The Shape of Collapse, #6: Cities
by Jason GodeskyMost discussions about Peak Oil have centered particularly on their impacts on the industrial city: its infrastructure, its suburbs, and the various industrial processes that make the modern city possible. In Endgame, Derrick Jensen offers a definition of a city: “people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life.”1 William Catton, author of Overshoot, agrees, suggesting that a city could be defined as a permanent human population dense enough to grossly exceed its local carrying capacity. Cities have always been civilization’s defining phenomenon, and they are fundamentally unsustainable. By next year, the U.N. estimates that half of the world’s 6.6 billion people will live in these fundamentally unsustainable settlements.2 The Peak Oil movement’s focus on cities is obviously worthwhile.
The idea that we can keep cities going is the very first that must be eliminated. While peak oil will bring “deindustrialization,” the reversing of the Industrial Revolution, the fantasy of “New Urbanism” in a new agrarian world has been eliminated by our first round of experience with such a world. While the will is there, the soil fertility is not. Agriculture left most of the previously fertile farmland sucked dry; that’s the very reason why the Green Revolution took off. We explored the reasons for civilized collapse throughout the Thirty Theses, so there’s no need to repeat them here.
But this does put one half of the world’s population in an unenviable position, as inhabitants of a fundamentally unworkable form of society. What are the prospects for the world’s cities in the face of collapse?
Unfortunately, it is the worst case scenario that is the most likely: increasing food prices eventually become food shortages, and then food lines, and then food riots. Gangs organize to increase their chances in the daily battle for their daily bread, and the cities eventually become killing fields, ultimately ending as the imports of food stop, and the gangs begin robbing stored food caches in people’s homes, and finally start hunting one another for food. While collapse always occurs because it benefits most people, this kind of horrorific scenario lingers in our imagination with the word “collapse” precisely because it has happened so often in the cities where the literate elites lived and recorded the end of their civilizations. In past collapses, where the majority of the population lived in the countryside, a momentary orgy of violence that turned the tables of the rural-urban relationship of centuries of cruel exploitation was something the average peasant had a hard time weeping for. Today, with half the world’s population living in cities, we face a much more grim prospect.
But the future is not entirely hopeless for city-dwellers, even if this is the end of the line for cities. In post-Roman Britain, archaeologists and historians often use the term “Life in towns, not town life,” to distinguish between the civic activity of the late Roman Empire, versus the continued population in those places. Of course, we have since discovered contiuing evidence of civic life, as well, so the prhase does not very accurately describe post-Roman British towns, but it may be a useful term to remember for the world’s cities: “Life in cities, not city life.”
The Ik in Uganda offer another example. Here is a hunter-gatherer population that suffered collapse. Even the most basic family structure has broken down; they live in settlement patterns that show clear evidence of former village life, even though there is no more village. (Much of this analysis from Joseph Tainter, however, comes from Colin Turnbull’s The Mountain People, which is highly controversial, so this situation is questionable.)
Consider the case of Havana, which may be the least unsustainable city on the planet. Havana uses community-based permaculture to produce 30% of its own food. As impressive as this is, it is a far cry from what Havana would need to produce to become self-sufficient. That said, a proliferation of community permaculture still provides the best way forward for the modern city. If this path were followed vigorously, we could see a somewhat different pattern emerge for the future of cities: community permaculture gardens creating more tightly-woven neighborhoods, which begin to become more and more self-contained as deindustrialization progresses. These neighborhoods could, in time, become the cores of a new kind of horticultural village. Over time, neighborhood rivalries and tensions would become the kinds of long-standing feuds that we see today between horticultural villages. As dwellings become more elegant and ad hoc, these neighborhoods would see more reason to occasionally move their gardens and their village, particularly as civic identity gave way to village identity. In time, you could see a cluster of inter-related horticultural villages diseminating from the urban core, all descended from what had once been a city’s neighborhoods.
The realistic possibility that this course of action would be vigorously pursued, unfortunately, is fairly low. But Havana’s exmaple is inspiring, and we can hope that as things become tighter, more alternatives—like permaculture—might be explored. If you live in a city, start a community permaculture project and put some effort forth to try to reach such an end.
Realistically, the future of cities will lie somewhere between those two scenarios. How much of one versus the other depends entirely on what we do now.
Wow. Funny I just decided to check your site for the first time in a while, stumbled onto this essay. I was just watching the bridge collapse in Minneapolis if you haven’t heard yet. Between this, that pipe last week, the NO levess, there are serious infrastructure issues.
