Post Carbon Cities Blog
New London, Connecticut is turning the clock back on a public square that was 're-muddled' in the 1970s. In fact, there's a lot to learn from the ways we built and organized our communities before the modern era. The success of our cities in the post-carbon era may depend on it.
New London, Connecticut is turning the clock back on a public square that was 're-muddled' in the 1970s. In fact, there's a lot to learn from the ways we built and organized our communities before the modern era. The success of our cities in the post-carbon era may depend on it.
Last month I published a short article on what we learned --and didn't learn-- from the oil crises of the 1970s. We flirted with conservation and renewable energy, but quickly turned back to our squandering ways when a glut of cheap oil flooded world markets in the 1980s.
We also tried a few urban revitalization solution that ultimately proved poorly thought-through, or simply naïve. For example, we imported European-style pedestrian malls without the context of European densities, and pushed a new generation of heavy-handed planning and design solutions that wiped out human-scale streets and neighborhoods. Case in point: New London (Connecticut) recently decided to overhaul its historic Parade plaza, which was mangled by bad design in the 1970s.
The story of the Parade is an example not just of our earlier half-baked search for urban improvements, but of the value of pre-modern ways of organizing our communities. The Parade worked well in earlier times because it was designed with the same millennia-old, human-scale principles behind great public squares all over the world -- as opposed to, say, more modern and abstract ideas of architecture-as-sculpture, where urban areas are either conduits to pass through quickly or distinct "destinations" with no real relation to their context.
A lot of how we did things in the pre-oil era makes good sense for the post-carbon 21st century. Without oil to skew our sense of distance and place, we developed cities, provisioning systems and even cultural and social norms suitable to a lower-energy world. It's this way of doing things that we at Post Carbon Institute refer to with the term 'relocalization'. Relocalization doesn't mean reverting to some 19th century anti-technology past, but rather rediscovering those ways of running a society and an economy at the scale of humans, not petroleum-powered engines.
New London's redesign of its Parade may well prove to be just one of many new redesigns of our city infrastructure as the post-carbon future becomes a reality.
Post Carbon Cities is one of the key resources focusing communities on addressing peak oil as well as climate challenges. The inspiration, updated information, and pragmatic assistance that you provide is truly needed at all levels of government.
Provisioning systems and re-localization seem to cry out for detailed look at the railway oriented methodologies fostered with the application of electricity to commerce & mobility. Steam was the prime mover well past the advent of electric technology, but one can say the steam locomotive was obsolete with the arrival of the Ingersoll-Rand Diesel Electric locomotive in 1927. Better, with Charles Sprague's electric locomotive of circa 1890. Railways on wheels offer regenerative braking and mixed passenger & freight hauling on the same guideway cross section. Maglev is like the Concorde; I'll leave that analogy to the monorail advocates to figure out. (Colbert's "Word" would be 'VANITY')
Dr. Lercher's writings fill pages and it is a sad commentary on our ability to write reams on Peaking Oil without truly getting a grip on how much ever decreasing annual oil energy units will impact our lives. One would have more confidence in the localization movement if the writers expressed some knowledge, if not actual life experience of US transport during the Energy Independence Era, which ended (if one wants a date) when President Eisenhower signed the Defense Highways Act in summer 1956.
Of course the rubber tire vision in America, stifled thru the pre-WWII decade, burst forth with a vengeance as unemployed servicemen returned from WWII, and only by motorization would US have the ways & means of achieving full employment. Aviation needed bricks in mailbags to underpin commercial aviation; Trucks needed the inventory tax, and cars needed Saudi Arabia. By the numbers, we systematically demolished the electric streetcar lines, the Interurban Electric System, and, after using the capillary branchlines up, doing much of the heavy lifting in the Post WWII economy including hauling material for the freeway constuction, away went the LOCAL railway connection.
We have been snookered by the Savings & Loan guys, then came the real estate fiasco. Will someone take a look at the monorail mania about to envelop us? Under the radar, shortline rail corridor is gradually being added back to service, but not quickly enough to be at full coverage when the effects of Peaking Oil really make trucking uneconomical. Interested parties can see US Rail footprint past & present by obtaining US Rail Map Atlas volumes from (spv.co.uk) and sharing them with their locales'
county planning bureaus.
Post Carbon organizations need to buy in bulk, copies of Christopher C. Swan's "ELECTRIC WATER" (New Society Press, 2007) and talk localization in a more practicable way than is now the case...
There is danger ahead, whether of our own making, events beyond our control in the hands of nature & bad people, or the plain fact we are financially broke. Gold bugs beware, the Feds will call in the gold like FDR soon, and the energy for motor transport will probably beon a quota (rationing) system in the next few years regardless of which party controls the Federal Government.
The National Guard of the respective states should quietly refresh themselves on the ways & means of recommissioning the Railroad Operating & Maintenance Batallions. Hint: Call up the Association Of American Railroads (202-634-2100) and get copy of "Rail Transport And The Winning Of Wars, by James A. Van Fleet. Circa 1956, coincidental with the Freeway Act, an eerily prescient discussion of recovery from homeland attack, imported oil vulnerabilities, etc. In a more modern setting, all hands will profit from careful read of Kunstler's "The Long Emergency", as well as Richard Heinberg's writings. For the office adjutants with initiative...
Political and corporate advisors no longer have any excuse to be ignorant of these proceedings!