City of the Future

Matt Simmons Saves the World?

Jim Puplava and Matthew Simmons were practically giddy when they spoke a few weeks ago to discuss Simmons’ recent venture into offshore wind and co-generated ammonia.

For anyone who is unaware, energy investment banker Simmons is a senior peak oil guru – an unlikely Cassandra, who for years has been warning the world of the impending energy catastrophe. When I first became aware of the peak oil issue, I found his presentations, interviews and speeches to be the some most terrifying testimony on the energy catastrophe the world faced. So it was interesting to hear him get excited about a new energy prospect, because unlike so many he’s not prone to untested fantasies or into hyping hypothetical solutions that will never come to pass.

In 2007, Simmons founded the Ocean Energy Institute to explore the potential of offshore wind energy. The institute is a member of a consortium of private companies working with the University of Maine that will soon launch a demonstration project.

There are a couple elements that distinguish this project from ordinary wind. First, according to Simmons, these turbines and towers are made from a new composite material developed out of he University of Maine that is, he says, “the lightest and strongest” material every made. The composite allows for the construction of much larger turbines.

The other new idea is to use power from the turbines to use ocean water and electricity to manufacture ammonia (NH3) on site. Many people don’t realize that internal combustion engines can be retrofitted to burn NH3; when burned Simmons points out, it doesn’t contribute carbon to the atmosphere. Simmons now envisions a world of retrofitted automobiles run on liquid ammonia. As an added theoretical benefit, ammonia can be used as nitrogen fertilizer, the chief limiting nutrient in food production.

So what’s the catch? Well, for one thing burning ammonia releases nitrous oxide (N2O, otherwise known as laughing gas) which is, alas, a greenhouse gas (carbon or no). It is also the leading cause of ozone depletion now that CFCs have been eliminated; and it causes acid rain. And nitrogen fertilizers are killing marine life at a horrifying rate and have created a  dead-zone in Mexico.

So what would be the effect of burning 85 million or so barrels of ammonia each day to replace oil? Who knows, but it’s terrifying to contemplate. Is it more terrifying than the collapse of society promised by unmitigated oil depletion, or than the fast burnup  of the rest of the world’s coal? I honestly am not sure, but the heavy cost of these tradeoff seems yet another argument against the endless pursuit of energy growth--and in favor of train-connected car-free eco-cities, pattern languages, permaculture and whatever other whole-system design solutions we can implement to drastically cut rather than grow our overall energy and resource usage.

Why Are Starchitects Bent on Destroying the World?

Josh Stevens ran an interesting article a few days ago on Planetizen about the troubled relationship between superstar architects (“starchitects”) and the sustainability movement. Stevens begins by pointing out that unlike a Picasso painting, the execution of an architect’s vision has very real, significant, and measurable energetic and environmental consequences.

“The operation of the United States' buildings' lighting, heating, air conditioning, and ventilation systems,” he writes, “collectively represent an estimated 60 percent of the nation's energy usage, and they account for almost 40 percent of the nation’s carbon emissions. New construction consumes millions of tons of energy-intensive materials, including concrete, steel, glass, and lumber.”

So in an era when ecological crises are at any number of tipping points and global oil production is potentially about to fall off a cliff, it would seem to make sense for sustainability to be a the top of any architect’s agenda.

But the architectural power-players Stevens quotes are at best lukewarm about sustainability. Eric Owen Moss, director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, tells Stevens that "A sophisticated building in an environmental sense is not ipso facto a sophisticated building in a design sense . . . I wouldn’t mix the two."

That’s not as bad as post-modern “deconstructivist” architect Peter Eisenman, whose office told Stevens “Mr. Eisenman...does not 'wrestle' with sustainability.”

Not that these attitudes should be a surprise. Eisenman specializes in designing ugly, absurd, dysfunctional buildings that deliberately make their users uncomfortable and which start to fall apart within a few years of completion.

