Choosing What Our Cities Will Look Like in a World Without Oil  

WorldChanging has a post on a Peter Newman talk about the future of cities in the post-peak world - Choosing What Our Cities Will Look Like in a World Without Oil.

As we draw nearer to reaching the point of Peak Oil, it benefits us to imagine what our cities will look like in a world without oil. Does this conjure up images of cities turned into urban farms just to produce enough food for us all? Do we devote all our energy to growing, bartering and trading the food we grow? Or will the city become divided, with the wealthy moving to the center while higher costs of living force lower-income families to the outer-ring suburbs, where access to goods, services and transport will be limited?

If we start now, we can choose what we want our cities to look like in the future. We can make them the resilient, sustainable centers of culture, justice, art and creativity that we hope they will become.

Author and Professor Peter Newman is asking us to imagine and then get to work building these urban centers. His book and talk, both titled Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change, ask audiences to honestly look at what will happen to our cities when we reach Peak Oil. During his 90 minute presentation last night at Seattle's City Hall, Newman explained to the full house how peak oil will soon change reality as we know it; and how if we choose to make it so, we can take this challenge as our opportunity to create a functional, just and sustainable world.

Picturing a future where we do nothing resulted in some frightening scenarios: ones where we are barely getting by and injustice is running rampant. But, as Newman explained, picturing a future in which we respond to the challenge by building resilient cities results in images of a flexible and supportive, flourishing society.
So, in 2001, under the direction of Seoul's Mayor Lee Myung-bak, a plan was developed to tear down the freeway and to restore the river. The project was completed in 2005 .

In order to build the new resilient city of the future, Newman said that “we need to stop building extra urban road capacity and urban scatter; we need to start building electric renewable cities with much greater localism in the economy and infrastructure.”

“We need both at the same time," Newman said. "Or they will undermine what we need to do together.”

Here are a few exceptional points, summarized from Newman's worldchanging presentation:

End Agglomeration Diseconomies

The freeway is a failed technology. Freeways don’t actually ultimately help people get where they want to go any faster; they simply scatter people and economies. Freeways fail as public spaces; as infrastructure, they are dinosaurs. Their impact on cities is not good for economics or people. So we should stop building them. We should instead organize and advocate for rail systems so we can reclaim and rehabilitate our open spaces. Car-dependent cities can begin to reclaim freeways by investing in rail transit and building up local economies around station hubs.

Density, Walkability and Affordable Housing

High quality, high rise developments in the city will increase walkability, and decrease the number of trips taken by car. These developments will function best if developers work in partnership with land use planners. To end the division and disagreements that high density development creates, we have to require all developments to allot 15 percent of space to social housing, and require 5 percent of the value of a development to go toward social infrastructure, like landscaped open-to-the-public space, public art, community centers, schools, arts facilities.

Complete Streets, Smart Grids

Cars won’t go away completely, even though the oil we currently use to power them will. The cars of the future will run on alternatively produced electricity. We can link the extra energy produced from solar and wind production systems to the batteries in our cars with Smart Grids. These energy linking systems help buildings and transportation power each other.

Eco-villages colonizing the fringe

Build eco-villages on the outskirts of the urban ring. Built with their own water, power and sewage systems, we can turn the crumbling suburbs into self sustaining eco-communities of the future.

What We Need to do Now

Newman gave vibrant examples of each of these ideas happening in cities all over the world, from Seoul to London, Copenhagen to Vancouver, B.C., these cities are proving that this is possible. All we need now, said Newman, is imagination, post oil strategies, partnerships and demonstrations, and above all HOPE!

Also at WorldChanging, Alex Steffen has a post on the disappointing choice Obama has made to head up the Department of Transportation - Ray LaHood and Changing our Thinking About Transportation.

