Link to Article 1

Saving the Suburbs
By Paris Rutherford
Oct. 21, 2005

For decades, suburban development has been defined by uncontrolled growth, dependence on the automobile, and mile after mile of isolated single-use tracts of housing, retail and office buildings.

Today, several important trends are finally challenging this development, and municipalities, developers and the public are looking toward suburban redevelopment as a solution to the woes of sprawl.

The first driver is the changing face of retail. Consumers no longer seek the regional malls of the past: large enclosed centers surround by acres of parking. Instead, they are looking for shopping experiences that re-knit them into the social fabric - town centers with public spaces, see-and-be-seen hubs of entertainment and activity, and well-integrated shops that serve as a logical extension of their everyday lives.

Next: the rebirth of cities. Because of massive downtown revitalization efforts around the country over the past ten years, consumers are now aware of the benefits of city living. Empty nesters and young adults alike are moving back to cities, investing heavily in the revitalized, connected, vibrant urban neighborhoods their parents once fled in search of suburban tranquility.

Additionally, as the world grows smaller and technology larger, consumers are more educated about their options and have higher expectations about their quality of life than ever before. As a result, suburbanites are now demanding the same positive development their urban counterparts are enjoying around the world.

Finally, the suburbs are growing exponentially. Immigrant populations - both highly educated and skilled, and uneducated and unskilled - are flooding the areas surrounding first and second-tier cities.

This influx of people, particularly those with different social, healthcare and educational needs than native-born Americans, has the power to spur more negative development to meet housing and employment demands (see sidebar:The New American Dream ). If not addressed quickly, the negative effects of sprawl will continue to grow unchecked as more and more greenfield space is consumed.

With all of these new market demands in place, the solution seems clear: Reinvent suburbs to be human-scaled places that link live, work and play, and promote meaningful development that improves the overall quality of life. But this challenge is difficult for even the most enterprising town leaders and developers.

Though it is changing slowly, there's still a prevailing sense of NIMBYism among suburban residents. Because of prior development, assembling a large tract of land from disparate landowners is virtually impossible in some places. And zoning, though changing in some areas (see sidebar - The Answer to Zoning Troubles?), still poses numerous challenges to developers.

At the end of the day, success builds on success. Well-planned, mixed-use developments like Addison Circle in Texas and Downtown Brea in California are proving that suburban reinvention is possible.

Not only that, but municipalities can implement measures now to foster their success in the future. Taking advantage of the changing market demand requires thoughtful, sensitive and smart redevelopment strategy.

To that end, here are eight steps toward saving our suburbs:

Emphasize the centre of town instead of the "Town Centre."

From the regional mall emerged the town center: an attempt by developers to capture traditional downtown design by turning malls inside out. Today's "town center" is no longer achieved with big-box retailers opening onto surface parking or open-air walkways between stores. Today's town center is actually the center of town. It not only forges integral links to shoppers, but also to where they live, work and play.

Look at the Bigger Picture.

Great places need great planning. In order to promote the long-term use of a site, urban design is essential to success. With a planner's perspective, developers and designers see the bigger picture of a development - not only the buildings, but also the spaces between the buildings; not only the spaces, but also the hierarchy of those spaces; not only the neighborhood, but how the neighborhood expresses a unique identity.

Understand scale.

A critical component of any successful urban-style development is scale. Making integral connections to pedestrians means understanding how buildings and spaces interact with them. From the neighborhood to the town center, this relationship must be considered-and design must provide activity at every level.

Engage the public realm.

To capture the vitality and identity needed to promote a vibrant suburban center, well-scaled public spaces must accompany any development, providing the connective tissue among uses. Sidewalks and streets that engage passersby, public places that encourage social interaction and provide a showcase for events, and architectural and landscaping features that celebrate community all help to create a welcoming environment.

Create a strong identity.

Architecture doesn't have to be iconic, but in order to create a viable suburban center it must make a statement about its environment. For too long, suburbs have looked very similar, lacking any distinguishing characteristics from one another. Tomorrow's suburbs will be infused with the local character that makes the world's best places stand out in people's minds.

Link to transit.

Effective community design acknowledges two important trends: Transportation drives design, and the automobile no longer reigns supreme. Today's planners and designers are finding the value of building garden suburbs around mass transit, reconfiguring traditional cul-de-sac subdivisions into grid-like networks of streets, and fostering connections both inside and outside of the community with well-integrated transit stations.

Mix uses.

Mutually supporting synergistic uses generate higher total revenue than the sum of their parts. With carefully selected components, people on different schedules visit common uses at different times for different reasons, creating a dynamic environment around the clock.

Focus on ongoing regeneration.

Farsighted communities undergoing revitalization create systems of proactive public initiatives designed to combat negative effects of disinterest down the road. Communities need to constantly re-invent themselves, responding to shifting demographics and changes in population bases.

Paris Rutherford IV, AICP is the Vice President of Planning and Urban Design at RTKL Associates, an architecture firm based on New Urbanist principles.

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Link to Article 2

Suburbia Project: The Responses
By Ryan McGreal
Oct. 21, 2005

It appears that very, very few people are asking tough questions about the future of suburbia. Most of the people who are thinking about it are stuck on smart growth and new urbanism as viable solutions. While I support the principles of smart growth and new urbanism, they're not going to be anywhere near enough on their own to get our society through the coming storm.

For one thing, they come several decades too late to transform much of our built environment into something more sustainable. In Ontario, for example, the area of land under cultivation dipped below the supply of "dependable" farmland during the 1990s and continues to lose out to sprawl, meaning more of our agriculture rests on marginal land that requires greater inputs of fossil fuel-based fertilizers and water and is more susceptible to failure.

Among those who have given the issue some thought and agreed to share their ideas with us, responses have ranged from the grim ("I think what we'll see is that the suburbs will become, to some extent, salvage yards") to the glib ("I think the answer is obvious: suburban infill. Think discovered spaces.") and much in between.

Read the Responses

• The Psychology of Previous Investment, by James Howard Kunstler: The conditions of the permanent global energy crisis we face will create a lot of economic losers, and they are going to be very angry over the loss of their entitlements.
• Ripping up Asphalt and Planting Gardens, by Derrick Jensen: This culture is killing the planet. It must be stopped. We evidently do not have the courage to stop it ourselves. The natural world will stop it for us.
• The Primacy of Ecology, by Richard Register: Nature and agriculture must work its way back into what presently is a massive, disastrous design mistake fueled by weakness, laziness, greed on ego as well as gasoline.
• The Simpler Way, by Ted Trainer: Above all, the basic feature of the new suburbs and towns must be their highly self-sufficient local economies.
• Stop Catering to Cars, by Al Cormier: Al Cormier lists a number of strategies for municipal and/or provincial governments to help suburbs prepare for the end of cheap energy.
• Self-Reliant Suburbs, by Dan Chiras: The suburbs could be the raw material for a sustainable revolution.
• Retrofitting the Suburbs for Sustainability, by David Holmgren: As we in Australia take the first hesitant steps beyond 'rugged individualism' and begin to re-learn the skills needed to govern ourselves in community, the private-within-commons system tends to sit more comfortably with many.
• Saving the Suburbs, by Paris Rutherford: The challenge of reinventing the suburbs is difficult for even the most enterprising town leaders.

