I've made that point many times: That there are older, smaller Central Texas towns ever 30 miles or so, with all of the important social structures for stable, productive life, except for corporate jobs. It seems there is an underlying bias (fear?) of leaving what we used to think was secure employment.On Jan 17, 2010, at 2:18 PM, Tradingpost wrote: I don't disagree with Sharon on everything. But there's an awful lot of opinions and pontificating there. Frankly I'd go slow on telling everybody what are the right and wrong reasons for moving to the country. And really, the choice is not between country isolation and cities of a million or more. In between there are many thousands of small to large towns, most with a wide variety of stores and services of all kinds. We live in a county with several *very* small towns with hardware, lumber, cafes, schools, feed stores, utility companies, churches, truck stops, senior centers, drug stores, banks, farms, you name it. And all towns or cities aren't created equal, and there's a great deal more to it than just how the town or city might fare in future scenarios. Plus, how each place will fare in the perfect storm necessarily involves a lot of blind guesses. And much of her essay seems to assume people have a choice to begin with. She (and maybe most of her readers) can choose to buy a condo or a farm, but the vast majority (yours truly) are simply stuck where they are now. The middle class majority has been financially decimated over the last thirty years. If I had to guess, I'd say the biggest factor for most of us to consider is ... what we can afford. paul tradingpost@lobo.net*********** REPLY SEPARATOR *********** On 1/17/2010 at 7:55 AM Doug Willhite wrote: Reconsidering Cities
by Sharon Astyk
I get a lot of emails from people who want to get out of the city.
Sometimes the reasons are really good ones ˆ they don‚t like cities
or the ones they live in, but were drawn there by the promise of
salaries and jobs, but now see other options opening up in rural
areas or small towns. Maybe they always dreamed of land and space to
be self-sufficient, or maybe it was a new dream ˆ but now they want
to explore it. Maybe they want lower cost of living and stronger
community ties and think a rural small town is the way to get it.
Maybe they want cleaner air and more green spaces, or to go home to a
place they loved. Maybe they believed the idea that it was too hard
to grow your own and make your own, but they‚ve stopped believing
this. To which I say - great!
But not all the people I hear from have these reasons. Sometimes
people think they should get out of the city because they‚ve been
told they have to, or they‚ve seen too many apocalyptic movies.
Sometimes people read about peak oil and climate change and their
first reaction is „I‚ve got to get out of the city‰ - but their
family is there, and their home and their work. Sometimes people
really like cities, and don‚t want to leave, but feel like they have
to to be safe. Sometimes what is burgeoning under the surface is a
real fear of crime, and sometimes it is a nebulous fear of the alien
and strange. And sometimes there‚s a racist and classist element to
this ˆ a fear of „them‰ who will „riot.‰ Sometimes there are concerns
that cities are unadaptable ˆ sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly.
Sometimes people just haven‚t given much thought to what is possible
in the city and they don‚t realize that many of their dreams might be
fulfillable in the city.
We moved here to the country a few months before 9/11, and I can‚t
count the number of people who called up and said „you have the right
idea, get out of the cities!‰ In vain did we protest that we hadn‚t
left Lowell and Boston to escape terrorism, nameless violence and
scary people but because we wanted to grow things and raise animals.
I don‚t blame folks who instinctively reacted that way, but I do
think that if we‚re leaving the cities, we should go for the right
reasons ˆ because we love the country, not because we fear the city.
Moreover, I feel that many cities have a future ˆ and a rich and
complicated and probably quite wonderful (and difficult) ones. Nor is
it self-evident to me that the countryside will always be better off
than the city. So let‚s talk about why people should revisit the idea
of cities.
I think it is important also to distinguish between several kinds of
cities. Just as I‚ve written before that there are suburbs and
suburbs, there are cities and cities. There are cities I think have
little or no future in the face of climate change and energy
depletion, and ones I think have quite a bright future. How do you
know which kind of city yours is? Well, there are a few questions to
ask yourself:
1. Was this a major city before 1900? This is an important question
if you are interested in your city‚s future. As a general rule, the
best way to evaluate a city‚s long term future in the face of
depletion and the ability to produce less carbon is to ask „Back when
we used less energy, did people want to live here? If so, why? If
not, why not?‰ If, for example, your city is a major port city, or
connected by waterway to a major port city, your city probably has a
future. The age of water transport is hardly over ˆ it is just
beginning again, and ports will be needed. If your city was a mill
city with lots of hydropower ˆ that‚s another good sign. Or a major
rail hub ˆ we know that rail is much more efficient than private
cars. On the other hand, if not very many people lived there until
air conditioning or until we stole water from somewhere else, that
might not be so good.