Today, the U.S. Senate will hold a confirmation hearing on the president-elect's choice of Ray LaHood for Secretary of Transportation. No one expects that hearing to be anything but easy for LaHood. That's too bad, because it shows that when it comes to greening the stimulus, we're not only missing the forest for the trees, we're not even seeing the trees right.

In case you haven't been following the news, LaHood is a conservative Illinois Republican with little transportation expertise and almost no administrative experience, who has earned a LCV lifetime voting score on critical environmental issues of 27 percent, and who maintains deep financial connections to the very industries he's now supposed to regulate. He may be no worse than most of those who've lead the Department of Transportation, but his appointment is a profoundly uninspiring vote for business as usual at a time when we need change, and an strong indication that the administration doesn't get that energy policy, technological innovation, urban planning, environmental sustainability and transportation are all bound up together, and no solution to our problems can be had without tackling them all together.

LaHood's appointment is so disappointing to transportation advocates who've been waiting eight years for change, that they're boiling with indignant disbelief, branding him "an unbelievably disastrous pick," "Status quo we can believe in" and "same.gov" (a dig at the Obama transition site, change.gov). As one insider summed it up: "It's a real read-it-and-weep moment."

LaHood supporters point out that the president-elect promised to appoint Republicans, and LaHood is trusted by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Obama had to throw Republicans a bone somewhere, they argue: why not Transportation?

Because given the crises we face, the U.S. Department of Transportation is not a minor agency. This year it had a $58 billion budget and employed almost 60,000 people. What's more, the Secretary of Transportation will guide the spending of vast amounts of stimulus spending, oversee the auto industry bailout and be responsible for a raft of critical policy decisions that will dictate the shape of our cities and the choices we have for getting around for decades -- and thus indirectly our energy policies as well, since transportation is where much of our energy use goes. In fact, in an era of climate change, energy crisis and economic distress, Transportation may be one of the most important posts in the president's cabinet. ...

Since the economy is sagging so severely, some argue that much of the stimulus package needs to go to "shovel-ready" infrastructure: existing projects or plans that can be quickly completed and approved and undertaken. All those who have gotten rich off the status quo -- the Highway Lobby, suburban developers, state transportation agencies, even the Teamsters -- are saying that "shovel ready" can only mean "roads." They're wrong.

We're ready to run with all sorts of better alternatives. Transportation for America, a new national coalition of smart growth, transit and good government groups, has already put forward an alternative list of $33 billion worth of shovel-ready but environmentally-friendly transportation infrastructure projects, and is lobbying for $100 billion in total investment in transit and other climate-friendly solutions.

What's more, we should be more worried about spending the money right than spending it quickly: as Paul Krugman said in a recent column, "Why does the time frame have to be short? ...Right now the investment portion of the Obama plan is limited by a shortage of 'shovel ready' projects, projects ready to go on short notice. A lot more investment can be under way by late 2010 or 2011 if Mr. Obama gives the go-ahead now..."

So, while Transportation for America is doing critical work (their platform is well worth a read), their proposals do not go nearly far enough, when measured against our need for change or our opportunity to use this change to solve multiple problems at once by doing the right thing instead of the expedient thing.

This administration's combination of new politics and new funding sources is a one-time shot, and it's coming at a moment when we can't afford to lose another decade if we want to stave off climate change, make the U.S. energy independent, revitalize our communities and create the bright green economy of the future.

At this critical juncture, nothing could be a worse investment than building more highways. New highways are simply a catastrophic choice. Even highway expansion is a waste of money: you can't build your way out of a traffic jam. As you pave more lanes, more drivers crowd on to them -- for instance, after spending $15 billion on its Big Dig highway expansion Boston's traffic is worse, overall. Building more highways just means more people driving, more cars stuck in traffic, more people killed in accidents, and more pollution.

The last part -- pollution -- is critical. A highway-focused federal transportation agenda can't be reconciled with the incoming administration's promise to take on climate change. Building new highways to provide mobility is the transportation equivalent of building new coal plants to provide energy.

