I’m new here, but have been thinking about these issues for many years and most of the thoughts expressed in the Collapse series of essays are very much in accordance with my own. There’s a reckoning to be faced when we sufficiently use up the easy bounty placed by nature, the topsoil, the easily extracted oil, the aquifers etc. Due to this spike of one-time resource bounty the population of the human species has become vastly higher than can be carried in any sustainable way, and when the freebies run out we’ll start dying off- or rather, as they continue to run out we’ll continue to die off. In my mind only the details of pace and sequence may vary; the result will not; and we can’t even go back to the former carrying capacity of the time before we picked all the low-hanging fruit, but to some lower one.

Thanks for creating this site.

Compare that to the sprawl of NYC that just goes down the coast and eventually merges Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. into one more or less continuous megalopolis from New York to Virginia.

That’s exactly what William Gibson (coined the phrase “cyberspace”), in his future fiction, calls the contiguous urban city from NYC to Atlanta - The Sprawl.

-Jim

Another thing about preindustrial cities is that the filth and squalor in them was unbelievable. Country life was vastly preferable prior to the 19th Century. Though to their credit, Jewish communities in European cities were able to dispose of human waste in ways more sophisticated than dumping it in the streets. That’s why Jewish communities in the late Middle Ages were less ravaged by the Black Death.

Expect old cities cores in the “rust belt” concentrated around pre-oil age transport features (rail, waterways) to become much smaller but denser urban nodes surrounded by farms and widerness that the car-dependent suburbs will eventually become.

We’ll have cities quite some time but they will revert to their walkable, traditional form.

How could that possibly happen? This is a common fantasy, but no less fantasy for that. You need to feed those people, and what is it you’re going to feed them with? Agriculture cannot last much longer, and nothing else can produce the density of food necessary to keep a city going—no matter how walkable they are.

The fantasy that cities were once walkable in their “traditional” form is a fantasy. Before the motor culture, cities were primarily vast dormatories for armies of factory laborers, and before that, they were much smaller, elite affairs where only a small percentage of the population lived. Even those required vast agricultural hinterlands of rural communities to send their food to the city in tribute, tax, tithe, etc. There was no time at which the “traditional” city ever fit the mold of what so many Peak Oil writers now call the “traditional” city.

But at all times throughout history, cities have existed by exploiting large rural areas that managed to feed the cities because they had productive soil and a Holocene climate. But the practice itself used up the productive soil, and caused global warming that has now escalated to the point where the Holocene climate is ending. Those two factors mean the end of agriculture, and the end of agriculture means the end of cities, “traditional” or not.

Expect old cities cores in the “rust belt” concentrated around pre-oil age transport features (rail, waterways) to become much smaller but denser urban nodes surrounded by farms and widerness that the car-dependent suburbs will eventually become.

We’ll have cities quite some time but they will revert to their walkable, traditional form.

Life in cities and not city life. I like that. In my dreams I live in the places that are currently cities, but no longer meet the definition used in this article.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=4GVCH4U3PREA3QFIQMFSFGGAVCBQ0IV0?xml=/news/2007/08/02/wpole102.xml

A sign of increasing pressure to claim any remaining oil reserves?

Like the new look for the site too