Wonderful start! Here's somethibg i just listened to day before yesterday that focuses in part on the suburbs as a great experimentation platform too. A bit older - 7 years - but it was interesting to see that COVID accelerated some of the changes he was recommending back then. You expect you're familiar with David Holmgren and Permaculture, but this seems very aligned with what you are talking about.
"Housing is a climate issue, because increasing costs are pushing lower-to-middle income people out of cities where they are most likely to use transit, to suburban areas where they are forced to drive cars."
True enough. But I'd like to encourage exploring yet another long term proactive orientation on housing, and what I have to say on this is rarely mentioned by anyone, sadly.
A thorough examination (analysis, but also synthesis) of recent modernity's urbanization trend (of which suburban development is but an expression) reveals both urbanization and suburbanization as symptoms of a now obsolete (in the sense of no longer useful, going with Merriam-Webster's two-pronged definition of 'obsolete') design premise: that energy and materials are cheap and abundant.
Modern growth economies were made economically (not ecologically) sustainable, insofar as access to livelihood is concerned, by growing the luxury goods and services sectors to absorb the folks who were displaced from the necessary goods and services sectors. That was only possible so long as energy remained relatively cheap and abundant. But now we must measure cheapness holistically (which includes ecological costs) as well as economically. And what we discover when we think it all through carefully and accurately -- and honestly -- is that the cheap energy and materials which enabled the luxury economy to absorb displaced workers from the needs-based economy has come to a partial end, and will continue to come to an end as time moves on -- and can only move in the direction of ending.
Therefore, because urban economies are principally dependent on luxury goods and servicies to avert municipal collapse, we must (and will) reverse the urbanization and suburbanization trend of the twentieth (plus) centuries. We must, because of both the climate disruption of greenhouse gas emissions (84% of world energy consumption) and because energy is far more expensive than it used to be, and will only grow more so, measured in dollars. In short? The luxury-depenendent mode of economy will be ending soon, and that will mean access to livelihood will depend on what Chris Smaje calls "agrarian localism" -- just to meet basic needs like food and shelter.
Cities will soon empty out, not because we want them to, but because access to livelihood will require it. This process will amplify and amplify, and will soon enough be obvious to everyone.
So housing? We need rural houses in rural villages to expand in great number, simply because only rural places have land-access enough for agrarian self-provisioning of basic subsistence.
Food and shelter... and all the rest... isn't created in urban settings. It's made in rural settings, and imported into cities to feed luxury economy workers. That's it in a nut shell. And it's time we figure this out and warn folks of what is inevitably coming so we can prepare a bridge to the future which is workable.
I am not sure I agree that most city consumption is luxury. It’s largely basics of food, shelter and clothing, I think. In terms of food miles, the highest carbon emissions are between you and the store. Cities are an efficient way to accommodate large populations. A rebalancing with rural areas is desirable though.
By this definition, a nation, society or culture has a luxury economy if and when its economy would go into collapse if people stopped consuming luxury goods and services. This is certainly true of the USA today -- where both of us live. Luxury goods and services provided access to livelihood to workers displaced from (for example) agriculture. I highly recommend that you at least look at the agriculture labor graph I provided in my above-mentioned essay. It really explains a lot! Overwhelmingly most workers in the USA were farmers back in the 19th century, and as time went on farm labor, as a portion of the 'labor market', shrank and shrank over time, such that today only roughly 1.3% of workers are farmers. (That's one point three, not thirteen.) What changed? Mostly, it was technology which changed. Technology largely automated agricultural production, enabling one point three percent of the population to feed essentially 100%. (Some people actually feed themselves through self-provisioning directly, thus "essentially".)
Obviously, food is the very epitome of a necessity, in contrast to a luxury. So is shelter, clothing, medicine, water.... A few things are utterly necessary for life. And some things are clearly luxuries.
Some people believe automobiles are necessities, and even lawn mowers -- and lawns. I think they are all wrong on this question.
