by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
With view to the age of cheap oil coming to an end – and this could be as early as 2013, for so, at least, it is reckoned by some think tanks – our towns an cities need to be refurbished for sustainability, and this must be done yesterday rather than tomorrow.
By force of events more and more people who currently live in the suburbs or even deeper in the countryside but who work in the towns and cities will move back closer to where they work.
The commuting as it goes is just simply not sustainable with the “cheap” oil still being here. But without it commuting will simply, aside from being impossible for most, also be stupid.
This, however, means that towns and cities will have to change, become fully sustainable and, amongst other things, must produce a lot of their own food and other needs.
Electricity generation must return to a local level, a neighborhood level even, together with wind and solar on every roof.
The use of motor vehicles will have to be reconsidered as well and especially and the infrastructure must be created and geared to walking and cycling. This means that everything must be “shrunk” to size and once the “cheap” oil is gone we will have to do this anyway but we will then no longer have the machinery to do it.
The ideal move would be to start this transition already now and not just as regards to travel.
We need to “localize” everything in our lives and that includes where we live and work.
Living twenty, thirty, forty or even more miles away from our places of work, in the sprawl that are the suburbs, or even the deep countryside, has never been sustainable and was made possible, though still not sustainable, by “cheap” oil.
Once “cheap”oil is gone and, to all intents and purposes, as said, that day could be upon us very much sooner rather than later, the burbs will become unsustainable and thus very much part of history.
Therefore, our towns and cities must be changed and made sustainable in the extreme.
Not everyone, that is true, is made for town- and especially city life – I for one don't like to live in places that are too large and have too many people – but... and the “but” here is that the towns and cities will, by needs, have to break down into small communities on neighborhood level, more than likely, and thus the feel of the place is also going to change.
Areas must be ordered in such a way that everything is in walking- and cycling distance, with regards to shops, schools, work, etc.
we must redesign our towns and cities now while we still have the convenience of oil so that they are ready when oil, and with it gasoline and diesel, is too expensive to ordinary use. Who is going to be able to drive a car at £20 per gallon of gas or diesel? Very few people, if any, that much is certain.
Over the years, in the UK, our towns and cities, and here especially the centers, have become a “people-less” zone where businesses predominate and virtually no one lives. This will have to change and the centers of our towns and cities must be repopulated.
Housing units may also have to be redesigned and we must go up again, though not too high as elevators will also, probably, become history again. Five flights of stairs, more than likely, will have to be seen as the maximum. Before and just after World War Two housing estates were built in the UK the design of which should be considered again.
Those were blocks of brick-built flats around an internal courtyard and this would be ideal for today once again as this can create a community. The central courtyard can have – as it used to – a playground for the children and, in addition, a community garden growing produce.
Every space, aside from the children's playground, of this courtyard should be used for the garden and there are many ways of doing this and many kinds of planters in which to grow food, including abandoned shopping carts; should they still exist, that is.
Those blocks of flats could have gates also, which could make them quite secure against the possibility produce theft and other criminal acts. And blocks of homes such as those could be created in such a way that each forms a perfect community that could also have workshops, shops and such integrated within the area.
I am, obviously, playing here with ideas and thought of how to make our towns and cities (more) sustainable and livable again.
There will be, I should think, no “one size fits all” solution nor can or should there be.
However, ideas can become the basis to something concrete, very bricks and mortar. Bricks and mortar, though, do not a community make. It takes much more than just homes and a common area in which to live and that is also what we will have to rediscover and, in some instances, reinvent.
In the new “post cheap oil world” it is community that will count but it is something that we have lost in the last half a century or so, unfortunately.
The neighborhoods of our towns and cities were vibrant communities once where people, in the main, did look out for each other, and they must become thus again. Only as communities and in communities will we be able to make it, and I am serious when I say that.
The era of individualism, of the big I, also is coming to an end with the end opf cheap oil and that ois a good thing too.
In the era of abundant cheap fossil fuels the individual was created as the b e all and end all and where has it gotten us?
It has gotten us to a society that is uncaring, where money and possessions seems to be the only thing that counts and where life has become very cheap. Where someone's neighbor is lying dead for months in his house or flat before anyone notices that no one has seen him or her or when people get alerted to something being wrong because of the smell of something rotting.
How can be have become so uncaring that we do not notice for months that we have not seen one of our neighbors? Then again, we no longer talk to our neighbors very often even.
We have become worse than any other species in the animal kingdom, not that we were that not already.
We either, in the the world after cheap oil, learn to live in real communities1 once again or we are not going to make it. It is as simple that that. Communities where people live and work together at making life livable and where people look out for one another again, as used to be the case in the “good old days”.
© 2010
1When I say here community then I do not mean commune but real community; a collective of individuals, families and households that live in the same neighborhood and that cooperate and look out for one another.
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