After the 9/11 attacks, media in the United States were flooded with calls for a return to normalcy. But a normalcy that is overwhelmingly urban, energy intensive and dependent on faraway places for its basic needs is not sustainable. Rather, it will always be haunted: by security alerts, the echoes of distant resource wars, and the erosion of human rights not to mention the consequences of global warming. This normal, default way of life could itself prove a threat to human civilisation.
For the first time in human history, more people in the world live in cities than in rural areas. The primary enablers of this energy-intensive urban lifestyle have been cheap oil and natural gas. After 150 years of extraordinary growth, these fossil-fuel sources may be reaching their limits. We may be forced to reinvent urban life.
Green cities in America
In his October 2004 article Green Manhattan, David Owen observes that New York consumes about half as much energy as the average North American city (or about the same as a European city), making it the greenest city in the United States. Reassuring though this may be for New Yorkers, it is wrong to assume that the city offers a model for an energy-constrained future.
Like many commentators, Owen overlooks the other, less visible roles that oil and gas play in our lives besides transport and heating. They are the vital ingredients of most of the products that make city life possible, including the pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers for the food city-dwellers eat, and the plastics, rubber products, concrete, pharmaceuticals and other products that support everyday life.
Some cities are well positioned to deploy mass transit, but they remain hugely dependent on energy-intensive products often imported from faraway places. Food products in the United States, for example, travel on average about 1,400 miles (2,240km).
Post-carbon settlements
There are ideal sizes for human and animal homes. Might there also be ideal sizes for cities as well? The eco-city visionary Richard Register argues that both size and shape matter. He imagines the sprawling megalopolis broken up into smaller, taller cities, towns and villages surrounded by restored agricultural and natural environments linked by bicycle and light rail, with heavy rail between metropolitan areas and the largest city centres.
I imagine these settlements being interdependent and locally self-reliant no longer dependent on long and fragile supply chains. We need to begin restructuring our economies to meet our basic needs locally. This means increasing local production of food, water, energy, money and other necessities to create a parallel public infrastructure that grows as the global corporate oil-reliant infrastructure, which is going through wrenching change, enters what I believe will be a period of decline. The skills involved in conducting life on a smaller scale have been eroded so we will then need to experiment to find out what works locally.
The reconfiguration of our economies and cities will need to accelerate through process efficiency and minimal duplication of effort to ensure we have some working models before an energy crisis bites really deeply. This undertaking will require a level of civic cohesion and cooperation that is unprecedented in peacetime. It must be able to transcend our sordid histories of oppression, wealth disparity, and ethnic conflict. The alternative is horrible to contemplate. History is full of collapsed civilisations. Surely we do not want to join them?
This article appears as part of openDemocracys online debate on the politics of climate change. The debate was developed in partnership with the British Council as part of their ZeroCarbonCity initiative a two year global campaign to raise awareness and stimulate debate around the challenges of climate change.