Back in the day, as you remember, we had a thing called "the yellow pages" in a phone book. If we still had that, I'd ask you to flip through the yellow pages to look at the business in your city. And I'd have you rank the businesses on a scale of zero to ten, with zero being utter necessities and ten being utterly luxury oriented. This exercise would provide you with a sense of how much any urban economy is oriented around the provision of luxury goods and services.
84% of the energy used in the world today is fossil energy. An adequate response to the climate emergency would require us to reduce that consumption by at least (probably much more) half over the next decade. Currently, GDP / GWP is utterly tied to energy use, so halving energy use would mean halving the economy as we know it. That means cutting luxury goods and services very dramatically. And that means cities would largely empty out, because there would be essentially no access to livelihood for those displaced by the collapse of the luxury goods and services sectors of the economy of those cities.
Where will people then seek access to livelihood? Rural areas! Because only in rural areas is there land enough for people to engage in community self-provisioning of basic necessities like food, shelter, clothing (fiber), water, etc.
My point is that cities will not be economically viable for most of their current inhabitants if we were to dramatically reduce fossil fuel consumption, as is necessary and also even inevitable (due to coming scarcity of such fuels).
If cities were not so densely populated (and covered in buildings, concrete and asphalt), perhaps folks could manage to engage in community self-provisioning of food and other basic necessities there as fossil fuel use plummeted. But cities are much too densely populated, and lack sufficient land for food growing for their current populations. Only so much lawn could be converted to growing food. An economy half its present size would force migration from urban to rural simply for folks to have access to basic livelihood.
I don’t see things playing out this way. First, cities are efficient places for human intercourse, where movement can be limited and served by public means. Rural areas are spread out. My friends in the country sure do a lot of driving. I also think the transition won’t be so abrupt, and agriculture will continue to be relatively productive, so can still feed the cities. Also, lower material consumption scenarios envision an increase in services to one another, which works much better when people live closer to each other. As well as reduced work hours, so more people can be employed. Cities are effective as productive centers, and I believe will continue to be.
I'm presently writing an essay for The R-Word (and for Resilience.org) which more fully explains why a counterurbanization trend will be in our near future. In this essay I'll make my case more clearly and strongly. I should complete it by the end of the day or sooner.
I'm not suggesting that the cities will entirely empty out, with everyone leaving cities. What I am saying is that the sort of urbanization trend we've seen over the last century (plus), and especially since WWII, depended on a level of energy intensity in the economy which is no longer possible to maintain for any long duration.
As for country folk (and suburban folk) driving much more than urban folk, that's a fact -- and a well-known one. And this too is a symptom of the cheap and abundant energy regime which is soon to be over with. I'll also explain why this is so in my upcoming essay.
Future economies will be mostly local (and also regional, with an emphasis on the local), so automobile commutes in future rural villages simply will not be necessary -- whether commuting for work, shopping, play, visiting family, etc. Also, the fuel and materials which make all of this driving possible will soon enough dry up and blow away -- unless we simply refuse to consume energy at rates which will give us a chance of slowing the Carbon Bomb.
I don't much like cities, myself. But my argument isn't about my preferences, it's about economics and ecology, and access to livelihood.
Of course, the more affluent, the higher the consumption. What a society designed for less consumption will give most of us are options. For example, good transit that doesn’t force you to use a car to get to work. Affordable housing near work.
I don’t see much evidence higher city wages push many jobs to the suburbs. Though I probably should have mentioned wage hikes as something cities can do. Besides, if jobs really moved out of the cities to the suburbs, people would move with them.
Wonderful start! Here's somethibg i just listened to day before yesterday that focuses in part on the suburbs as a great experimentation platform too. A bit older - 7 years - but it was interesting to see that COVID accelerated some of the changes he was recommending back then. You expect you're familiar with David Holmgren and Permaculture, but this seems very aligned with what you are talking about.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uqwWdranB5A&fbclid=IwAR0VErrY5hNxI9Z3YI4T_f2fwSIX0QtUamC9sUkFKY1A_PaP88M2prqMQR0
"Building the future in place also involves an array of policy actions across cities and bioregions. Among them..."