James Howard Kunstler Kunstler was one of the first people I contacted, having recently finished reading his book The Long Emergency [Read the RTH review]. RTH emailed him asking how he thinks people can make the suburbs livable after the end of cheap energy.

As an adjunct to his response, Kunstler observed, "I don't think you can have a meaningful discussion about the future of suburbia without allowing for the possibility of substantial failure." (We subsequently expanded the original question from 'how' to 'whether and how'.)

Needless to say, Kunstler allows for the possibility of substantial failure. Kunstler's pessimism may yet turn out to be justified, but it seems to reflect a certain paucity of imagination from so insightful a thinker. It's also a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I had hoped Kunstler would turn his creative, incisive mind to the question of how people might try to leverage the existing stock of sprawl building to make it livable without cheap fuel. Instead, he surmised that "the suburbs will become, to some extent, salvage yards", and suggested I was caught in a "psychology of previous investment", unable to let go of an infrastructure into which we have poured so much collective wealth.

I wasn't asking him to think about how we might go on living today's sprawl lifestyle, but rather whether and how we might create a new lifestyle with the physical remains of sprawl, which aren't going away any time soon. This is a crucial distinction, and one that some recipients didn't understand at first: we're not advocating ways to continue building and living in sprawl, but seeking ideas on whether and how we might transform our existing sprawl built environment into something more sustainable without the benefit of abundant, cheap energy.

I don't think we're going to have the luxury of writing the suburbs off as a bad idea and wiping the slate clean, as we have written off bad ideas in the past. The mix of economic and technological factors that created the suburbs will probably not exist for much longer. However, the built environment itself will endure for long after it has outlasted the circumstances that gave rise to it. The houses are cheaply built, but they're not going to decay into forest by themselves, at least not for many decades.

It's not the psychological burden of suburbia that worries me, but the physical burden. The large-scale demolitions that would be required to eliminate the suburbs will no longer be possible without energy to operate the demolition machines. That leaves us with a quandary: the suburbs are badly suited for sustainable living, but they won't go away on their own.

Derrick Jensen also believes our sprawl civilization is doomed, but unlike Kunstler, he welcomes it and advocates direct citizen action to hasten its inevitable destruction. The noted philosopher and activist wrote, "I don't see declining oil extraction as a problem. I see it as a wonderful and necessary thing I wish would have happened a long time ago."

Jensen advocates "ripping up asphalt in vacant parking lots to convert them to neighborhood gardens, teaching people how to identify local edible plants, even in the city (especially in the city) so these people won't starve when the proverbial shit hits the fan and they can no longer head off to Albertson’s for groceries."

He doesn't believe cities can ever be sustainable, because "all cities require the importation of resources" meaning they cannot supply their own needs internally. By contrast, Richard Register, author of Ecocities: Building Cities in Balance with Nature [read an excerpt on RTH], believes cities can function sustainably and enrich human life if they are designed according to ecological principles. In his response, he wrote:

Like gasses thrown into vast space by a supernova (gasoline exploding in car engines) the uniform film of suburbia and the metropolis has to condense into discrete points of high complexity and miniaturization, which means small cities and compact towns and villages with nature and agriculture woking its way back into what presently is a massive, disastrous design mistake fueled by weakness, laziness, greed on ego as well as gasoline.

Register agrees that a city that must import much of what it needs is "unnatural", but argues that cities could produce all or most of what their residents need sustainably by organizing around organic food production, building, using, re-using, and re-combining, and taking advantage of the various economies in energy flow-through and innovation that accrue to proximity and cooperation among people with complementary skills.

In Ecocities, Register describes what he calls "complexification/­miniaturization/­quickening", by which he means cities draw numerous small elements together, which combine and recombine into complex relationships that generate novel elements. He draws the analogy between city development and biological evolution, treating cities as large and very complex organisms.

Ted Trainer, a Professor in the school of Social Work at the University of New South Wales, also agrees that our current way of life is doomed. Trainer argues that sustainable suburbs and towns must be self-sufficient. "These settlements and the space close to them must produce most of the things their people need, from local labour, soils, skills and resources, dramatically reducing the need for travel, transport and trade."

Trainer places a similar emphasis on the need for a wide variety of small-scale production facilities, "including little farms, firms, fish tanks, ponds, forests, workshops, stores, bamboo clumps, herb patches", rather than the monoculture and comparative advantage that characterize globalized production. "There must be many neighbourhood workshops. Most food will come from home gardens, community gardens, small farms in and close to where we live, and especially from the commons, e.g., the orchards producing fruit and nuts."

Like Jensen and Register, Trainer suggests that a future without the destructiveness of the global, fossil-fuel based economy could be much more humane and fulfilling. "These neighbourhoods would be very leisure rich, reducing the demand for resource-expensive leisure activity. There would therefore be high levels of interaction, interdependence, mutual assistance and community. There would be much participation."

The most specific, detailed responses we received were from Al Cormier, Dan Chiras, and David Holmgren.

Al Cormier is the president and CEO of the Centre for Sustainable Transportation, based in Mississauga, Ontario. His response laid out a number of civic regulatory and service delivery changes intended to a) make non-car based transportation cheaper and more accessible, b) remove the subsidies and incentives for car-based transporation, and c) encourage building developments that reduce energy consumption and encourage accessibility without cars.

Cormier believes that the right regulatory environment, coupled with the incentive of high energy prices, will allow and encourage suburban residents to densify, mix uses, and achieve more efficient transportation. He also exploits spare road capacity, idle oil era buildings (e.g. service stations), and opportunities in public buildings that are currently used only part of the day.

Dan Chiras is the co-author, with Dave Wann, of Superbia! 31 Ways to Create Sustainable Suburbs, one of a small handful of books that examine the prospects for suburban development. His essay offers plenty of great ideas for specific things suburban residents can do to make their environment more neighbourly and habitable.

His suggestions all turn on individual action, requiring not only that suburban residents become educated about their options, but also that they manage to find ways to cooperate with each other voluntarily and achieve consensus within individual neighbourhoods rather than squabbling over declining resources. This is problematic, and Chiras acknowledges as much when he writes, "If neighbors can be encouraged to work together, the sky's the limit. If they enter into a frightening me vs. them mentality, all hell could break loose."