Transportation generates more than a quarter of U.S. greenhouse gases, according to the E.P.A.. A portion of that comes from moving freight around (mostly on highways), but more than 20 percent is personal transportation, and almost all of that is auto-related. Even if we actually get them (and, again, LaHood does not inspire confidence that the auto bailout will actually lead to green vehicles), driving cleaner cars on those proposed new freeways won't do much good, because many of greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere by our transportation system don't come out of the tailpipes of those cars: manufacturing, building highways and so on all contribute mightily to our climate problems. Auto dependence is in-and-of-itself a critical contributor to climate change. No technofix is available to change that and building new highways will only make it worse.

The alternative is not just transit, it's cities that work. There is a direct relationship between the kinds of places we live, the transportation choices we have, and how much we drive. We ought to be doing everything in our power to stop sprawl, grow compact communities, and make better transportation investments to help us leave our cars at home -- something we can only do if more of what we want is close at hand, and other transportation choices are convenient and cheap.

This one-time wave of funding will do one of two things: it will further entrench a broken system, or it will begin to build a new and better one. In the next six years, we'll either dump hundreds of billions of dollars into highways, roads and bridges or we'll begin to revitalize our communities and transform our economy. Sprawl or urban renaissance? That's ultimately the choice we have.

We need to insist that at least half of the stimulus goes to climate-friendly transportation projects that will create green jobs: a massive investment in light rail and other urban transit, commuter rail, inter-city high-speed trains, bike paths, pedestrian improvements (including, simply, sidewalks), support for the planning and development of transit-oriented communities and the deployment of new technologies to facilitate innovations like congestion pricing, dynamic parking and smarter commutes. These are the kinds of transportation infrastructure our kids will be glad we invested in, the kinds 21st century cities demand. Furthermore, we ought to insist that the first year's worth of "shovel-ready" auto-oriented projects be limited to much-needed repairs of existing infrastructure and demand that subsequent investments meet smart growth standards. We can be even more sure that our transportation dollars support compact development rather than sprawl by sending the money directly to cities, bypassing the state governments and their often corrupt and outdated bureaucracies.

Voters are already coming to understand that there's a link between climate change, land use and transportation. With effective leadership, I think we Americans are ready now to choose a new path forward: bright green, thriving cities instead of more boom-bust sprawl.

We need a Secretary of Transportation who sees the choice, can articulate it to the American people, and can lead the fight for change. Without that change, none of Obama's promises on climate, on cities, on energy independence or on green jobs can be fulfilled.

And to get that Secretary, we're going to need a citizen's movement that pushes the Obama administration and Congress to demand new transportation priorities in this stimulus package. That fight has barely even begun.

Tom Whipple's latest peak oil article at the FCNP is also looking at post peak suburbia and urban design - The Peak Oil Crisis: Renovating Suburbia.

ot everything about the suburbs will be a downside when the era of cheap fossil fuel comes to an end. Nearly all suburban dwellings have broad roofs and yards that are suitable for collecting some form of solar or in some places wind energy. In many cases, suburban yards are suitable for growing food or perhaps even raising poultry or other small livestock. Most have yards allowing for easy access to subsurface geothermal energy. They are clean and have adequate sources of water and a means to handle sewage. These are not inconsequential assets when trying to maintain large numbers of people in some form of civilization in the face of dwindling supplies of energy. There are already places in Asia that are facing life-threatening water and sanitation problems due to the lack of electricity to run the pumps.

For the immediate future, an unappreciated aspect of suburban homes is easy access to a source of electricity for recharging electric vehicles. Wiring of urban streets and parking areas for recharging plug-in electric cars will cost billions and likely take decades. This week's Detroit automobile show stands as a monument to the closing era of the internal combustion engine. Nearly every automobile manufacturer is showing some form of electric powered vehicle that should be available, for those that can still afford them, in three or four years.