2. What are the best projections for its future in climate change?
The exception to the rule that you should use the past to predict the
future is climate change. If your city is expected to be underwater
and subject to increasingly violent storm surges, you might not want
to stay ˆ even if you imagine you won‚t be alive for the worst
consequences, you might consider asking yourself „When I‚m 70, will I
want to evacuate every hurricane season?‰ Or if increasing heatwaves
and drought are the projection, you should honestly ask whether you
are prepared to deal with them. Cities with no good reliable supply
of water will probably do very badly indeed.
3. What kind of local food and energy infrastructure have you got?
Cities that didn‚t develop hugely in the last decades that still have
farmland around them will be at an advantage ˆ not an insurmountable
ones if they have natural transportation lines, but still, this is a
powerful advantage. Smaller cities of 1 million or less may do better
than bigger ones ˆ the biggest cities will probably have to get
smaller, particularly if they are built up for many miles outside
their limits, have a lot of high rises or other major disadvantages.
That said, even a big city that has to get smaller will have some
particularly well developed people who do very well there
4. Finally, what‚s the culture of your city/neighborhood within it?
Are you surrounded by immigrants who are growing gardens in every
spare inch? Awesome. Are you surrounded by affluent neighbors who
don‚t like to see undies out on the line? Not so great. Is your city
in decline with a high violent crime rate? Not so good. Does your
city have an active and powerful community organizing presence that
helps keep people safe? Good. Is your municipality actively preparing
for the future? Terrific. Are they not helping but not hindering
much? Pretty good.
Moreover, the country will have some disadvantages over cities in
difficult times ˆ this is almost certain to happen. It is important
to be prepared for those difficulties, and many city people aren‚t ˆ
given that they will be facing challenges in either place, it may be
better to face challenges that are more familiar, in a place where
you have ties, than to try and face totally unfamiliar ones in a new
place.
What are the disadvantages of the countryside? Here are a few:
1. Fewer jobs, more poverty, at least at first. While in the longer
term, rural areas may do better, in early transitional periods, the
odds are that they will do worse, because they have fewer jobs to
begin with. In an economic crisis, many people in rural areas become
very poor and areas become severely depressed. If you are thinking
that we will have an instant apocalypse where everyone moves out to
the countryside looking for food, you probably should give some
thought to a slow grind, where there‚s plenty of food but no money to
buy it.
2. Shortages of goods and higher prices for things not made locally.
Many rural areas have few stores and are at thee nd of shipping
lines. If gas gets expensive or resources get constrained, outer
perimeter stores will be serviced last, and at higher cost. Few rural
dwellers make everything they use or even grow all their own food ˆ
it may cost you a lot more to get things and you may be the first to
see shortages.
3. Tight knit and conservative communities can be alienating to
people who are different or simply outsiders. While I know, for
example, many gay and lesbian people living in rural areas, I know
others who were driven out by small mindedness and hostility. Plenty
of people move out our way and complain that if you aren‚t related to
someone, there‚s no social life, and it is hard to integrate. The
reality is you may be an outsider for a long time.
4. It can be far away from family and friends if they are tied to the
city. Life in the country also requires that you live differently ˆ
fewer formal activities for the kids, more just playing, maybe
multiple sources of part time income instead of one steady job.
5. Lack of services ˆ as economic consequences get greater, small
towns with small tax bases either need to raise taxes (a tough sell)
or they need to cut services. When oil prices spiked in 2008 schools
cut back to 4 days a week, got rid of staff, plowing was cut back,
garbage collection abandoned and town courts closed. The consequences
are worse in the city when services do shut down because of
population density, but cities are less likely to get hit as early.
Now I love the country, and I love my life, but it would be wrong to
imply that everyone should live here. In fact, everyone shouldn‚t ˆ
first of all, there‚s not enough land in the world for everyone to
live at the population density that I do. Some people have to ˆ
otherwise we wouldn‚t have farms, but our present population means
that some people also have to live in apartments and dense housing so
that there‚s farmland left. Moreover, unlike some rural folk, I don‚t
dislike cities ˆ I lived in them for much of my life, and I‚m fond of
them. If I could bring my livestock back to the city, heck, I might
consider it ;-) .