David Holmgren is an Australian environmentalist and co-originator, with Bill Mollison, of the Permaculture concept. He had already written a detailed essay on retrofitting the suburbs before we contacted him, and he kindly agreed to let us reproduce it for this report. His essay focusses on applying the various Permaculture concepts to suburban development, outlining how sprawl dwellers can take steps toward obtaining fresh water, producing their own food, composting (and hence re-using) waste, reviving local barter, and so on.

Like Chiras, his suggestions apply to individual action more than government fiat. "The bottom line here is that we do not need to wait for policies to change. We can choose today to do this - to create our own small neighbourhoods."

Only one architecture firm responded to our call for submissions. Paris Rutherford, Vice President of Planning and Urban Design at New Urbanist architecture firm RTKL Associates, send us a copy of an existing essay identifying four "trends" that are challenging sprawl: consumer preference for Main Street style retail over enclosed malls, downtown reinvestment, home-buyers better educated about housing options, and growth pressure on suburbs from the vast influx of recent immigrants.

This is consistent with what McMaster Univerisity Professor Richard Harris explained in his interview with Trevor Shaw in this issue: "Builders respond to consumers. Most consumers respond to market forces (ie. prices), and not to ethical principles."

Within these constraints, the RTKL essay does a good job of arguing in defense of New Urbanist principles in community design, but it fails to acknowledge energy issues as a potential problem. Certainly, Rutherford's recommendations are a step in the right direction, but they ultimately represent conventional thinking about what is likely to be a major discontinuity in this continent's economic development.

A few other people responded briefly to our requests. Their responses follow.

David Sucher, author of City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village, believes the answer is as simple as infill. "I think the answer is obvious: suburban infill. Think discovered spaces. [his emphasis]" This seems to suggest Sucher is not terribly concerned about declining fossil fuel energy availability, which he also indicated a couple of years ago on his blog.

Steve Raney, a transportation consultant in California, has already come up with a similar project - how to create efficient, livable suburbs - and he wrote his clever essay, Efficient Suburbs 2020 Vision, as a retrospective narrated by a suburban resident in 2020.

Ilja Green, who is studying spatial analysis at McMaster University, wrote:

I've lived in the Netherlands for 12 years and will be going to Mac for a diploma in spatial analysis this fall. Holland has been battling overpopulation, sprawl, immigration and emigration and yes, high oil prices for years. The biggest difference I've seen between them and 'us' is size. Smaller cars, smaller roads, and fewer parking spaces (to name a few) force people to buy more efficient cars or choose alternative methods of transportation. Although public transportation is good to the outside regions, it is the core that makes or breaks the city. Further, I think a continuous bike network connecting the core to the outside regions would be a great idea. The advantages of bikes over cars are too numerous to list, but what an excellent alternative to the car particularly in this time of peak oil production.

Joel Hirschhorn, author of Sprawl Kills, wrote:

I see the need for creating new mixed-use communities in suburban locations that are higher density, use less land, greatly reduce automobile dependency, encourage routine physical activity in a pedestrian friendly environment (lots of greenspace); the checklist in my book is designed to help people find such places. Of course, to get more of these places we must address sprawl politics that distort the marketplace in favor of continuing sprawl. Second, we need smart growth style revitalization of older, inner ring suburbs and cities to provide housing for the many who really do want to live in very urban places, especially aging baby boomers and singles.

I responded:

I agree with your assessment on what needs to be done for new housing development as well as older downtown suburbs. However, my question is whether and how can we retrofit the low-density sprawl that's already here into sustainable neighbourhoods without massive infusions of cheap energy for demolitions and mega-projects.

He, in turn, responded:

That question of retrofitting existing sprawl areas has no good answer. You really can't expect to make them mixed-use, walkable and less car-dependent; we're stuck with them, but better to have already built sprawl available for those who want that option than to keep building new ones and few alternatives for all the people who don't want sprawl.

So there you have it: a range of responses from grim fatalism to blithe dismissal, and plenty between. A project like this can only scratch the surface of the fate of our gargantuan endowment of sprawl development. Consider it an introduction: the start of what we feel will be a critically important debate in coming years, as the energy foundation of a continent-wide - and rapidly globalizing - living arrangement begins to crumble. Over the next few months, we hope to publish more essays that continue the discussion.

We would like to thank and credit these few thinkers, as well as others not represented here, for attempting to grapple with the issues at all. Their ideas and dedication will become ever more important as city after city faces choices on how to proceed: into decay and degeneration; into jealousy and seige mentality; or into a bright future of sustainable living.

Ryan lives in Hamilton with his family and works as an analyst, web application developer, writer and journal editor. He is the editor of Raise the Hammer. Ryan also helps to edit Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness, writes occasionally for CanadianContent.Net, and maintains a personal website.

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Link to Article 3

Retrofitting the Suburbs for Sustainability
By David Holmgren
Oct. 21, 2005

The "Suburban Dream"

The suburbs of our Australian cities have, in the main, become sterile wastelands, lacking in any true spirit of community, impoverished of local resources, and filled with fearful people whose daily efforts are focussed elsewhere. What has happened to the Australian "suburban dream"?

To find the foundation of the so-called 'suburban dream' and the reasons why it has proved illusory, we need to look back to the post World War II economic boom of the 1950s. At that time, Australia was riding high on the sheep's back, with wool prices around $2.40 [Australian dollars] per kg, and there was also cheap and abundant fossil fuel and timber.

Furthermore, the government of the period provided widespread war-service housing, low-interest loans, and substantial public infrastructure such as roads and utilities to facilitate suburban growth.

The typical 'baby-boom' family of the 1950s lived on a single income of around $50-$100 per week, with a housewife and three children at home. These home owners, who had grown up through the "Great Depression" and wartime hardships, had an ethos of proud self-reliance and domestic frugality, reinforced by their wartime experiences.

Many suburban 'back yards' had an actively worked vegetable garden and one to a few productive fruit trees. Produce swapping and home preserving of seasonal surpluses were common. And this was also the heyday of several great consumer icons - the FJ Holden car, the Victa lawnmower, and the Hills Hoist clothesline.

But there were problems with the suburban dream and the resulting rush of young families to "nappy valleys" on the city fringes, notably "urban sprawl". As the suburbs spread, they displaced important agricultural activities such as the market gardening and dairy farming that formerly provided fresh foods with minimal need for transport.

Not only did public infrastructure become increasingly poorly used, but the disproportionate rush to build roads and sell more Australian cars led to a general decline in the use of public transport - leading eventually to the phenomenon we see today, that our suburbs are designed for cars not people.

