Suburban Survival
The plight of the traditional American way of life will lead to a reassessment of one’s way of being, the regulation of consuming, a new urban infrastructure and a civil war. The genesis of the suburb was a by-product of the Industrial Revolution of 1850s America. In it’s original form, the suburb was considered relief from the industrialised city, complete with it’s factories and production plants. It offered a rural setting with access to the city as a place of work - the city, the machine, the suburb, the relief. This was the suburb without the sub-division we know today: it comprised of farm-style living, manor houses, light-rail (streetcar) connection to the city - this was the American Dream. It took nearly 100 years for the rest of the population to realise that this was indeed the form of living most comfortable. This comparison between what the suburb was to suburb-dwellers of the 1850s and the failed attempt to recreate this ideology today is laughable perhaps pitiful, on many levels. This way of life is now an outdated infrastructure.
Not only is it not anything comparable to the genuine intention of the original suburb, but today’s quest for one’s own piece of land is not sustainable. The inception of the automobile in the early 20th century formed the first demanded change to the suburb in the form of designated access and expressways. At a time when oil and land was aplenty, there weren’t foreseeable problems to confining the city and solving expansion or growth issues. The possibility of owning your own land, customising your own home, having a family car was something of a democratised ‘luxury’. James Howard Kunstler is a straight-talker who is adamant about the downfall of the contemporary suburban life, “…the fabric of our daily life, the suburban cul-de-sacs, the strip malls, the parking lagoons, the commercial highway strips…all the stuff that Americans are familiar with as the daily setting of their lives, really does not lend itself to retro-fitting, for a different kind of future, for a more energy-efficient future.” He catagorises it as a mis-investment of resources. One could extrapolate that it is going to remain as that and require a more resource and labour-intensive future if it is going be improved.
The automobile is the all-American lifeblood of the suburb and is the instrument that it has become dependant on, it is also the major cause of the oil crisis that we are embarking on. Up until now there has been a constant, accessible level of crude oil distributable for requiring nations (the crisis of ‘73 was a controlled situation whereby oil was not distributed to the U.S as it was affiliated with Israel in its conflict with Syria, Egypt, and Iraq), …
Oilfields, California, 1938
Oil refineries and petrochemical factories, Texas City, 2008
… now however it is the latent demand of the resource to keep afloat the suburban lifestyle. Two important determining diagrams that outline what is demanded and what we ‘might’ have, paint a grim picture of our future. Fig. 1 is the diagram that represents all nations and their rate of oil imports by the billions of barrels per day.
Fig. 1: Global oil imports in bbl/day: The digram reveals that the top oil consumer is the United States (@ 20,680 bbls/day).
Fig. 2 is Marion King Hubbert’s diagram of peak oil. Basically, the peak oil diagram represents the global production level of oil against the year. The poignant information that this diagram illustrates is that at certain level the production level hits a peak and begins to decline because the rate the maximum oil being extracted is reached. It outlines that we are in this peak oil moment.
Fig. 2: Hubbert’s Peak Oil diagram of 1956.
Hubbert’s diagram is evidence for adopting a new suburban lifestyle - no longer living an existence mediated by the car. As well as the general population, it is the developers of these pastiche, new communities that elect not to recognise the crisis we are in. The crime lies in expanding on green space, and building stylised so as to recreate a lifestyle that existed in Victorian England.
Queen Victoria in 1887.
All is not lost on the Andalusian coast of Spain as the rate ruthless construction, considered a large contributor to the economic growth of the region, exhibits a paradigm that is becoming all to familiar to coastal regions globally (a comparable situation is in Abidjan, Ivory Coast where the population has gone from 400,000 in 1968 to over 1,500,000 in 1981). The southern coast of Malaga, the region that garners an international airport, consistently triplicates its off-season population. The remaining sections of the coast also tell a similar story: a homogeneous, hard-scape of housing, each attaining a view of the ocean, staining the coastline. The geological arrangement provides a barrier as it is mainly mountainous region, however it flattens just before it reaches sea-level - which explains the latitudinal expansion. The residents of these localities are well-off retired Spaniards, a large population of English expatriates and Russian mafioso. The land is now non-desirable.
The rectification of problems of oil, consuming levels and expansion is ubiquitous, the answer lies in the centres of large cities, particularly in Europe. This model is stacked apartments, shared cores, densely located, satellite commercial nodes and a lesser reliance on the automobile as everything is neatly connected with public transport or accessible by bike or foot. There is no sure-fire way of converting the American dream into this sustainable response. It will be a process of taking away the life that has been common to generations and blindingly easy to live in. It might just generate a civil uprising if running politicians promise the un-promise-able: that one can keep their SUV, and their double-story house, and the luxuries that come with it.
The lives of ordinary Americans will have to be re-evaluated and every measure to implement alternative energies will have to be considered following the reduction of oil extraction from the earth.