Some, with good reason, doubt that there will be enough resources, energy, and money to replace the 250 million passenger cars and trucks that we have in America so that we can continue motoring with electricity rather than gasoline. These skeptics are probably right if one assumes that the motor vehicles of the future will be electric clones of the of the 3-6,000 pound behemoths that are clogging the roads today.

Transportation to, from and around suburbia ten or 20 years from now will have to be markedly different than today. While some will have plug-in electric cars, it is unlikely that electricity will continue to be cheap in an era of dwindling fossil fuel supplies, carbon caps and emission taxes. Wasting energy will become a thing of the past. Driving to work or the store in a 4,000 pound electric car will simply become too expensive for most. In place of today's ubiquitous automobile will be a variety of light electric vehicles, ranging from electric bicycles, tricycles, and scooters, to very small cars that will be inexpensive to produce, use minimal amounts of electric energy and provide much of the mobility that will be required for everyday life.

An important part of suburbia's future will be far more efficient systems for distributing goods and services than driving many miles to stores and shopping centers in 6,000 pound vehicles to pick up a few pounds of whatever is required. Suburbs need to be modified with the addition of numerous small neighborhood commercial centers so that people can walk, bicycle, or at most take a short light vehicle trip to obtain whatever goods and services they need. Existing housing could be converted into neighborhood centers so that neighborhood centers would not even have to look like stores. Neighborhood centers which would be transfer places for mail, packages, food orders could provide very efficient ways to move essential goods to and from suburban residences without requiring lengthy energy consuming trips.

To maximize efficiency, the concept of a "store" that contains a large inventory could be replaced by warehouses for goods ordered over the internet and delivered to neighborhood centers. These centers could serve as starting points for public transit vehicles that could provide frequent service to move people as well goods to and from the neighborhood centers. They could even supply personal services such as haircuts and dentists. By combining the movement of mail, people and goods on one frequent-service, efficient electric vehicle great energy efficiencies could be achieved.

Renovating the suburban housing stock for optimum energy efficiency will be a long and difficult process taking many decades. With cheap energy, most houses in America were built to very low efficiency standards in order to save on capital costs. It will soon be recognized that using natural gas and oil for residential heating is a massive waste of a valuable resource that should be used for making things and essential vehicles. Residences will have to be modified to all-electricity and renovated to consume the minimum amount of energy for lighting, appliances, heating and cooling that is possible and affordable.

Doing this on a nationwide scale will likely take some form of government intervention. This could be in the form of considerably higher building standards including retrofits of existing buildings, higher energy taxes and even renovation loans to jump start the process. For nearly every existing building there are a variety of steps that need to taken from better insulation and more efficient lighting to replacing windows and heating systems. All of this will be expensive but there is no other choice because staying on in suburbia with greatly reduced sources of energy renovation will be the only option.

The New York Times is also pondering the future of suburbia, with a post looking at some of the uses the exurbs could be put to - What Will Save the Suburbs?.

In urban areas, there’s rich precedent for the transformation or reuse of abandoned lots or buildings. Vacant lots have been converted into pocket parks, community gardens and pop-up stores (or they remain vacant, anxiously awaiting recovery and subsequent conversion into high-end office space condos). Old homes get divided into apartments, old factories into lofts, old warehouses into retail.

Projects like Manhattan’s High Line show that even derelict train tracks can be turned into something as valuable to citizens as a vibrant public park. A brownfield site in San Francisco has been cleaned up and will house an eco-literacy center for the city’s youth. Hey, even a dump (Fresh Kills, on Staten Island) is undergoing a remarkable metamorphosis into a recreation area.

But similar transformation within the carefully delineated form of a subdivision is not so simple. These insta-neighborhoods were not designed or built for flexibility or change.

So what to do with the abandoned houses, the houses that were never completed or the land that was razed for building and now sits empty?