Along with "sprawl" has developed an increasingly dysfunctional economic situation. We see speculative inflation of land values, capital invested unproductively, declining household (non-monetary) production of food and "backyard industry", and a massive rise of consumer addiction based on rising household debt.

Large areas of our cities have become "dormitory suburbs". The average household size is declining while ever-larger homes are increasingly empty during the working day. Their blind windows look out onto streets empty of people (but all too often filled with cars). There is an alienating lack of community resulting, ultimately, in increased crime and fear.

Trying to Adjust

The conventional responses to this situation are familiar to us all. The first is a change of planning regulations to encourage increasing density, promoting smaller housing blocks in new developments, dual occupancy infill development, and medium-density redevelopment of older areas.

Residents themselves have responded independently in various ways through their lifestyles. The renovation obsession is frequently directed at producing more high-value house space at the expense of the 'back yard'. Then there is a mobile lifestyle and semi-abandonment of home, when eating out and leisure activities elsewhere compound the daily absence during work hours.

There is also the move to get rid of garden maintenance and commuting by moving to inner-city apartment living; and, at the other end of the scale is the "super-suburb" response of moving to a rural-residential or hobby-farm property beyond the new suburban fringe.

In recent years, as we have become more aware of the negative effects of our high-impact lifestyles, a number of environmental responses have also been introduced - such as building insulation, energy-efficiency requirements, improvements to public transport, conservation of urban green space, and more water-sensitive urban design.

Permaculture Principles

We have barely scratched the surface, however, of the profound improvements that the application of permaculture principles and strategies could deliver for the sustainability and livability of today's suburbs - for example:

Food security based on gardening: Food security through retention of horticultural production within and close to cities, has barely been on the agenda, while home gardening is largely ignored as irrelevant to the sustainability debate.

For many of today's urban residents, where food comes from beyond the supermarket is barely on their radar. We are still fixated on the high-density European-style city that gets its food from somewhere else. Most are unaware of different patterns of urban living such as those of Japan, China and other Asian countries where cities have traditionally contained interspersed gardens and rice paddies.

If food is produced in distant places, its supply is more vulnerable to risks (such as increased transport costs) that we cannot control. For urban residents aware of the fragility of the food supply system, home gardening is a practical activity that can provide much of the fresh food of a family, and also bias the diet away from over-consumption of animal protein and towards vegetables and fruit.

Even when the level of production is small, the seasonal garden maintains the skills necessary to produce food and passes those skills on to the next generation.

Better health through a culture of home food consumption: Consumption of genuinely fresh fruits and vegetables from a local garden can underpin good health and combat the current obesity epidemic. In the same way that wood warms you twice - once when you split it and once when you burn it - garden produce keeps you healthy when you grow it and also when you consume it.

Economy through home food production and food preservation: Growing food at home and preserving seasonal surpluses bypasses the so-called "value-adding" processes of the commercial food chains, and means food is much less expensive - a principle readily understood by families of the Great Depression and WWII years.

Firewood for sustainable and ethical energy: The permaculture strategy of burning waste wood from landscaping and building for space heating, water heating and cooking allows urban residents to be more energy self reliant, while keeping a valuable resource from going to landfill (to generate greenhouse-intensive methane) or into inefficient, noisy, fossil-fuel-driven chippers and mulchers.

How many of us realise that our cities are actually big forests? The expanding areas of new plantations and natural regeneration within or near cities all need continuous thinning to reduce fire hazard and improve timber and ecological values.

With careful management and better eduction, there is much valuable wood that could be saved for fuel. Wood has a high energy density, is greenhouse-gas neutral, and can readily be made available as smokeless charcoal for city use. With maximum pollution occurring through smoke emission right at the point of use (cf. distant coal-fired power stations), there is a useful negative feedback that controls user behaviour.

Passive solar design combined with thermally efficient natural materials: Building with rammed earth, mud brick, recycled timber and salvaged joinery, for example, greatly reduces the embodied energy of a dwelling while providing 'character' to designs and thermal mass to control temperature fluctualtions. This is in contrast to the conventional regulatory emphasis on energy efficiency through insulation alone. Unfortunately, this emphasis often leads to suppression of real innovation even while it "raises the floor" for lowest performance.

Retrofitting attached greenhouses to existing homes: An attached greenhouse can help capture warmth from the sun while extending the garden growing season.

Water harvesting and natural wastewater treatment: In many coastal areas of Australia (where the greatest proportion of us live), the rain that falls on the roof should, if used innovatively, be sufficient for at least the majority of home uses, including gardening. Rainwater harvesting can be supplemented by treatment of greywater (from the bathroom, laundry, and kitchen) e.g., through, gravel reed beds, for subsequent use in the garden.

Even blackwater (from the toilet) can be treated and re-used on site in some circumstances, or a waterless composting toilet can be installed to ensure water goes to more productive uses. Closing the nutrient cycle, from human waste to fertile, food-producing soil is, in the longer term, one of the most critical factors in the sustainability of urban populations.

Animals in productive garden ecosystems: Hens and ducks are excellent components of a sustainable suburban garden system and can significantly expand the range and value of foods produced at home. They deal with various types of food waste and pests such as insects and slugs, while their manure adds natural fertiliser to the soil.

Reclaiming the streets: Making greater use of our public space - most notably our streets for walking and cycling - reduces the costs of transport, enhances knowledge of the local area, and contributes to better community.

The more we expand these uses, the more the destructive uses of public space (such as excessive car traffic and vandalism) are gradually displaced. It is high time residents reclaimed their suburban streets for people. They should again be available for children to play and safely learn their cycling skills.

Creative recycling: Making creative use of discarded goods and wastes is a classic permaculture strategy that is far more innovative and productive than most industrial recycling systems, such as smashing and melting down bottles.

My own 16-year-old son, for example, built himself a fully functional recumbent bicycle from "rubbish". We have a shortage of innovative skills, not materials. Creative re-use and re-manufacture could greatly extend the lifecycle of many consumer goods.

Creative recycling: Making creative use of discarded goods and wastes is a classic permaculture strategy that is far more innovative and productive than most industrial recycling systems, such as smashing and melting down bottles.

My own 16-year-old son, for example, built himself a fully functional recumbent bicycle from "rubbish". We have a shortage of innovative skills, not materials. Creative re-use and re-manufacture could greatly extend the lifecycle of many consumer goods.

City farms and community gardens: Cooperative gardening and farming of city open spaces allows these productive activities to move beyond backyard scale, opening up a further range of possibilities for food production and community engagement.