Thank God his tic-tac-toe building never won bidding to replace the World Trade Center (though it came uncomfortably close). In 1982, a debate between Eisenman and Christopher Alexander brought the anti-humanist philosophy of Eisenman and architects like him into sharp relief. After talking past each other for several rounds, Alexander finally pins Eisenman down:

CA: “The thing that strikes me about your friend's building -- if I understood you correctly -- is that somehow in some intentional way it is not harmonious. That is, Moneo intentionally wants to produce an effect of disharmony. Maybe even of incongruity.

PE: That is correct.

CA: I find that incomprehensible. I find it very irresponsible. I find it nutty. I feel sorry for the man. I also feel incredibly angry because he is fucking up the world.”

Is it surprising, then, that someone whose anti-humanist ideology willfully pursues disharmony and dysfunction would laugh at the very idea of sustainability (even if the survival of the human race depends on it?)

Alexander’s point has always been that functionality is inseparable from aesthetics in architecture—a point that can be applied to sustainability issues as well. Natural light on two sides of a room not only saves electricity, it makes people more comfortable and contributes to emotional health. Natural materials not only carry less embodied energy, but they also make for buildings that feel more natural and alive.

Of course all this assumes that “functionality” in a building means making people feel more comfortable, natural, human, alive and happy. If one’s goal, on the other hand, is maximizing retail profits or making sure there is plenty of parking, a different model takes hold.

Neither goal, however, explains the strange monstrosities that Eisenman, Liebskind and others produce. The fact that these architects still manage to pawn off their ill-conceived creations onto an intellectually-befuddled public probably says more about us than anything else. If we are so disconnected from our feelings that we celebrate the building of structures that make us uncomfortable, is any surprise that we are insensitive to ecological catastrophe we have created?

The Legacy of Norman Borlaug

It’s hard to think of many people who had a greater impact on the 20th century than Norman Borlaug, who died last Saturday at the age of 95. Universally acknowledged as the father of the “Green Revolution," Borlaug’s agricultural innovations literally changed the lives of billions. Given the precarious historical crossroads we find ourselves at, it’s worth taking a moment to reassess his legacy.

Conventional opinion hails Borlaug as one of the great heroes of the 20th Century; yesterday’s New York Times obituary describes him as a “plant scientist who did more than anyone else in the 20th century to teach the world to feed itself and whose work was credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives.” How, according to the experts, did he do it? As the Times explains it:

By the late 1940s, researchers knew they could induce huge yield gains in wheat by feeding the plants chemical fertilizer that supplied them with extra nitrogen . . . but beyond a certain level of fertilizer, the seed heads containing wheat grains would grow so large and heavy, the plant would fall over, ruining the crop.

In 1953, Dr. Borlaug began working with a wheat strain containing an unusual gene. It had the effect of shrinking the wheat plant, creating a stubby, compact variety. . . The plants would produce enormous heads of grain, yet their stiff, short bodies could support the weight without falling over. On the same amount of land, wheat output could be tripled or quadrupled. Later, the idea was applied to rice, the staple crop for nearly half the world’s population, with yields jumping several-fold compared with some traditional varieties.

The obituary writer sums up saying that “this strange principle of increasing yields by shrinking plants was the central insight of the Green Revolution, and its impact was enormous,” but from the way his career is described, it might be more accurate to describe Borlaug’s signature achievement as a way to greatly enhance the usefulness of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer which is most commonly made using natural gas.

Whether or not this innovation actually achieved what it’s backers claim is itself debatable. Sharon Astyk is one among many voices who have taken issue with the claim that the Green Revolution “fed the world”:

If you track the research, what you find is this. The vast majority of increases in grain yields since the beginning of the Green Revolution didn’t feed hungry people - they went to feed livestock, to make meat in the rich world, and then to ethanol - with the help of the same industrial corporations that we plan to rely upon to feed us. The same corporations that are going to “feed the world” by introducing new, drought resistant crops invested heavily in ethanol infrastructure, helping move more of the world’s grain harvest into gas tanks, rather than into people’s mouths.

