Cities: an obsolete concept
July 17th, 2008Summary
People need three things: land to grow food, energy to make stuff, and information to interact. In the old model, it was easier to pack people together so they could make stuff and interact more efficiently, and move food and energy around. But now that the information and energy can be everywhere, we had better live where food grows.
In the olden times…
For centuries until 1700 in Europe and 1900 in the rest of the world, the ubiquitous social structure was a network of small farms organized around a village with a local lord, and only a handful of larger cities. Urban population was marginal and was made essentially of craftspeople and merchants who profited from concentration by easier procurement and commercialization, as well as exchanges in knowledge. The rest of the population lived off the land and took care of itself in quasi-total autonomy.
Cities were where political power was, because they concentrated human interaction: information traveled faster, ideas could be exchanged more broadly, in turn leading to the concentration of technology and wealth. However, in times of war, plague, or famine, cities were extremely vulnerable, and power generally fled to fortresses while the nobility found refuge in country estates.
How the industrial revolution happened
In one book I have read, the industrial revolution was presented as a consequence of an agrarian revolution, which introduced crop rotations with legumes and started to plant hedgerows for cattle. This put an end to the slow agricultural decline that had gone on since the end of the Roman empire, and slowly generated food surplus. The food surplus could then feed more craftspeople, more city dwellers, more thinkers, more scientists, more engineers, who naturally tend to gather in cities, as they do not need to grow food. Technology thrived as a consequence of agricultural wealth, and in return, technology boosted agriculture. As new tools made it possible to cultivate the land with fewer people, the resulting exodus from the countryside fed the factories. The vicious circle turned cities into black holes, gradually draining all population from the land.
Industries were growing fast, and they were all shaped around a centralized energy or procurement source: a mill had to be close to a waterway, a foundry near a mine, a factory near a railway. When the steam engine ruled the world, there was often only one big power source, one big engine in each factory, therefore making a centralized architecture compulsory. Economic theory was nascent at the time, and this centralized model left a lasting imprint in all Western consciences: when a production system was centralized, it generated economies of scale and became more efficient.
In fact, the apparent efficiency gain in production probably came more from mechanization than centralization: obviously, when one applies mechanical power to a production that had been exclusively manual before, the increase in yields can be spectacular. With early factories, mechanization and centralization were associated. Therefore mainstream economic conscience never abandoned the dogma that centralization and intensification always increased efficiency. In fact, when production units grow beyond a certain size, external costs like management overheads, procurement, and distribution increase, and they outcost the marginal economies of scale.
Unheeded dents in the centralized model
While applying energy to production units does generally increase production, concentrating production units becomes counter-productive beyond a certain size. When oil or electricity came, machines could be made much smaller, and we could have adapted the size of production units to what was the best. Mechanization could cease to be synonymous of centralization. But it was too late. The model of enormous cities with concentrated industries was already burnt deep into our foreheads.
Then came the world of offices and services, which grew as a wart on the back of the industrial world, but did not need any inputs and outputs in terms of material goods or hardware. Paper activities ended up making the majority of the world’s economy. And yet, people who needed only a typewriter, a phone line and a fax machine still congregated each morning, driving dozens of miles alone in their gas-guzzling automobiles, just to find the one typewriter and the one fax-machine assigned to them in a centralized office.
Now there is the internet. Now nobody can say that being able to touch colleagues physically during office hours results in such efficiency that it can compensate the social, environmental, or economic cost of daily commuting. I know as many instances of misunderstanding from ill-interpreted physical cues in a flesh-and-blood meeting as from ill-interpreted voice tones over a telecon. To me, the format of meetings is terribly archaic, especially when all the speaker does is read from his/her “poorpoint” slides, so that switching to telecommuting would probably be a big leap forward. The internet is the magic that allows spatial dislocation of the workplace for all those who do not make material stuff.
My utopia
I claim that if electricity and the internet had come before the industrial revolution (which obviously could not have happened because we needed the industrial revolution to bring us semi-conductors), we would not have chosen the over-concentrated urban and industrial model. As a consequence, people would have remained on the land, they would have worked from home, and the minority of workers who still have to make stuff with their hands would have worked on small distributed production units in many small towns. For each type of production, people could have chosen the scale that makes most economic sense, and most of our industry could have been small regional production units instead of the gigantic factories which lose in external costs what little is gained in scale effects. Only a few heavy industries would have remained in large centralized factories.
Because the real-estate pressure would be lower, every family could afford one acre or two, and the time saved in commuting could be used to grow stuff (not everybody would grow stuff, but you’d always find neighbors who grow more than they need). With production more labor-intensive and less input- and capital-intensive, society would be more robust to economic disruption.
And as the internet connects all people together, there is no need to walk to the agora to participate in the democratic debate anymore: a centralized parliament of city-dwelling representatives is an invention dating back to times without today’s means of communication. Now we could have a web2.0-style parliawiki, in which there would not be such a representation gap between cities and rural areas.
Inspired from Ralph Borsodi’s ‘This ugly civilization‘
Read on
A great quote by Ralph Borsodi
An introduction to a voluntary simplicity pioneer
The suburbia surrounding cities is an interesting artifact of the truth that most people don’t actually want to live in cities, and so try to find an “agrarian” life outside of them, which contributes to the oil-sucking horrors of the daily commute. I know of people who commute on a daily basis from Santa Rosa CA to Sacramento CA, around 90 miles, which is just crazy. Wasteful, too.