New ways of trading: Locally based trading systems retain the energy of participants within the local community, rather than draining it away to some different location. LETS systems are a good example, some of which may also have associated local currency or tokens for ease of exchange. Local exchange systems allow citizens to wrest back some control of their economic wellbeing from the increasingly unstable, national and global monetary systems.

New ways of sharing land: Traditionally, Australia has acknowledged only two forms of land ownership - fully private and fully public. Recently, however, there has emerged a new option - that of commonly owned land - providing new opportunities for community formation and cultural innovation.

Eco-villages and co-housing schemes are beginning to appear which combine 'ecological' building with common infrastructure and community governance. The actual housing lots and dwellings in the scheme can be part of the 'commons', or privately owned within a broader common title.

As we in Australia take the first hesitant steps beyond "rugged individualism" and begin to re-learn the skills needed to govern ourselves in community, the private-within-commons system tends to sit more comfortably with many.

Creative Descent

The importance of the above options becomes clear when we ask the question "What if energy availability declines?" Beyond the abundant availability of fossil fuels is an uncertain energy future that has been pictured in various scenarios that range from "techno-fantasy" (e.g., unlimited nuclear cold fusion with no unforseen negative impacts) - an absurdly optimistic scenario but frightening in its implications for humanity and the planet - to an "Atlantis-like" fate in which our culture "goes under".

Most of the sustainability debate is focused within the "green-tech stability" scenario in which we essentially maintain a steady (albeit somewhat reduced) level of energy usage by progressively moving to renewable sources such as wind, solar, tidal power, etc., as fossil fuel reserves are used up.

While permaculture strategies mesh nicely with many of those directed towards this generally accepted desirable future, permaculture in fact defines a creative response to a fourth scenario that I call "Earth Stewardship" - a "creative descent" in which we progressively reduce our energy demands to return eventually to living within the natural energy and production budget of the land we occupy. Elements of all these scenarios can be found in the wide-ranging viewpoints and arguments of today's "sustainability" debates.

In the Earth Stewardship "creative descent" scenario, which I consider to represent the only truly sustainable future, human society creatively descends the energy demand slope essentially as a 'mirror image' of the creative energy ascent that occurred between the onset of the industrial revolution and the present day.

The actual sustainable plateau is a long way down from current energy demands, but also a long way ahead in time. If we begin our journey now, there is time to use our familiarity with continuous change and creative innovation to avoid bringing on "Atlantis".

So, in an energy-descent future, what are the prospects close to home - here where we live in suburbia? Will it be the end of suburbia? What if we can no longer afford to commute to work by car? What if we are dependent on food and energy supplies that are transported long distances at increasing expense? What if the services and functionality of our communities decline further so that there is ever-diminishing support from local councils and police, for example?

There is a real and viable alternative to this seemingly alarming scenario - a retrofit of suburbia - a remodelling of local neighbourhoods and communities for the energy-descent future. The "refit manual" will bring together and integrate features such as:

• Home-based work, telecommuting, and cottage industries serving a local clientele;
• Extended families, lodgers and shared households;
• Recycling of storm water, waste water, and human waste;
• Soils of improved fertility, and the water supply and infrastructure for urban agriculture;
• City farms, cooperative gardening, Farmers' Markets, and Community Supported Agriculture schemes (CSAs). Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a scheme in which customers undertake to buy a regular box of in-season fruits, vegetables, eggs, etc. from one or more local producers, thus providing the latter with a secure income and the ability to diversify the types of produce they provide.

Let's paint a specific picture of how this might work. If we return briefly to the golden age of the suburban dream in the late 1950s, a birds-eye view of our suburban neighbourhood might have looked something like the image above, which shows four standard suburban blocks with productive backyards, including one supporting a small service enterprise.

If we move on in time and look at the same small neighbourhood in the 1990s, the image below shows the typical effects of affluence, aging and infill. The backyards are now all unproductive as aging original householders are no longer gardening or working at home.

The cottage industry workshop has been renovated as an addition to the house space, and one property has been sold for speculative investment and the backyard filled with a second dwelling. How can this decline in productivity be turned around?

Let's leap a few years ahead into the late 2000s and imagine what might now have been done with the same four properties. The catalyst has been the sale of the house second from left to an energetic young couple determined to "future-proof" themselves for the energy descent expected in their lifetime. Using permaculture principles, they have restructured their entire block, including its front garden, as an integrated food production system.

Seeing this exciting new development on the other side of the fence, the empty-nest baby boomers in the property third from left have aborted their migration to Queensland and restructured their home and lifestyles along lines compatible with the initiatives of their neighbours.

They have extended their home with an eco-addition and increased its occupancy with an additional family member plus a young boarder. The 1970s games room has been fitted with a solar PV array and returned to its original 'backyard-industry' purpose to house their son's small metal-working business.

The fence between the two properties has been removed to allow the land of both blocks to be farmed cooperatively for the benefit of all the occupants. Shared water management facilities, including rainwater collection and greywater treatment, have been implemented, and productive fruit trees have been planted on the nature strip in front of both houses.

The complementary design relationship between the two households is characterised by horticultural skill and youthful energy but not much capital on the left, and more capital and more interest in the built environment and social strategies of permaculture on the right.

Seeing all these successful communal activities going on next door, the property owners on the left- and right-hand ends of the row are now looking for ways to contribute. The elderly couple on the left need home help (an opportunity for one of the young mothers) in exchange for use of their extensive backyard to expand the cooperative CSA vegetable-box garden.

While the development and neighbours in the right may be slower and more difficult to connect, they have offered their unused back and front gardens to extend the farming system in return for a share of the produce, one of their teenagers is training to help in the metal-working enterprise, and their stormwater detention tank will shortly be refitted as part of the communal water management system. And so it grows...!

The bottom line here is that we do not need to wait for policies to change. We can choose today to do this - to create our own small neighbourhoods.

The Suburban Sprawl Advantage

'Suburban sprawl' in fact give us an advantage. Detached houses are easy to retrofit, and the space around them allows for solar access and space for food production. A water supply is already in place, our pampered, unproductive ornamental gardens have fertile soils and ready access to nutrients, and we live in ideal areas with mild climates, access to the sea, the city and inland country.

So what do we have to do to make it work? Basically, the answer is "Just do it!" Use whatever space is available and get producing. Involve the kids - and their friends. Make contact with neighbours and start to barter. Review your material needs and reduce consumption. Share your home - by bringing a family member back or taking in a lodger, for example.

Creatively and positively work around regulatory impediments, aiming to help change them in the longer term. Pay off your debts. Work from home. And above all, retrofit your home for your own sustainable future, not for speculative monetary gain.

