It's impossible to understate how crucial cheap oil has become to our way of life. It's shaped how we get our food, what we buy, where we live, how we work, and the way we play. Cheap oil opened up the world to millions of travellers via discount airlines, allowed thousands to buy their first homes in sprawling suburbs, and enabled consumers to get their hands on ever cheaper goods, shipped just in time, from around the globe. Now economists say all of that is at risk.

Gas prices in Sydney, Australia, are soaring - but they're not hurting everyone evenly. A recent study has found that residents of the western ring of suburbs are spending, on average, three times what their inner-city counterparts are spending on fuel. Insufficient public transit infrastructure gives residents of these suburbs little option but to keep paying, at a cost to other parts of their lives and to the community.

Anthony Perl, coauthor of the book Transport Revolutions, talks to the Vancouver, B.C. Georgia Straight about the effect of high oil prices on property values. The upshot: properties that are far from jobs and other important amenities will lose value, while ones that don't require cars will be more desirable. And it's happening already.

"An ever-expanding footprint of our urban areas is not sustainable," says John Gormley, Ireland's Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government. That department has just released a new set of planning guidelines for sustainable residential development in urban areas.

The US's first suburb, Levittown, is launching a program to encourage energy efficiency upgrades in its homes. Volunteers are going door-to-door to publicize house upgrades that could improve the community's carbon footprint by 20%. But "having a green neighborhood and a green home are two different things" --although greening the houses is a step forward, the suburban form creates much greater impacts by requiring car use.

Alex Steffen of WorldChanging on why developing low-emissions vehicles is nowhere near as important as developing more compact, efficient and livable cities. Focus on new automotive technologies can distract us from the much more effective strategy of building in less-consumptive ways.

This beautiful book is an excellent reference for coming to grips with that slippery but important issue, density. Density can have both positive and negative connotations -- and effects -- depending on its context and execution. The photos in Visualizing Density illustrate this wonderfully, and can help us get a better mental grasp on the variety of ways people can live at a variety of different density levels.

Florida's suburban housing boom was fueled by low gas prices, and now those developments are hard-hit. While it's a little late for elected officials to put the brakes on far-flung projects that resemble ghost towns, local governments must start insisting on more sensible, less energy-consumptive models. These include mixed-use enclaves that combine work and home inside urban service boundaries, along with well-situated local transit grids that wean residents off single-occupant cars.

This touchstone book by James Howard Kunstler (author of The Geography of Nowhere)offers a vivid and uncomfortable vision of a post-oil future. As a result of artificially cheap fossil-fuel energy we have developed global models of industry, commerce, food production, and finance that are now threatened with collapse. Building on his previous work analyzing American suburban (i.e., energy-intensive) lifestyles, Kunstler sketches potential outcomes that may result from our current dysfunctional economic and cultural patterns.

Slides and notes from a presentation at the 2006 Atlantic Planners' Institute Conference on how the assumptions behind planning decisions will have to adapt to the changing reality of energy.