But whether or not increased yields prevented (and continue to prevent) mass famine, an agricultural system based on training plants to sustain massive blasts of high-energy, industrially produced fertilizer has some other obvious problems. Never mind what nitrogen runoff does to streams and rivers and oceans etcetera; using a finite resource to produce most of the world’s food would seem to be the definition of unsustainable. We are essentially eating fossil fuels, and Borlaug was largely responsible. (Never mind also that the idea that by creating a system that requires massive inputs of chemicals from western agro-industrial giants, Borlaug “taught the world to feed itself” is laughable at best).

But what choice did we have? With rising birthrates matched by falling death rates due to advances in basic medicine and sanitation, in the 1960s governments, activists and everyone else were terrified about the coming “population bomb,” especially in the third world. Were there alternatives? Here are a few possibilities:

Agroforestry/Tree Cropping. The first edition of J. Russell Smith’s classic Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture was published in 1929. Smith saw the terrible erosive effects of unchecked till agriculture in the present and throughout history, and proposed putting the same effort we put into annual plant breeding into hybrid tree production, especially nuts, for human and animal consumption. As trees are much more productive per acre than annual crops and do not require yearly tilling or replanting, it seems that finding ways to use trees to produce staple crops should be a primary strategy to feed the world move toward a truly sustainable agriculture. Smith became a key influence on the agroforestry and permaculture movements.

Grow Biointensive. This enormously influential method of intensive gardening was developed by Alan Chadwick and John Jeavons in the 1970s using a fusion of Biodynamic and French Biointensive techniques. According to Jeavons, a Biodynamic garden can sustainably produce all the calories an individual needs on an average of 1,000 square feet, recycling all wastes.

The Fukuoka Method. Masanobu Fukuoka who passed away last year, practiced what he called “natural farming” for rice production, with comparable yields to conventional farming. Crucially, Fukuoka’s method was neither energy intensive modern nor traditional, but involved careful crop rotation and no tilling.

Keyline Design. Keyline Design was invented by Australan farmer P.A. Yeomans. Another major influence on permaculture, it involves a sophisticated system of contour farming to passively catch and store water in the landscape and rapidly build topsoil.

Permaculture. Permaculture is a comprehensive, whole-systems design approach which encompasses not only food production but energy, housing and village design and small-scale economics. An open ended, non-dogmatic approach, permaculture is the a grass-roots, multi-disciplinary approach to sustainability. As co-founder Bill Mollison put it, if traditional agriculture is labor intensive and conventional agriculture is energy intensive, permaculture is design intensive.

The “problem” with all of these approaches is that unlike green revolution techniques, they do not require the continuous intervention and high energy inputs of national governments and multinational corporations. To put it simply, Dow Chemical and Monsanto will never make money from permaculture, and if tree-cropping and agroforestry actually worked, the chemical giants would go out of business.

What would have happened had the world spent as much time, energy and resources researching and disseminating sustainable techniques as it did on the “green revolution”? Is it hopelessly cynical to believe that such an outcome was never in the cards?

The Great Contraction

Talk about surreal.

It’s only been a few years since James Howard Kunstler really started beating the drum of urban contraction:

I think that what we’re about to see is an epochal reversal of the 200-year-old trend of populations moving from the small towns and the farms to the big cities. That is going to reverse, and we’re going to see big cities contract substantially, and people moving back to smaller cities, smaller towns, and indeed to an agricultural landscape that is going to require a lot more human attention to make productive.

Which, needless to say, was a view so far outside of the mainstream that Kunstler he might as well have been announcing an imminent Martian invasion.