In an energy-descent world, self-reliance represents real opportunities for early adopters of a permaculture life style:

• Rises in oil prices will flow through to all natural products (food, timber, etc);
• Higher commodity prices will be a stimulus for self-reliance and organic farming;
• Local products will be more competitive than imports;
• Repair, retrofitting, and recycling will all be more competitive than new replacement;
• There will be rising demand for permaculture as life-skills eduction; and
• There will be a resurgence of community life, ethics and values.

There are, however, some real hazards for the greater community in the energy-descent scenario. For example, perverse subsidies and "head-in-the-sand" policies could distort necessary market adjustments (e.g. the end of fuel tax combined with production subsidies to agribusiness).

There is a real danger that fascist-style politics could see minorities and those providing for themselves as being to blame for declining social conditions. Sudden economic and environmental shocks could conceivably lead to social collapse, removing even the security necessary for local food production.

We need to understand the energy-descent pathway ahead, act to ensure our own longer-term resource security, and keep ourselves informed about the viewpoints and approaches of the greater national and global communities around us.

Additional Resources

• Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas - http://www.peakoil.net
• The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies by Richard Heinberg. New Society Publishers 2003. ISBN: 0865714827 [Read the RTH review]
• Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability by David Holmgren. Holmgren Design Services 2002. ISBN: 0646418440
• Video Interview of David Holmgren by Adam Fenderson - http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/interviews/106
• Documentary Film: "The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream." http://www.endofsuburbia.com [Read the RTH review]

David Holmgren, co-originator with Bill Mollison of the Permaculture concept, is an innovative environmental design consultant based at Hepburn Springs in central Victoria, where he maintains one of Australia's best-known permaculture demonstration sites. David has written several books, conducted numerous workshops and courses on sustainable living, and developed several properties himself using permaculture principles. The following feature is adapted from a public lecture given at the Aldinga Arts EcoVillage in Adelaide in January 2005. You can check David's website: http://www.holmgren.com.au

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Link to Article 4

Violence Linked to Sprawl
By Douglas E. Morris
Nov. 28, 2005

American society is slowly waking up from the nightmare of suburban sprawl, and is starting to build places that have the potential for community to form.

However, similar to a drunk emerging from a binge, progress is sluggish, and a serious hangover remains.

Even so, some of the positive steps being taken include over 800 smart growth projects underway all over the country. Shopping malls are being converted into villages, public transit initiatives are being developed, and zoning codes all over the country are being changed to reflect the principles of New Urbanism.

All of these efforts along the path to livability deserve our recognition and applause. However, to have the impact needed to re-establish America's quality of life, they are not nearly enough.

Sprawl, aside from being a wasteland of neon signs, gridlock, and big box stores, has transformed America from the land of the free into the land of the frightened.

Today, along with dramatic increases loneliness, depression, and suicides, America's levels of violence have also skyrocketed.

Compared to other first-world nations, countries that are our peers legally, politically, and economically, but do not have sprawl, we are the only one suffering under an epidemic of violence. Our rates of murder, rape, and assault are astronomically higher than the rest of the world.

To better visualize this, let's compare the number of sexual assaults in the US with those in Europe's most violent nation, England. America had 102,560 sexual assaults in 1990, while England's number was only 3,391.

England has 60 million people and America has 280 million. If England had as many people as America and its sexual assault rate stayed the same, there would still be only 16,995 sexual assaults per year.

That's not even close to America's 102,560! With numbers like this it is no wonder women are afraid to walk around alone in our society.

Contrary to a Hollywood concocted image, America was not always such a dangerous place to live. Statistics clearly show that our rates of violence only started increasing after sprawl emerged.

Before sprawl, America was a safe, community-oriented place to live. Our cities were filled with safe neighborhoods and our suburbs were designed to be livable small towns.

Only after WW II, when we eliminated our communities by building the isolation and alienation of sprawl, has our country fallen apart.

To support this realization, let's looks at another statistic: assaults.

Sprawl emerged in 1945 and was firmly in place by the 1960s. Not so coincidentally, the aggravated-assault rate escalated from 60 per 100,000 in 1957 to 200 per 100,000 in 1965, then erupted to over 440 per 100,000 by the middle of 1990s.

As sprawl emerged, violence increased dramatically.

You may be wondering how the alienation and isolation of sprawl and the resulting lack of communities act as a breeding ground for violence.

FBI agent John Douglas has spent over twenty-five years tracking and studying violent human predators, and he asserts that more than any other factor, children who are predisposed towards violence need responsible adult role models so that they can develop into healthy, well-adjusted individuals.

Mr. Douglas and other criminologists and psychologists are certain that positive interactions with older members of society are the key to helping dissuade budding violent offenders from their predatory impulses.

However, if spending time with adult role models is what is needed to stop the development of violent offenders but a family breaks down or both parents are working, how is that going to happen in the alienating expanses of sprawl?

Before sprawl existed, children could depend on the whole community to be there for support, guidance, and direction in the absence of a parental figure.

There would usually be another adult role model to fill the void-a local shopkeeper, neighborhood policeman, or someone else from the small town or neighborhood community.

In sprawl and the urban blight it creates, such support is virtually non-existent. Regrettably, suburban sprawl has eliminated the places where children can spend time with responsible, caring, older members of society.

Without the adult supervision that was so common when we lived in genuine communities, many American children are left to their own devices, allowing those who are predisposed toward violent behavior to fall through the cracks in society and offering an opportunity for their "bad seed" to germinate and grow.

Grow it does as our rates of violence indicate.

We deserve better than sprawl and urban blight. We deserve to live in places where we can let our children explore the world around them without being afraid some sicko might snatch them.

We deserve to be able to walk our streets without worrying about being assaulted. We deserve well-designed communities that are more than just places on a map, but are also, more importantly, places in our hearts.

Douglas E. Morris is the author of five books, a magazine columnist, and an international entrepreneur who has lived for 14 years outside the US in a variety of safe, community-oriented urban areas in seven different countries. His newest book, Its a Sprawl World After All, has just ben published by New Society Publishers. Visit his website: http://www.ItsaSprawlWorld.com.

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Link to Article 5

Designing Livable Cities: An Interview With Donald Schmitt
By Ryan McGreal
Nov. 28, 2005

Donald Schmitt, a Principal of Diamond and Schmitt Architects Inc. (http://www.dsai.ca), specializes in academic projects that cross-fertilize disciplines, bring people into contact, and integrate smoothly into their surroundings.

His firm is dedicated to sustainability, designing projects that manage their own rainwater, reduce lighting costs, and less energy-dependent air conditioning through architecture and the strategic use of trees and other plants.

Among his many projects, Schmitt is designing the new McMaster University Innovation Park at the former Camco property on the northeast corner of Longwood Rd. S. and Aberdeen Ave.

