Cities In The Deindustrial Future - John Micheal Greer (Archdruid Report)

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Imagine, by contrast, a city of between 20,000 and 200,000 people in a mostly agricultural region; there are hundreds of such cities scattered across the North American map, so this shouldn’t be hard. In the sort of overnight collapse imagined by too many writers on peak oil these days, that could still be a very difficult place to be – but as I’ve pointed out more than once in this blog, an overnight collapse is very nearly the least likely way the downslope of Hubbert’s peak might play out. In the far more plausible scenario of uneven decline and slow depopulation spread out over many decades, such a city would have immense advantages over a rural lifeboat community. Located within easy reach of surrounding farmland, stocked with raw materials in the form of surplus buildings, cars, and the like, and a large enough work force to allow division of labor and the production of specialty goods, the city could easily import food and other necessities by supplying trade goods to the nearby countryside, the way cities in preindustrial times have always done.

These same factors make the maintenance of public order much less challenging – the sort of rural brigandage that springs up in the last years of civilizations could make life very difficult for a rural lifeboat community, but a city with a large organized militia centered on its police force and pre-decline National Guard units would be a much tougher nut to crack. Finally, most small to midsized cities have the cultural and social resources – libraries and colleges, community groups of many kinds, and a lively tradition of local politics, among other things – to maintain some approximation of civilized life even in hard times. In a deindustrializing world, all these things are potent sources of strength. While there will undoubtedly be failures from a variety of causes, all these things make cities among the most viable options for personal and cultural survival as the deindustrial age opens around us.

Historically speaking, this pattern – the largely independent city-state surrounded by its own agricultural hinterland – is one of the most common foundations for urban society, and civilizations that manage a broader level of geographical integration routinely fall back to the city-state pattern in times of disintegration. Some variant of it is very likely in the North America of the deindustrial future. Some areas of the continent lack the agricultural and resource base to support such a pattern; others will likely be in the path of armed invasions or mass migration, in which case all bets are off; the fate of Roman Britain shows what can happen when an urban society is overwhelmed by armed and hostile migrants (though Roman Gaul, which passed through a similar experience, came through it with a surprising number of its cities intact, and most of those are still viable urban centers today). Elsewhere, though – especially east of the Mississippi and west of the Cascade crest, where rainfall and soil quality combine to make sustainable organic agriculture a good bet for the foreseeable future – urban centers are likely to play a significant role through the approaching deindustrial Dark Ages and on into the successor cultures to come.

One factor that could derail this vision is the failure of urban centers to make useful preparations in the early stages of crisis. Fortunately, steps in the right direction are already being taken. More than a dozen US municipalities are already at work on their own peak oil contingency plans, and more are considering it. The “transition town” movement in the UK is working in the same direction with at least as much success. The seismic shift that has placed municipal and local governments out in front on several other issues, and left national governments behind them in the dust, seems to be under way in the peak oil field as well. When city governments draw up meaningful plans to reduce their fossil fuel usage by 50%, as Portland, Oregon did in its recently released peak oil plan, or look seriously at reestablishing local rail service, as several US cities are now doing, it’s hard to justify the claim that urban populations will check their common sense and their instinct for self-preservation at the door of peak oil and turn into the mindless ravening mobs of the classic survivalist fantasy.

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http://www.energybulletin.net/33280.html