How times have changed. From today’s New York Times:

The government is looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature. Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area . . .
Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.
Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.
Most are former industrial cities in the "rust belt" of America's Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

That’s not all; rural Michigan is turning paved roads back to gravel. From the Chicago Times:

About a quarter of the state’s county road agencies largely left out of the federal stimulus package, which focuses on highways and other major thoroughfares, say they can’t afford some costly repaving projects and have crushed up deteriorating roads . . .
More than 20 of the 83 counties in Michigan, home to the nation’s highest unemployment rate for much of the past four years, have turned rural roads back to gravel with no immediate plans to repave, according to the County Road Association of Michigan. About 50 miles have been reverted in the last three years . . .
Montcalm converted nearly 10 miles on three primary county roads into gravel in May. Crushing the pavement and laying gravel cost about $10,000 a mile. Repaving a mile with asphalt would cost more than $100,000. The county had patched the roads in bits and pieces for years. But with potholes the size of steering wheels and no money for an extensive repaving, crews figured it wasn’t worth another piecemeal job.

It seems as though we’re already beginning to “make other arrangements” as slide past not just peak oil but peak capital, and peak everything else.

When Giants Fall: Review

Like his previous work, Financial Armageddon, Michael J. Panzner’s When Giants Fall provides a brief but surprisingly comprehensive picture of our unfolding economic catastrophe.

It’s also a curious book, not easy to categorize. Panzner perspective is that of long-time veteran of stock, bond and currency markets, but he is wise enough to see that one can’t describe the financial mechanisms of the meltdown without looking deeply at the political, social and individual ramifications of what is going on. To put it another way, if you’re looking for quick investments tips on (as Panzner himself joked in a recent interview) “how to make a killing in a world gone to hell” you’ve come to the wrong place.

In fact, in spite of the quote on the book jacket which reads “for those enlightened few who understand what is really going on and what will likely happen next, the chaotic years ahead may well represent a singular opportunity” the book itself provides no such easy answers. There are many suggestions of what to avoid: stocks, bonds, most real estate. But as to what will do well at any given point, the only good answer is likely to be: “it depends.”

At the heart of the book is the observation that for myriad reasons the United States is rapidly losing its place as the world singular superpower—from resource constraints to debt at all levels, to a collapsing dollar. This doesn’t mean that competitors like Russia and China will have an easy go of things. “While the United States may be the main loser, it won’t be alone,” Panzner writes. “The rest of the world will also be wracked by what is likely to be a long and debilitating malaise.”

Unlike some financial doomsayers, Panzer grasps the implications of resource limits to growth as well. While he is agnostic about the idea of a near-term peak in oil, he recognizes growing demand for oil in the developing world will very likely suck up any new capacity that could come on line.

This is not a small distinction; differing scenarios for the rate and timing of global oil decline versus the simple inability to keep up with demand make for drastically different outcomes. But Panzner is right to be cautious about predictions.

It seems increasingly clear that we have entered an era when the predictions—even of those who were correct up to now—are diverging. The problem is that even for those of us who understand the broad outlines of what is happening, getting the ever-crucial details right in the moment will continue to prove challenging if not impossible.

In that sense, When Giants Fall is a highly enlightening portrait of how things may fall out, and an invaluable tool for scenario planning. Does it have all the answers? Of course not; nobody does.

What to Do with all the Empty Car Lots?

The editors at Planetizen raised an interesting question in its Feedback forum last week: what should cities do with the coming surge of empty car dealerships? (Between Chrysler and GM, there will be at least 1,900 nationwide). The loss of these dealerships is likely to blow huge holes in city tax budgets across the country and leave untold acres of unused open space.

Responses varied from the sensible to the utterly ridiculous (vertical towers with ports for flying cars?), but more telling was how readers voting on the choices. The highest voted responses were to “ask the local residents about what the community needs” and “urban gardens” with “farmers markets and local events” and “create walkable, vibrant places” coming in third and fourth.

Granted, Planetizen is a self-selected community if there ever was one, but even so maybe the results provide some hope that so many people are voting for democratic, local or sustainability-minded alternatives.

The only concern I have with the “local residents” approach is that the places where giant car-dealerships lived—suburban sprawl wastelands—are, by definition (and simple geometry) unlikely to possess much in terms of local community or civic engagement to build on.