On November 9, 2005, Schmitt delivered a presentation on Imagining Hamilton's Future for the Friends of Red Hill Valley's first annual Spirit of Red Hill lecture. His theme concerned ways that architecture can facilitate interactions among people and contribute to the fabric of city life.

Schmitt kindly agreed to an email interview to elaborate on some of the points he raised during his lecture.
The Interview

Ryan McGreal, Raise the Hammer (RTH): In your presentation on Wednesday, you described people as "gregarious", seeking and enjoying the company of others. Yet nearly all of the building in the past fifty years has been, well, anti-gregarious. If people love lively streets, how do you explain sprawl?

Donald Schmitt, Diamond + Schmitt Architects Inc (DS): Sprawl is first and foremost a product of those developments and purchases not having to pay the full cost of extended road, sewer and power infrastructure.

The taxpayers of the Province subsidize sprawl. If the consumer paid the full cost of sprawl it would be curbed. In other words sprawl is the cheaper alternative. The taxpayer pays the balance.

RTH: During your presentation, I was reminded repeatedly of Jane Jacobs' seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She described the principles of urban streetlife over 40 years ago, but developments built according to those principles are still the exception. Why is that?

DS: The design of too many developments has been driven by marketing the image, not designing the community. I think people hunger after residential neighbourhoods which have the characteristics Jane Jacobs described in her books.

If developers followed those principles, their projects would only suffer the problems of success. Low interest rates have in recent years spurred lots of residential development. Good design will create a premium value on top of current sales prices. The evidence proves it.

RTH: Hamilton's advocates for a more sustainable city often ignore or neglect the suburbs. Is there any way advocates can reach out to suburban residents to explain how density and use mixing can improve quality of life?

DS: North American culture over the last 50 years focused on the convenient mobility of the automobile, the image of the single family house in a semi-rural landscape and individual consumerism.

What has been sacrificed is the community and support of neighbourhood, modest increases in density and a mix of uses combined with infill for additional residential units allow better use of existing service infrastructure investment and an expanded population. This will strengthen community and improve the quality of life.

The big hurdle still to overcome, however, will be to increase density to the point that transit is viable. This will reduce the isolation of teenagers and seniors. It will improve the quality of life for those families from whom the two car model is not sustainable.

RTH: What can be done to reverse the strongly-held notion among suburban residents that "density" connotes either the hypertrophied, gridlocked form of New York or the squalor and crushing poverty of Mumbai?

DS: Hamilton, with its population of 490,270, is in no imminent danger of becoming a world megalopolis!

However, a lively downtown as a great place to do business, to live, and to enjoy culture are what caused Paul Piggot to build the headquarters of his great construction enterprise downtown.

That's density. It's healthy, it's attractive and it builds community.

RTH: You are a strong advocate for two-way streets. Several years ago, a charette of Hamilton architects studying how to revitalize the city came to the same conclusion. What will two-way streets accomplish?

DS: Two way streets slow cars down. The environment on the sidewalk, particularly if they are widened with parallel parking and street trees becomes more protected from traffic and more conducive to window shopping, outdoor food and sidewalk life.

Pedestrians cross the street more safely and both sides of the street start to work together as a true retail strip.

RTH: If two-way streets are such a no-brainer, then why is there so much resistance?

DS: Perhaps it's simply a resistance to change, to the status quo. Clearly, however, while Hamilton's downtown is a quick, easy place to navigate in a car, it's not healthy in other respects.

In an era when Canadian downtowns in Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto are bursting with vitality, Hamilton has too many abandoned buildings, too many narrow sidewalks, too few trees on the street.

Take a couple of traffic lanes, widen the sidewalks, give more comfort to the pedestrian. If people linger, low rents will attract small businesses, small galleries, shops and cafes.

The energy of those small business people will begin to restore vitality to the street.

RTH: How can Hamilton accommodate those people who simply want to rush across the city as quickly as possible? Should the city even try?

DS: A city is the form for community life, for the exchange of ideas, for cultural activity and the production of goods and services. To flourish it needs an effective network of transit and streets to connect places.

The key is to create a network which links the fabric of the city, not a conduit which bypasses city life. Towns where the road network bypasses the centre literally have the life drawn out of them over time.

RTH: London, England has instituted stiff tolls for drivers entering the city. Paris, France plans to ban non-local cars entirely from a five square kilometre stretch of the Left Bank. Should Hamilton consider restricting car access downtown or even establishing a pedestrian-only area?

DS: London and Paris are enormous cities which, at their centre particularly, are very healthy. Their vitality has benefited from congestion which, over time, has made them more desirable. They are controlling congestion, lopping the top off the activity, not eliminating it.

Clearly, Hamilton has not approached the threshold of lively urban excitement that are the success of London and Paris. Hamilton has no need to restrict car access.

The pendulum needs to swing away from the dominance of the car and pedestrian showing a lively street, with greater emphasis given to the pedestrian. I certainly do not think that the pendulum should swing to the opposite extreme of pedestrian only environments, vehicles and pedestrians can and should co-exist in lively urban neighbourhoods.

RTH: Your firm takes sustainability seriously, finding ways for signature buildings to manage their own stormwater ecologically and regulate air temperature with less energy inputs. Why on earth isn't every architect and builder doing this?

DS: Our culture has come to the widely held realization in the last decade that our consumption of energy and resources is simply not sustainable at the rates to which we became accustomed. The many warnings of far sighted community thinkers and scientists did not register sufficiently.

Now, however, the crisis has registered and architects, engineers and the whole design profession is beginning to take sustainable design seriously. Our collective input can and will be enormous.

No doubt the innovations and new strategies that will emerge for green design will, over the next twenty years, represent a complete revolution in the built world. The future is very exciting.

RTH: Architecture is an extremely important part of city life, but most people know very little about it, leaving it to others to worry about. Do you see a value in better public education about architectural principles? If so, what's the best way to spread the word?

DS: It is very important that individuals and the community challenge architects and planners to build appropriately, to exercise common sense and to demonstrate how their design ideas will benefit the built environment.

To do so effectively, people don't need an education in architectural principles. They need to take an interest in the built world around them, they need to observe what works and what doesn't and they need to ask questions and engage in a debate with those who build the city.

Jane Jacobs is a great model for us all. She is not an architect or planner; she is a writer with keen powers of observation. She observed how people occupied neighbourhoods, what worked and what didn't, and she wrote about what she saw in a clear way, unencumbered by architectural jargon.

She is a great model of how to spread the word.

Donald Schmitt is an architect and principal of Diamond and Schmitt Architects Incorporated. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto Schools and the Faculty of Architecture, University of Toronto, where he was awarded the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada medal for design in his thesis year.

