Peak Suburbia
Recently I came across two articles that seemed pretty forward looking. The first one I saw was a bit ago about vertical farming - moving farms indoor and scaling them vertically with the goal of putting them much closer to if not right inside cities. The other looks at the relation between oil prices and suburban growth.
To me they’re both talking about the same problem - that is, suburban sprawl is not a supportable paradigm economically or ecologically. Spreading everyone out increases shipping costs as well as increasing the burning of fuel. Kunstler’s piece relates the spread of suburbia directly to the cheapness of oil - that suburbia depends on oil being cheap and easy. All housing bubbles, this one included, occurred due to something happening that increased the supply of oil to the world - and now the party is over.
While I don’t necessarily subscribe to the Peak Oil theory (I don’t not subscribe to it, I just don’t know enough to have a real opinion on it) it seems reasonable to believe that international politics in oil producing countries coupled with increasing world usage of oil is going to keep the price high. This should have a negative effect on suburban growth. Which is great news, in my book.
The vertical farm project is also really interesting. By putting farms directly where everyone already is, you cut off significant shipping costs (in terms of money and pollution). They claim that it will make crops more regular, since they’ll all be in controlled environments they won’t be subject to the whims of nature (or less subject at least) and with fancy pants water reclamation projects, apparently they’ll make very efficient use of water supplies. And I’ll be able to get really fresh strawberries year round, don’t discount fresh strawberries.
I don’t know if any of this is true or happening, but it was two pieces looking at the same sort of problem and I’m happy to forecast the end of suburbia. It also helps that at a young age I used to play the Traveller sci-fi roleplaying game wherein I was introduced to the idea of an arcology and I completely dug it and have since been waiting for it to happen.
June 27th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
If you’re interested in this myth of peak oil theory, I’d recommend Thomas Gold’s book “The Deep Hot Biosphere”. Basically the premise is that fossil fuels are not made from fossils at all, but rather a natural part of the biosphere, and are the output of bacteria that live in the first 1-5 miles of the earths surface crust. There’s plenty of evidence for this in the book, the fact that many of the large fields seem to be refilling etc..
This is otherwise known as the “abiogenic petrolium origin” theory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
June 28th, 2007 at 7:28 am
Yeah, I was reading about that (because of you) some months ago - pretty interesting stuff. It’d certainly be interesting to see what happens if that were true! Of course even if it’s true it may be that we consumer oil faster than those little bacteria can pump it out…