Nonetheless, that amount of open space near cities is a potentially tremendous resource if we take the initiative rather than letting it bake into squalor. Given the environmental damage that so many acres of asphalt causes, (from toxic stormwater runoff to creating urban heat islands) maybe depaving should be the first step in any redevelopment program. Once the blacktop is gone, it may be easier to visualize the beginnings of a regenerated, living world, whether it comes from a sustainable farm, a walkable village, or something else.

The Growth Illusion

Ilargi, over at The Automatic Earth, posted an interesting article this weekend about the failure of “the current economic order” and the illusion of growth.

It has been an article of faith among mainstream economists that the way out of our current financial debacle (indeed, any financial downturn) is to promote policies that return us on a path to economic growth. Of course, as Ilargi points out, it is, at this point, an exercise in absurdity to put our trust in mainstream economists.

The same forces who've had an interest in keeping the growth illusion alive until now are now trying to make us believe that a little tweaking of the system here and there is all that's needed to restart the growth machine, that the engine hasn't failed, it's merely temporarily sputtering. Nothing a mechanic with a good manual can't fix. But there is no good manual, something that has repeatedly been admitted, willingly or not, by various parties to the decision making process. The fact that the only people who have correctly predicted the situation we now find ourselves in were, and still are, standing on the periphery, literally on the outside looking in, while those in the center have consistently been embarrassingly wrong, yet remained where they were is ample proof that there is no manual.

Many in the peak oil movement believe that global peak in oil—a peak we are now more than likely atop—is the ceiling of economic growth. Ilargi, quoting derivatives expert Satyajit Das, who makes the point economic growth in the West actually peaked more than 30 years ago. “There are all sorts of means to measure this,” Ilargi writes, “and Das provides a nice one: the amount of dollars in debt required to achieve $1 in growth.”

Or as Das puts it:

“The ability to sustain high rates of economic growth, decreed by governments and central bankers, is questionable. The aggressive increase in debt globally resulted in a sharp increase in sustainable growth rates. $4 to $5 of debt was required to create $1 of growth. Approximately half the recorded growth in the US over recent years was driven by borrowing against the rising value of houses (mortgage equity withdrawals). As the level of debt in the global economy decreases, attainable growth levels also decline.

The world used debt to accelerate its consumption. Spending that would have taken place normally over a period of many years was squeezed into a relatively short period because of the availability of cheap borrowings. Business over invested misreading demand and assuming that the exaggerated growth would continue indefinitely creating significant over-capacity in many sectors.”

The idea that the economic growth my generation has experienced was mostly illusory (i.e., debt based) comports with our seemingly contradictory perceptions about economic life. On the one hand, the PC and Internet revolutions seem to have brought us incredible increases in standards of living. Houses have gotten bigger and consumer goods cheaper.

On the other hand, the cost of housing, education and healthcare has never been more staggering, and whereas 30 years ago in the U.S. a family could be comfortably middle-class on one income, that hasn’t been the case for a long, long time. Now, of course, even the illusion is coming to an end. So what happens next?

The Drama of Industrial Agriculture at the Twilight of the Industrial Age

It seems likely that we’ll never know for sure where and how the recent swine flu outbreak was born, but plenty of evidence is emerging that the industrial farming of pigs may have been a culprit. As a recent Wired article explained,

“High-density animal production facilities came to dominate the U.S. pork industry during the late 20th century, and have been adopted around the world. Inside them, pigs are packed so tightly that they cannot turn, and literally stand in their own waste.

"Diseases travel rapidly through such immunologically stressed populations, and travel with the animals as they are shuttled throughout the United States between birth and slaughter. That provides ample opportunity for strains to mingle and recombine. An ever-escalating array of industry-developed vaccines confer short-term protection, but at the expense of provoking flu to evolve in unpredictable ways."

According to the article, for years a growing number of scientists and observers have warned that industrial pig farms were likely breeding grounds for a deadly flu pandemic.