Thanks and, after reading those policies I would REALLY appreciate your thoughts about my own ones for the cities of 2070, which in several points overlap with yours: https://mfioretti.substack.com/p/the-city-reboot-for-2070-that-we-122
You might find of interest this book review of Omand David's How to survive a crisis: lessons in resilience and avoiding disaster: <https://academic.oup.com/ia/article/99/5/2137/7255740>
Good article! Thanks.
"Housing is a climate issue, because increasing costs are pushing lower-to-middle income people out of cities where they are most likely to use transit, to suburban areas where they are forced to drive cars."
True enough. But I'd like to encourage exploring yet another long term proactive orientation on housing, and what I have to say on this is rarely mentioned by anyone, sadly.
A thorough examination (analysis, but also synthesis) of recent modernity's urbanization trend (of which suburban development is but an expression) reveals both urbanization and suburbanization as symptoms of a now obsolete (in the sense of no longer useful, going with Merriam-Webster's two-pronged definition of 'obsolete') design premise: that energy and materials are cheap and abundant.
Modern growth economies were made economically (not ecologically) sustainable, insofar as access to livelihood is concerned, by growing the luxury goods and services sectors to absorb the folks who were displaced from the necessary goods and services sectors. That was only possible so long as energy remained relatively cheap and abundant. But now we must measure cheapness holistically (which includes ecological costs) as well as economically. And what we discover when we think it all through carefully and accurately -- and honestly -- is that the cheap energy and materials which enabled the luxury economy to absorb displaced workers from the needs-based economy has come to a partial end, and will continue to come to an end as time moves on -- and can only move in the direction of ending.
Therefore, because urban economies are principally dependent on luxury goods and servicies to avert municipal collapse, we must (and will) reverse the urbanization and suburbanization trend of the twentieth (plus) centuries. We must, because of both the climate disruption of greenhouse gas emissions (84% of world energy consumption) and because energy is far more expensive than it used to be, and will only grow more so, measured in dollars. In short? The luxury-depenendent mode of economy will be ending soon, and that will mean access to livelihood will depend on what Chris Smaje calls "agrarian localism" -- just to meet basic needs like food and shelter.
Cities will soon empty out, not because we want them to, but because access to livelihood will require it. This process will amplify and amplify, and will soon enough be obvious to everyone.
So housing? We need rural houses in rural villages to expand in great number, simply because only rural places have land-access enough for agrarian self-provisioning of basic subsistence.
Food and shelter... and all the rest... isn't created in urban settings. It's made in rural settings, and imported into cities to feed luxury economy workers. That's it in a nut shell. And it's time we figure this out and warn folks of what is inevitably coming so we can prepare a bridge to the future which is workable.
I am not sure I agree that most city consumption is luxury. It’s largely basics of food, shelter and clothing, I think. In terms of food miles, the highest carbon emissions are between you and the store. Cities are an efficient way to accommodate large populations. A rebalancing with rural areas is desirable though.
In my essay, Energy Transition & the Luxury Economy, I said "I define a luxury economy as an economic mode of access to livelihood which depends upon luxury goods and services in order to avoid economic and social collapse." https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-10-31/energy-transition-the-luxury-economy/
By this definition, a nation, society or culture has a luxury economy if and when its economy would go into collapse if people stopped consuming luxury goods and services. This is certainly true of the USA today -- where both of us live. Luxury goods and services provided access to livelihood to workers displaced from (for example) agriculture. I highly recommend that you at least look at the agriculture labor graph I provided in my above-mentioned essay. It really explains a lot! Overwhelmingly most workers in the USA were farmers back in the 19th century, and as time went on farm labor, as a portion of the 'labor market', shrank and shrank over time, such that today only roughly 1.3% of workers are farmers. (That's one point three, not thirteen.) What changed? Mostly, it was technology which changed. Technology largely automated agricultural production, enabling one point three percent of the population to feed essentially 100%. (Some people actually feed themselves through self-provisioning directly, thus "essentially".)
Obviously, food is the very epitome of a necessity, in contrast to a luxury. So is shelter, clothing, medicine, water.... A few things are utterly necessary for life. And some things are clearly luxuries.