Comment by EnronHubbard — 1 August 2007 @ 7:32 PM
Damn; no, I hadn’t heard of it. Wow.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 August 2007 @ 7:40 PM
I’m going to try just such a course of action in the very near future.
I’m about attend college in the heart of Philadelphia, so, beyond my time practicing and studying, I’m going to try to get involved with as much of the Farmadelphia and other urban horticultural projects as I possibly can. If I can get the University to acknowledge the projects (and judging by the liberal nature of school, it’s not that unlikely) as a kind of charitable, “community outreach” program, I might just get some sort of pre-village type of rhizome started.
But I’m still a cautious optimist, heavy emphasis on the former word. I chose my career path before I became aware of all this and moving into a city at this point still scares the living shit out of me. It’s a good possibility I’ll have to break for the woods much earlier than expected. But I’m still going to give it a shot.
Comment by Dan — 1 August 2007 @ 7:45 PM
Go Dan! That’s great to hear!
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 August 2007 @ 7:56 PM
I recently spent a week in NYC and I gotta say, I just don’t have much hope that cities will be anything but terror, trembling, panic and fear once currency becomes valueless and the food deliveries stop coming and the sewer system breaks down and there’s no more tap water. That place is a fucking nightmare now, let alone once collapse gets underway in earnest… especially considering that most of it is crammed onto an island.
I have a theory that once things start getting bad, the socio-economic ladder is literally going to be a matter of higher or lower… hierarchy manifest, perhaps. The “ghetto” will be floors above about 8 or 10, high enough up that hauling much of anything in or out becomes a problem, including waste and water. I can imagine gangs coming down at night to raid and loot from the permaculture gardens downstairs.
When I think of this stuff I feel so fortunate to live where I do.
Comment by Paula — 1 August 2007 @ 11:19 PM
Nice article Jason. It’s well balanced which is a rare thing when it comes to post-collaspe predictions about cities.
Like the new look for the site too
Comment by Aaron — 2 August 2007 @ 5:38 AM
I live in Milwaukee, and Lake Michigan is literally a forty minute walk from my front door. So if any city will be “good” to live in post-collapse, it would be cities such as Milwaukee that aren’t too terribly dense and the are located on a major river or lake. Madison fits this criteria, too. Once the flow of college students from out of town ceases, it’s population density will lower somewhat. I do miss Madison and wonder why the Spirit arranged for me to be transplanted to Milwaukee; but I have to remember that without the University of Wisconsin (I’m sure institutions such as universities are the first to shut down once rapid and visible collapse begins in earnest), Madison will go back to being just another Breadbasket medium-sized city such as Janesville, La Crosse, Eau Claire, and Wausau struggling with the realities of collapse.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 2 August 2007 @ 12:46 PM
Speaking of indicators of collapse (the bridge/infrastructure) Russia just planted a flag on the seafloor at the north pole:
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?
Comment by JustVisiting — 3 August 2007 @ 1:58 AM
The remains of the cities will provide important scrounging resources during transition. And I don’t think it will take too long for nature to reclaim the land once we stop weeding and cutting and repaving. I feel as much a connection to the wider world in the run down parts of my city as I do when I’m out in “nature.” Actually, those places might be more wild than many of the campgrounds and state parks I’ve visited.
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.
Comment by Andrew Jensen — 3 August 2007 @ 12:02 PM
The suburban mess will likely become more dangerous than what the older cities will evolve into.
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.
Comment by denizen — 3 August 2007 @ 4:26 PM
Paula, for all its condescension, I do tend to think that New York City will probably fare worse than average; Venuspluto already pointed out some cities on the other side, that might do better. Pittsburgh is similar; there are significantly wooded areas in just an hour’s drive from downtown Pittsburgh. 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 contiuous megalopolis from New York to Virginia.
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.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 August 2007 @ 8:41 AM
Andrew’s comment about nature reclaiming cities reminded me of a Korean DMZ that has become so “wilded” over that it’s attracted E.O. Wilson and other biologists to try and protect it. http://www.mindfully.org/Heritage/War-Protected-Land10dec02.htm
This was a mere 50 years without civilized human contact. It makes me wonder what other developed areas will become by the end of the century (or even 2050).
Comment by Dan — 6 August 2007 @ 9:31 AM
Jason:
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.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 6 August 2007 @ 10:06 AM
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
Comment by JCamasto — 6 August 2007 @ 11:13 AM
It has a proper name- Boswash, the essentially continuous urban sprawl stretching from Boston to DC. When you look at a population map where each dot equals some number of people, it’s a solid mass.
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.
Comment by garth — 19 August 2007 @ 6:34 PM