We should, of course, not be too quick to jump to conclusions about the origins of this particular outbreak. But the controversy around the swine flu is only the latest piece of evidence to indict a pathological industrial food system. From salmonella-laden spinach, tomatoes and peanut butter to melamine soaked animal feed and milk, there is plenty of evidence that no matter how “modern” factory-made food might appear, its safety record is not as stellar as its proponents would like us to believe—and that’s not even taking environmental impacts or fossil-fuel and fresh water dependence into account.

Ironically, though, far from moving us away from dependence on industrial agriculture, Congress appears, in name of food safety, to be on the verge of passing legislation that would, “likely put smaller and organic producers at an economic and competitive disadvantage” according to the Cornucopia Institute. And the proposed legislation doesn’t even address meat production.

To be fair, the Cornucopia Institute also says that the organic food advocates who fear that the bills “will end organic farming as we know it seem to grossly exaggerate the risks.”

Nonetheless, evidence abounds that in spite of their immense power, industrial agriculture sees small-scale, organic food production as a serious threat. When Michelle Obama decided to put in an all-organic vegetable garden, she received a letter from Mid-America CropLife Association (a group representing, among others, Monsanto, Dow AgroSciences and DuPont Crop Protection) “respectfully encouraging” her to “recognize the role conventional agriculture plays in the U.S. in feeding the ever-increasing population, contributing to the U.S. economy and providing a safe and economical food supply.”

“We live in a very different world than that of our grandparents. Americans are juggling jobs with the needs of children and aging parents,” the letter states. “The time needed to tend a garden is not there for the majority of our citizens, certainly not a garden of sufficient productivity to supply much of a family’s year-round food needs.” The emotional button-pushing tropes of such a pitch are, of course, neither unfamiliar nor accidental. “Juggling”, “time” “children and aging parents” and (elsewhere in the letter) “affordability” evoke a portrait of an archetypal “soccer-mom”—harried, stressed, probably running to and fro in her minivan, with neither the time nor energy to think about something so indulgent as a vegetable garden.

Thus, a part of life that was fundamental to most families with a bit of land a generation or two ago—indeed, a basic skill and a grounding of culture—becomes, through implication, a snotty affectation of people who can “afford” it. In other words, if you’re worried about swine flu (or, as the meat industry would have us call it, H1-N1 ) and the other apparent dangers of industrial food, too bad; it’s the only thing you can afford and have time for, so just relax and enjoy that T.V. dinner!

Evoking the learned helplessness of one’s subject is one of the oldest sales tricks in the book. As morally atrocious, unsustainable, unhealthy, or disguising as factory farming may be, we must accept it, because we have no other choice. Shove aside any systemic critique, and appeal to the emotions of harried people who are “juggling” jobs and kids and elderly parents—or to the poor, starving masses in the developing world who, we’re told, will die without artificial pesticides, fertilizer or (now) genetically modified crops. Whatever it takes to reinforce our dependence on the toxic system.

Or as Norman Borlaug, father of the modern industrial agriculture (inaptly called “The Green Revolution”) put in a recent Reason interview,

“If all agriculture were organic, you would have to increase cropland area dramatically, spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of forests . . .at the present time, approximately 80 million tons of nitrogen nutrients are utilized each year. If you tried to produce this nitrogen organically, you would require an additional 5 or 6 billion head of cattle to supply the manure. How much wild land would you have to sacrifice just to produce the forage for these cows? There’s a lot of nonsense going on here.”

For anyone who knows a bit about organic agriculture, there is something a little odd about Borlaug’s assertion, as Kevin Carson explained in a pointed response:

Apparently Borlaug, a professor of agronomy, has never heard of green manuring with nitrogen-fixing cover crops. You don’t need additional land to grow the legumes—you grow them on the land you’re fertilizing . . it’s simply incontrovertible that the most intensive organic techniques produce far more per acre than conventional agribusiness. For example, John Jeavons’ raised bed technique can feed one person on a minimum of 4000 sq. ft. That’s one tenth of an acre. And it’s done, by the way, without cattle manure or additional land for foraging them.