Some people believe automobiles are necessities, and even lawn mowers -- and lawns. I think they are all wrong on this question.
Back in the day, as you remember, we had a thing called "the yellow pages" in a phone book. If we still had that, I'd ask you to flip through the yellow pages to look at the business in your city. And I'd have you rank the businesses on a scale of zero to ten, with zero being utter necessities and ten being utterly luxury oriented. This exercise would provide you with a sense of how much any urban economy is oriented around the provision of luxury goods and services.
84% of the energy used in the world today is fossil energy. An adequate response to the climate emergency would require us to reduce that consumption by at least (probably much more) half over the next decade. Currently, GDP / GWP is utterly tied to energy use, so halving energy use would mean halving the economy as we know it. That means cutting luxury goods and services very dramatically. And that means cities would largely empty out, because there would be essentially no access to livelihood for those displaced by the collapse of the luxury goods and services sectors of the economy of those cities.
Where will people then seek access to livelihood? Rural areas! Because only in rural areas is there land enough for people to engage in community self-provisioning of basic necessities like food, shelter, clothing (fiber), water, etc.
My point is that cities will not be economically viable for most of their current inhabitants if we were to dramatically reduce fossil fuel consumption, as is necessary and also even inevitable (due to coming scarcity of such fuels).
If cities were not so densely populated (and covered in buildings, concrete and asphalt), perhaps folks could manage to engage in community self-provisioning of food and other basic necessities there as fossil fuel use plummeted. But cities are much too densely populated, and lack sufficient land for food growing for their current populations. Only so much lawn could be converted to growing food. An economy half its present size would force migration from urban to rural simply for folks to have access to basic livelihood.
Do you disagree with this, Patrick?
I don’t see things playing out this way. First, cities are efficient places for human intercourse, where movement can be limited and served by public means. Rural areas are spread out. My friends in the country sure do a lot of driving. I also think the transition won’t be so abrupt, and agriculture will continue to be relatively productive, so can still feed the cities. Also, lower material consumption scenarios envision an increase in services to one another, which works much better when people live closer to each other. As well as reduced work hours, so more people can be employed. Cities are effective as productive centers, and I believe will continue to be.
I'm presently writing an essay for The R-Word (and for Resilience.org) which more fully explains why a counterurbanization trend will be in our near future. In this essay I'll make my case more clearly and strongly. I should complete it by the end of the day or sooner.
I'm not suggesting that the cities will entirely empty out, with everyone leaving cities. What I am saying is that the sort of urbanization trend we've seen over the last century (plus), and especially since WWII, depended on a level of energy intensity in the economy which is no longer possible to maintain for any long duration.
As for country folk (and suburban folk) driving much more than urban folk, that's a fact -- and a well-known one. And this too is a symptom of the cheap and abundant energy regime which is soon to be over with. I'll also explain why this is so in my upcoming essay.
Future economies will be mostly local (and also regional, with an emphasis on the local), so automobile commutes in future rural villages simply will not be necessary -- whether commuting for work, shopping, play, visiting family, etc. Also, the fuel and materials which make all of this driving possible will soon enough dry up and blow away -- unless we simply refuse to consume energy at rates which will give us a chance of slowing the Carbon Bomb.
I don't much like cities, myself. But my argument isn't about my preferences, it's about economics and ecology, and access to livelihood.
What is a "luxury economy," really?:
counterurbanization and the future of livelihood
https://rword.substack.com/p/what-is-a-luxury-economy-really
Zoning can mandate density. Houston is an example of what you get without it. Ultra-sprawl.
Reducing fossil pollution takes priority.
Of course, the more affluent, the higher the consumption. What a society designed for less consumption will give most of us are options. For example, good transit that doesn’t force you to use a car to get to work. Affordable housing near work.
I don’t see much evidence higher city wages push many jobs to the suburbs. Though I probably should have mentioned wage hikes as something cities can do. Besides, if jobs really moved out of the cities to the suburbs, people would move with them.