He was adjunct professor at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Toronto, from 1986 to 1993 and at the School of Architecture, Dalhousie University. He has also taught at the University of Texas, University of Pennsylvania, University of Waterloo, and University of British Columbia.

Donald's notable project include the Metro Central YMCA, Toronto, and the Earth Sciences Centre, University of Toronto, both recipients of the Governor General's Medal, Orchestra Hall, Detroit, and the Bahen Centre for Information Technology, University of Toronto.

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Link to Article 6

Peak Oil Scenario Planning
By Lakis Polycarpou
Dec. 14, 2005

For some reason, the idea of local governments preparing for peak oil - despite the fact that no one disputes that oil is a finite resource - has not taken hold.

As we creep ever further into the new millennium, it is becoming increasingly clear (the highly doubtful claims of "cornucopians" notwithstanding) that the age of oil will soon be ending.

Oil is a finite resource. Its production will, at some point, peak and begin to decline, and there are numerous indications that we are at or past that point.

The picture for natural gas is slightly more complex, but potentially more dire in the short-term, as gas supplies in North America and the U.K. are in decline, and gas is not easily shipped overseas.

What will become of suburbia, where most North Americans now live and depend on oil and natural gas for transportation, home heating, and a large percentage of electricity generation?

Peak oil experts and commentators paint visions of the future that range from mildly pessimistic to apocalyptic. But the truth is that no one knows exactly how much energy will be available at any given point in the depletion era, or how different regions and populations will respond.

Rather than engage in pointless debates about precisely what will happen, it makes far more sense-especially at the regional and local levels-to begin serious planning based on differing scenarios, with the awareness that changes could come in phases and that any model must adjust to reality as it unfolds.

As an example, one could project three hypothetical scenarios for a typical, middle-class suburb:

Best-Case Scenario

In the best-case scenario, the rapid adoption of efficiency measures, renewable energies and synthetic fuels (including biofuel, if it can be produced with a significant net energy gain) gives society a long lead-time to adjust to depletion, gradually reducing its energy consumption to a sustainable level.

A series of recessions causes serious economic hardship for many, but also reduces energy demand. Energy substitutions in the developing world (from heating oil to natural gas and coal, for example) keep transportation fuel affordable, if expensive, in the short- to middle-term. Enlightened national leadership combined with market forces reverses the trend toward sprawl.

Strategies

In this case, successful localities execute a long-term plan to stop sprawl and develop downtowns and main streets where they exist (or build them where they do not), and gradually shift toward a more sustainable (and sane) living arrangement, centered around relatively dense, walkable towns and neighborhoods connected by public transit with goods supplied by electric rail.

Policies to encourage local agriculture and the rebuilding of regional economies reverse globalization, saving energy. Some people notice a decline in perceived standard of living, but are compensated by the elimination of many economic distortions caused by the current globalization regime.

Middle Case Scenario

In the middle case, personal transportation in suburbia rapidly becomes unaffordable, and high oil prices spark either massive inflation or trigger a series of severe recessions.

Assuming policy makers use both the financial and legislative means available to avoid mass bankruptcies, suburbanites keep their houses, but find living in them increasingly difficult. Long commutes that cannot be accomplished through public transportation end.

Residents cut back drastically on consumption, bankrupting many chain merchants. Food is available, but very expensive, and there are regular spot shortages, leading to epidemics of hunger and malnutrition.

Home heating in cold climates becomes a serious problem; many families take periodic refuge in shelters. Work does not disappear, but jobs become increasingly scarce.

Strategies

In this case, suburbanites survive with an ad hoc combination of car share co-ops, efficient vehicle purchases, biking, telecommuting and local gardening. Whenever possible, people install wood or even coal-burning stoves for heating, along with solar panels.

Towns and cities do better if they focus on facilitating organic changes (by building or designating bike paths and rewriting zoning rules to provide maximum flexibility, for example) rather than resisting them.

In this scenario, the importance of electricity becomes paramount. The grid still works to an extent, but electricity prices escalate rapidly, and there are sporadic blackouts which make ordinary business difficult. Places where small-scale solar, wind or mini-hydroelectric power is available do much better.

Worst-Case Scenario

In the worst case, an economic crash causes mass bankruptcies. Collapse is not confined to one sector; everyone is affected. Global trade breaks down; nothing is available that's not produced locally.

National authorities take action, but are overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis; attempts to increase efficiency and develop alternatives come too late and accomplish too little. Gas rationing takes effect.

The food production chain also breaks down. In some areas, food supplies are so scarce that large numbers of people starve, while more successful regions soon find themselves overwhelmed by oil crash refugees.

Work as we know it vanishes, though trade and barter still exist.

Strategies

At the local or neighborhood level, communities do better by developing a collective mindset, setting up co-ops or other legal structures to keep loan defaulters afloat and living in their own homes.

This is in the interest of everyone; the alternative is either a rapid depopulation of neighborhoods-a neither safe nor economically sustainable outcome for those who remain-or an epidemic of illegal squatting, with former owners staying on in homes they have defaulted on but have not been evicted from.

In the final scenario, energy intensive technology disappears, but the importance of knowledge remains. Skills for growing food, making clothes, insulating buildings, and fixing household items become vital.

Preparation for the final scenario includes the establishment of seed-banks and knowledge centers to disseminate information on how to most efficiently grow food on available land, using Permaculture, Grow Biointensive, or similar organic methods.

For a small investment, local governments could also sponsor classes on wood and metal working and other forgotten skills. After the crash, residents in successful suburbs could be encouraged to set up "cottage" industries, perhaps through a system of microloans.

Conclusion

In all cases, a mindset of using existing infrastructure is less important than one of refusing to allow blight to take hold.

Abandoned strip malls, for example, should not be allowed to fester for years as decaying buildings; rather, they should be torn down and either returned to farmland or converted to higher-density, mixed-use neighborhoods.

Even with oil supplies in decline, it seems at least plausible that a great portion of the resources now spent building sprawl could be diverted to retrofitting and revitalizing suburbia.

If, instead of building more spread out, single use neighborhoods and strip-malls, we used our current building energy for infill development (using principles of density, walkability and mixed use currently associated with "New Urbanism" but known since Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961), we could begin generating an ever-more efficient economy, and perhaps stretch out the tail of oil depletion.

The highest priority, then, should be to stop current and future sprawl development.

Scenario planning is not a new concept, but for some reason the idea of local governments preparing for peak oil - despite the fact that no one disputes that oil is a finite resource - has not taken hold.

But if local governments are able to develop response plans for the relatively unlikely event of a terrorist attack, then is it too much to ask that they consider how to respond to the eventual certainty of oil and gas depletion?

Lakis Polycarpou writes about energy depletion and society on his blog at http://www.nea-polis.net. He lives in New York City with his wife and two children.