But if society decides that telecommuting becomes the norm rather than the exception, suburbia is not such a bad habitat anymore. I have read somewhere that the average suburban density in the US is comparable to some parts of rural South-East Asia. It would not take much effort to turn lawns into productive food gardens, all connected to a great irrigation network.
Well hi there Mandarine.
Two random remarks on your paper.
1. It’s my understanding that early phases in the agricultural revolution (see late-medieval England, Flanders) saw work-at-home systems whereby an overseer would go around a district’s farms and distribute raw material like wool: then the farmers’ wives would set to work weaving the stuff, and after a while the overseer would return and collect the finished product. You should look into it if you haven’t already.
2. Talk about a virtual agora: most visitors to the US Senate and House these days are surprised that instead of a room full to the brim with cigar-smoking, mustachioed gentlemen, most often only two people are in the chamber: the president of the Senate/speaker of the house, and whoever happens to be talking. The reason being, it’s all being shown live by the public affairs channel C-SPAN, so other members/senators can watch their colleague from their office across the street (or anywhere really). In fact the orator (sic) doesn’t typically speak from his/her assigned chair, as TV pictures would then show rows upon rows of empty seats behind him/her: so they’re moved closer to the wall, and then they address a non-existent audience, looking left, then right, then left again, thus keeping the illusion that we’re still in Daniel Webster’s days. Also, they only now spend two days a week in D.C.: the rest of the time, they’re back in their constituencies. So there you go: it’s the end of the Athenian agora in all but name (or choreography, if you will).
Well hi there bro’
1 - if they come with e-unions, I believe such manufacturing/telecommuting models are fine. At least when they are not restricted to women.
2 - the next step is to remove the senate building altogether and replace it with a computer-graphic-generated great hall, with the avatars of all politicians sitting on whatever kind of seat you choose in the skin/rendering settings of the C-SPAN website.
I completely agree that the suburbs are ripe for a more agrarian society. This is particularly true since most suburbs were built on productive farm land. The problem for most of the inhabitants of suburbia right now is that their work and commute eat up so much time they don’t have time to put their land into production. Telecommuting will help that situation out.
But some attitudes and laws need to be changed as well. There are numerous communities in this country that have ordinances on the books that mandate lawns. God forbid that you should dig the chemical and water hungry monster and replace it with something that is xeriscape, or productive.
Don’t get me wrong, I think those sorts of laws are idiotic and irresponsible, but they exist and the shackle people who want to do something more intelligent with their space.
There is a lovely book out there, The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk, which contains descriptions of what San Francisco could be like with NO cars. This vision could be applied to any city. Think of all the space that is covered with parking lots and paved streets in any major metropolitan area. Imagine all the pavement gone and replaced with gardens, bike paths and orchards.
I think there are a lot of exciting things that can be done in cities nowadays. I’ve seen designs for amazing rooftop vegetable gardens on top of apartment buildings. My understanding is that urban living actually is the most ecological way to live in terms of carbon footprint. I quite agree though that a lot of people don’t want to- I don’t and part of that is because urban building standards and design have been so crap in the past (at least in New Zealand) I can’t imagine trying to bring up a family in shoebox with virtually no soundproofing with drunks throwing up outside- which is what apartment living is frequently like here. But that could change if the will was there.
Also I get the appeal of telecommuting and electronic agoras and so forth but in any design for utopia you have to keep in mind we are basically social animals. We need to be able to huddle with our kind.
healingmagichands: no cars in San Francisco - that’s a fine dream indeed (unless you mean no cable cars too)
make tea: I did not say that humans must live on isolated farms. Towns are fine, but cities are too big in my opinion. Admittedly, the environmental footprint of someone living in downtown Manhattan is lower than someone in a Phoenix suburb, but you could have just as much environmental efficiency in towns of less than 100,000 people. And for those who want to live outside such towns should not want to be connected to a water grid, a power grid, a paved road network, a telephone network, a sewage system and a mall if they want to keep their impact low. This means water catchment and a cistern or a well, photovoltaics or wind power, a mule path, wireless comms, greywater harvesting, composting toilets, and growing most of you food - and a very slow life. Not everybody wants to live like that, and that’s what towns are for.
I don’t know: I’ve heard lots of arguments that city-dwelling is the best for the environment. Buildings go up instead of out, thus leaving more land space outside the city. City gardening is becoming more common. Better public transportation. More walking and bicycling. However, you’ve certainly given me something to chew on when it comes to a different argument, and I always like that!
In fact, Ms MakeTea had roughly the same remark. I do agree that compact urbanism is better than sprawling suburbs. I was only questioning the need of packing several million people together like this in mega-cities.
Modest-sized cities surrounded by agricultural belts are probably the most efficient type of human organisation. Sometimes, I wonder whether they are also the most robust in case of crisis or temporary disruption, as they rely on well-oiled, highly specialized organisations to get going (food, water, waste, power). A distributed network of semi-autarcic land-dwellers does seem more robust, especially when they can have the internet to get organised. OK, if the crisis if really serious, we lose the internet, and people in small cities will have an advantage in terms of organisation capacity.