Urban social reconstruction after oil

Abstract

Over the past decades there has been a struggle to create decent living conditions for poor urban majorities in conditions of rampant urbanisation and in the face of neo-liberal development rules. ‘Peak oil’ is, however, upon us, which we may expect will fundamentally change the context of urban development. Whilst conceding that there are a range of scenarios as to how policymakers will address the problem of declining energy resources and hence what the net results will be, the view taken in this article based on substantial research over recent years is that ‘economic growth’ and development that has been built upon the growing consumption of fossil fuels will go radically into decline. This article looks at different dimensions of what this might mean for cities everywhere, with a focus particularly on cities in the South. It concludes with proposed measures that need to be taken, starting today and growing out of emerging initiatives – such as the ‘transition towns’ movement, to start the process of rebuilding viable urban life post fossil fuel.

Keywords:

• fossil fuel
• neo-liberalism
• alternatives
• urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA)
• local economic development (LED)
• transition towns
• World Social Forum
• intentional community
• megacities
• empire

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was delivered at the annual N-AERUS Conference in Madrid in July 2011. I am indebted to the discussants at the conference and to the anonymous reviewers of this article.

Notes

1.A short list of important contributions should include the following: Stren et al. (1992), Houghton and Hunter (1994), Pugh (1996), Satterthwaite (1999), Newman and Kenworthy (1999), Leitmann (1999), Williams et al. (2000), Lawrence (2000), Allan and You (2002), Hallsmith (2003) and Jenks and Dempsey (2005). See also the journal Environment and Urbanization.

2.Important references here include Portney (2003), Lerch (2007), Hopkins (2008) and Newman et al. (2009).

3.For an entertaining look at the world of ‘stuff’, see www.storyofstuff.com.

4.Whilst there is a large literature addressing this issue, a series of books by Zygmunt Bauman make the point most clear (Bauman 2000, 2002, 2004).

5.Albeit surveys investigating levels of happiness in the United States were indicating a decline (Heinberg 2007).

6.Perhaps the protest movements of late 2011, starting with Occupy Wall Street, can be seen as the first steps in a reaction against the rampant wealth of the few against the majority though these have yet to show a capacity for deeper analysis of the source of the malaise and invent effective political solutions!

7.This ranged from the famous Orangi Pilot Project in Karachi and similar community-organised sanitation projects in Latin America to the proliferation of community-based microfinance initiatives starting with the famous Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.

8.The critical view of many northerners – perhaps motivated by a vague sense of their own purloining of the earth's resources at the expense of others, stretching to the posture of moral outrage famously articulated by Mike Davis (2006) – is not to be found amongst the populations themselves living in the urban slums of southern cities.

9.See Douglass and Zoghlin (1994) for a good example. See also papers from the N-AERUS conference of 2007 entitled Grassroots-Led Urban Development: Achievements, Potentials, Limitations.

10.Arguably best represented by the International Forum on Globalization with a membership of some 50 ‘radical thinkers’ and a well worked out, comprehensive alternative global system (Cavanagh and Mander 2004).

11.Whilst nineteenth-century France (Manuel 1962) and the early years of the United States with such communities as the Mormons, Amish and Hutterites are best known, the United Kingdom also has a rich history of such communities. Dennis Hardy (1979) researched many nineteenth-century communities in England and analysed in detail their ideological origins and intentions.

12.For an easy entry to the subject, see Heinberg (2003). For a more technical exposition by ex-employees of the US Department of Energy, see Hirsch et al. (2010).

13.Brazil is almost alone in potentially being able to run its entire transport system on ethanol derived from sugar cane. This is but a very small percentage of the world's transport fleet and could never increase to a very significant extent.

14.Energy is received by food crops from the sun. Added to this, before it arrives on the table, is fuel for tractors and other agricultural machinery, agrochemicals, harvesting and transport, refrigeration, preparation for marketing, the family trips to the supermarket and thence home preparation.

15.See Bloomington Peak Oil Task Force (2009) for a short list. The report also notes Gary Stringer of Northeast Louisiana University as having compiled a list of 500,000 products using oil or oil-based products as ingredients.

16.A rich academic debate that has had very little impact on planning realities has been conducted in recent years concerning ‘sustainable cities’ and particularly ‘compact cities’. See Jenks et al. (1996) and Jenks and Dempsey (2005). For a series of papers on compact cities for the South, see Jenks and Burgess (2001).

17.Dmitry Orlov (2008), a Russian who had become an American citizen but often returned to Russia in the early years following the demise of the Soviet Union, writes in an entertaining fashion of the problems that arose in Russia at that time and how the United States may fare in the coming years with the decline in energy resources.

18.Perhaps due to the fact that US culture is entirely a European derivative, envisioning the end of this culture whilst continuing to live on territory taken from a native population of a different order of civilisation triggers notions of ‘returning’ to such a condition of life or going back even further to prehistoric social conditions. See Diamond (2007) and Zerzan (2008).

19.Walter Christaller's ‘discovery’ of central place theory as a practical manifestation of territorial economies is still used by the German planning system to determine the distribution of functions between towns and thence villages of different sizes.

20.One such methodology is explained in brief as a kind of checklist in the paper entitled Local and Regional Economic Reconstruction in an Age of Global Economic Crisis developed in the context of a project in Colombia managed by New Synergies in Development, the NGO chaired by the author, to be found on the web site of the organisation in documents – www.newsynergies.ch.

21.For readers unfamiliar with the debate: ‘Empire’ in this sense is the global capitalist system with the United States at its centre but encompassing also capitalist structures in Europe, Japan and elsewhere, the point being the dominance of corporate interests in running the modern world politically as well as economically.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adrian Atkinson

Dr. Adrian Atkinson retired as professor of development planning at Berlin's Technical University in 2008. He continues to work throughout the South on projects financed by international and bilateral agencies and banks and by national and local governments. He is co-founder and chair of the Geneva-based NGO New Synergies in Development.