accident. And I am still living in the middle of a vast area vulnerable to disruptions to its massive energy feed. Living in a walkable neighborhood won't protect me from the economic contraction as the industrial engine that powers this agglomeration of megacities, their suburbs and hub cities grinds to a halt for want of oil and natural gas. It won't protect me from food scarcity due to both reduced transportation capacities from faraway agribusiness and reduced food production. I have inclinations to stay and help with whatever retrofitting must be cobbled together, but as will become clear in these pages, the evidence suggests flight would be more prudent.
I invite your comments, corrections and suggestions. I also apologize for the disappearance of the initial blog entry and the comments that were initially sent to it.
2 comments:
Gary,
Good, thoughtful blog. It is hard for me to imagine a place where I could have access to all I need within 500 paces. Of course that pre-supposes that supplies are brought in by trucks from long distances away. But, city dwellers in Havana after the oil embargo were able to develope urban gardens on rooftops and courtyards that produce something like 40 percent of the food consumed in the city today. That's pretty good!
I live in a very small central Oregon rural "town" six blocks long with one stoplight (just built). Most people here live in homes with one acre lots. We have one grocery store, 3 restaurants, and one discount store with most items.When the collapse hits, we'll have to walk miles to the nearest store or doctor (or have a horse, dog & wagon, bicycle, or some other conveyance). It will be interesting to see which kind of living will be the most viable. We are attempting to become mostly self-sufficient: learning to garden, raise chickens, etc.
I think an important thing for the transition is to support a new vision for the "poor." If we started now to help the poor become self-sufficient, with gardening and animal husbandry and promoting other skills that nurture and sustain, it will be all the better for the rest of us when we join the poverty pool and attempt to create lives that allow for dignity and self respect and purpose.
Freeacre,
Thanks for the reply. The point I will continually address is that of relocalization. Things aren't in walking distance for most of us anymore because they didn't have to be. Most Americans don't live in a borough of New York or a truly functioning small town. All we've built this past century are structures for parking and arrangements for driving. Instead of small towns with everything on Main Street, we have suburban cul-de-sacs miles away from strip malls or megamalls. I posit that this will all slowly change.
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