Take as an analogous example their symbiotic partner, the big box store. As I learned in artist Julia Christensen’s new book, “Big Box Reuse,” when a big box store like Wal-mart or Kmart outgrows its space, it is shut down. It is, apparently, cheaper to start from scratch than to close for renovation and expansion, let alone decide at the outset to design a store that can easily be expanded (or contracted, as the case may be).

So not only does a community get a newer, bigger big box, it is also left with quite an economic and environmental eyesore: a vacant shell of a retail operation, tons of wasted building material and a changed landscape that can’t be changed back.

The silver lining in Christensen’s study are the communities she’s discovered that have proactively addressed the massive empty shells they’ve been left with, turning structures of anywhere from 20,000 to 280,000 square feet into something useful: a charter school, a health center, a chapel, a library. (And, in Austin, Minn., a new Spam Museum.)

The repurposing of abandoned big-box stores is easier to wrap one’s head around: one can envision within a single volume (albeit a massive one) the potential to become something else.

But exurban communities are a unique challenge. The houses within them are big, but not generally as big as, say, Victorian mansions in San Francisco that can be subdivided into apartments. So they’re not great candidates for transformation into multi-family rental housing.

I did visit a housing development last year that offered “quartets,” McMansions subdivided into four units with four separate entrances. These promised potential buyers the status of a McMansion with the convenience of a condominium, but the concept felt like it was created more to preserve the property values of larger neighboring homes than to serve the needs of the community’s residents.

There has been a nationwide shift toward de-construction (led by companies like Planet Reuse and Buffalo Reuse, the surgical taking-apart of homes to salvage the building materials for reuse, but often the building materials used in these developments aren’t of good enough quality to warrant salvaging.

I don’t have the perfect solution for how to transform these broad swaths of subdivisions, and while I’ve heard much talk of the foreclosure tragedy, I’ve heard nary a peep about what to do about it.

A recent article in The Times spotted an emerging trend of kids usurping the abandoned pools of foreclosed homes for use as temporary skate parks. (Interestingly, this was big in the ‘70s, as you can see by watching the rad skate documentary “Dogtown and Z-Boys.”) It’s a great short-term strategy for adolescent recreation (and for ridding neighborhoods of fetid pools, which often harbor West Nile virus), though it’s not a comprehensive solution to the problem of increasingly abandoned, ill-maintained and more dangerous streetscapes.

But there are some interesting avenues to be pursued. Part of President-elect Obama’s proposed massive public works program, for example, is to be dedicated to clean tech infrastructure. Included in this is the intent to weatherize (that is, make energy-efficient) one million low-income homes a year.

One can already see how those in the construction industry can begin to make the shift from new construction to home retrofitting. It’s the centerpiece of “The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems,” the best-selling, Al Gore- and Nancy Pelosi-endorsed book by environmental activist Van Jones. Though we hear a lot in the news about new LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design/) buildings and incentives for implementing the latest green technology, it’s often the case that fixing leaks and insulation are just as effective in reducing the carbon footprint of single-family homes (which account for about 18 percent of the country’s carbon footprint).

As people increasingly stay put — and re-sell homes less — this retrofit strategy makes sense. Millions of homes, not just low-income ones, are in need of the sort of weatherization the Obama plan describes. The non-profit Architecture 2030, established in 2002 in response to the global warming crisis, is leading a major effort in this arena with the goal of dramatically reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of the building sector by changing the way buildings and developments are planned, designed and constructed.

And after decades of renovation-obsession that has simply gotten out of hand, it seems a prudent time to swap Viking ranges for double-paned windows and high-efficiency furnaces. It’s the perfect moment to fix what we’ve got. Despite their currently low numbers, green homes typically re-sell for more money than their conventional counterparts.

I still dream that some major overhaul can occur: that a self-sufficient mixed-use neighborhood can emerge. That three-car-garaged McMansions can be subdivided into rental units with streetfront cafés, shops and other local businesses.

In short, that creative ways are found not just to rehabilitate these homes and communities, but to keep people in them.