The Future. Shades of the Past - Changing the Structure of Society

The Long Emergency! James Howard Kunstler (2005) has written about our possible recovery from the threat of the suburbia syndrome. The American dream following the second world war was to escape from the city, hence creating urban sprawl. The strategy? Concentration of services, Long commutes to work. Bigger, centralized schools and hospitals. All based on abundant and cheap oil. The author contends this cannot continue as oil supplies diminish. The future societal organization will have to be a return to our origins. Smaller self contained communities, i.e. towns and villages surrounded by rural lands to minimize shipping distances for delivery of food to consumers. People will have to live within walking or cycling distance from facilities. Shades of Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful" of 3 or 4 decades ago.

I was amused some years ago to visit the vast city of London. It wasn't a city! It was an assortment of contiguous boroughs. I found myself walking up Putney High Street. Locals belonging to that community could walk to small markets, bakeries, clothing stores, banks, etc. It was noted in The Long Emergency that European cities had by far the greatest chance of surviving through the decline of oil. North American megalopolis will suffer the most.

Once established, major urban centres will be the most difficult to adapt. But not impossible. Curitiba, Brazil, as described in "Natural Capitalism" ( Hawken, Lovins and Lovins. 1999) is a fascinating example of what can be done. The mayor, Jamie Lerner saw the 'handwriting on the wall' and decided to completely restructure the city. Work started on a Friday evening after the urbanites had left their offices and headed for home, and continued for 48 hours. City employees were required to return to work, to create the transformation. Downtown streets were torn up and replaced with cobblestones, converting them to pedestrian malls. Gardens were built and planted with flowers. Trees were planted in boulevards. Pedestrian walkways replaced paved roads.

Monday morning when shop owners came to open up, they were horrified. There was talk of a lynching or at least suing the administration.. However by early afternoon, crowds of shoppers took them by complete surprise. By the end of the first day, the mayor's office was inundated by lobbiests urging an extension of the program. That it was good for business was an understatement.

There was no budget for building a subway system so the mayor directed the development of above ground rapid bus transportation. Buses were redesigned to simulate trains. Subwaylike stations were built resembling glass tubes. Fares were paid at the entrance so that on arrival the driver would open all doors of both bus and station letting passengers enter and leave at will. Platforms were built at bus-floor level so there were no stairs to slow the movement of traffic. A system of one way streets with designated bus lanes reduced commuting times by half. Parking lots on the outskirts of the city drastically reduced car traffic in the city core.

Another of the innovative initiatives was in the field of waste disposal. Slum areas of the city had narrow roads, usually cluttered with garbage, hence difficult access for municipal vehicles. Residents were required to take bags of garbage to designated centres where their wastes were purchased!! Two bags of garbage for one bag of vegetables. The latter were purchased from local farmers, a most beneficial market for the struggling rural community. Garbage was moved to a central location to be resorted, yielding enough useful material to be sold to a recycling industry hence paying for the vegetables.

Lerner reorganized the city by going against the grain. His goal was a city with vibrancy and diversity. He rejected the wisdom of urban planners, i.e. the destruction of people-oriented cities in order to rebuild them around cars. He realized that major urban problems were based on personal gas guzzlers, the cause of the long emergency in the first place.