A lot of nonsense indeed. Never mind inconvenient facts, though. Like the banking system, industrial agriculture, we’re told, is simply too big to fail, and anyone who thinks otherwise is not being “realistic”.

I have a prediction, though: the still-growing populist backlash against trillion-dollar bank bailouts is nothing compared to the rage that will rise up against industrial agriculture as its fatal weaknesses become increasingly obvious, especially as we head down the backside of Hubbert’s curve.

The problem, though, is that political action, however necessary, will not create the small-scale alternative political, social, economic and food-production systems that will be needed to appropriately respond to the collapse of all of our “too-big-to-fail” institutions; it’s past time to start building alternatives. Let’s start now.

Columbine—10 Years Later

It’s hard to believe it has been only 10 years since that awful day in April of 1999, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold made murderous history at my old high school. So much has happened since then—so many events of great weight—that I wonder if it happened today would the Columbine murders have the same impact, or would they just be another statistic in a chain of ever-worsening world events?

Of course America is a country that is perpetually losing its innocence, but something seems different now. I used to think that these surreal times started with the persecution and impeachment of Bill Clinton—an absurd moment in American history if there ever were one. But more and more that spectacle seems to belong to an earlier period—itself a strange time, characterized by mockery, flippancy and callous “irony”.

Columbine, on the other hand, seems in retrospect to be more a transitional event, partaking both of themes from the preceding era and the one that would follow. In its ideological vacuity, its inward-looking obsession with provincial American social hierarchies, its shameless media-bating, its inspiration in the genre of black comedy (remember Heathers and Natural Born Killers?) Columbine seems in some ways like the epitome of hipster 90s (hipster unto death).

In many other ways though, it feels more like a gloomy omen of the decade that followed. The idea that the intention to die is the ultimate tool for murder is not new, but it until now it has never been the a dominant trope of an era. More importantly, though, the events at Columbine blew a hole in the in the myth of upper-middle class American suburban life as the epitome of human progress, comfort and well-being.

The media tried to make the story of Columbine about guns and video games and goth music, but strangely, almost no one looked at the physical world that kids are forced to inhabit. I moved with my family to the Columbine neighborhood just before going into the 10th grade. It was in a somewhat wealthier neighborhood than Green Mountain, my 9th grade high school—not that you could tell from external appearances. The two schools had exactly the same layout—a squat, prefab, modernist design. Like the junior high and elementary schools I attended, it was a layout that seemed designed to evoke a certain feeling—that education should be modular, synthetic, reproducible. Schools were factories for learning, in much the same way that architect Le Corbusier once argued that that houses should be “machines for living.” I don’t remember any outside windows in the classrooms.

It wasn’t just the high-school, of course. In spite of its mailing address in Littleton, the Columbine area is actually an unincorporated part of Jefferson County, without a main street or town center. As in most of suburbia, cultural life there centers around fast food, malls and chain stores. Even religious life has the outer trappings of big box stores and strip malls (down the street from the high school is a church housed in a converted K-Mart).

We have now entered an era that throws the basic premises of American life in to doubt. But the viability and health of a consumer economy driven by debt, finance, housing and sprawl was always questionable, even without the current credit crises or the looming threat of peak oil.

Since Columbine, there have been plenty of studies and analyses that point to the objective unhealthiness of the sprawl-based life, from correlations to obesity to the loss of community, to the excessive use of fossil fuels. Less talked about though, are things like wholeness, life, beauty, meaning. I am thinking of the characteristics of what Christopher Alexander, in The Timeless Way of Building called “The Quality Without a Name.” The fact is, human beings are not utilitarian machines; building a society that treats them as such is nothing less than pathological.

Suburbs, Cities and Sustainability

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:

1. 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).
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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 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 (a depressing number of which have been Walmartized).

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?