Plus, there are some real advantages to living sustainably in the
city ˆ some things are a lot easier. These include transportation,
getting to shopping, scavenging stuff, building diverse communities,
meeting cultural needs for people who are different in some way or
need to be close to religious or ethnic communities, more bodies to
keep you warm, access to trade goods, educational opportunities and
others. Cities have existed for a very, very long time, and they
aren‚t going to go away. Trade has been happening for centuries, and
climate change is not going to make Ottumwa, Iowa a center of
international trade anytime soon.
Moreover, some cities may thrive with the resumption of local
manufacturing ˆ when oil prices spiked in 2008, overwhelmingly the
costs of globalization began to be realized. When shipping costs
rise, we will have incentive to bring manufacturing back in many
areas. For people who don‚t want to be farmers, meeting new needs for
efficient heating, garden tools, sturdy clothing, etc∑ will be
important work. Even Aaron Newton and I never did suggest that
everyone was going to be a farmer ;-) .
Sometimes people email me saying that they desperately need to get
out of the city because they want to grow a garden, because they need
to get their hands into dirt. But this, I think, is the deepest
misconception created by energy depletion and climate change ˆ that
there‚s only dirt in the country, or that it only „counts‰ when
there‚s a lot of it. But the reality, as I say as often as I can
think of, is that there‚s dirt under everyone‚s feet. It may be hard
to find ˆ sometimes you have to go look at community gardens or
borrow a neighbor‚s yard or do so guerilla gardening. But we need
people to grow food most of all where people live now.
Because reducing energy and shipping costs is essential, we need
gardeners in the city and small livestock in the city as much as we
need farmers in the countryside. In 1943, for example, the city of
Baltimore had more than 14,000 community gardens, producing enough
food to meet all the produce needs of the city. In 1944, all the
victory gardens in the US produced the same amount of produce as all
the vegetable farms in the US put together. In the 19th century,
urban Paris was exporting food from 3600 acres of intensively farmed
land that produce more vegetables than the city could consume.
Underestimating the power of urban agriculture is one of the deepest
flaws in reasoning. Most nations of the global south produce
substantial portions of meat and vegetables within city limits ˆ Hong
Kong and Singapore, for example, both produce more than 20% of their
meat and vegetables within the city limits. In 2002 with more than 6
million people, Hong Kong was producing 33% of their produce, 14% of
the pigs, 36% of the chickens and 20% of the farmed fish eaten in the
city limits, much the animale being rased on 160,000 tons annually of
food waste that was recycled into meat and eggs. Will cities grow all
their own food? No, but they don‚t necessarily have to. A substantial
portion can be enough, as long as they also build ties to surrounding
rural areas.
What about people‚s fears about crime and violence? Are they
misplaced? No, they aren‚t ˆ they are very real. But it is important
to keep them in perspective ˆ often we‚re so terrified of crime that
we give it a bigger place in our lives psychologically than it
deserves. There are some cities that have undergone major crises and
become violent, unliveable places but most often because of war. In
many other places, the countryside has also experience violence ˆ
violence that was worse because of isolation from neighbors.
My bet is that if you could live in the worst neighborhood in your
city right now then you would be ok. Now many of us wouldn‚t choose
to do that ˆ but we should remember that the crime we‚re facing in
the cities is probably on the same order of the crime and difficulty
that we expect the poor to endure in our cities right now. Right now
there are people operating in your city without utilities ˆ either
squatters or people who have been shut off for non-payment. Right now
there are people who are facing high crime rates, who can‚t get
police protection or who have reasons to be afraid of the police.
Right now there are people who are facing rising infant mortality,
lack of access to health care and good food.
What‚s likely to happen in the longer term is that many of us are
likely to live in cities much as the poor live in them now. But at
the same time, the same strategies that have helped poor urban
dwellers make a decent life for themselves are available to us ˆ
organize, organize, organize. That is, when the neighborhood isn‚t
safe and the cops aren‚t responsive, get together and talk to the
police and the people who police the police. Organize watches. Get
the dealers out. Make spaces that are safe. Enlist help from the
community to clean things up and make things safer. It isn‚t a magic
bullet, but it works.
When there‚s no good local food infrastructure, people start it. When
there‚s no clinic, people agitate for one, or start one themselves.
The beauty of cities is the tremendous people power that cities have
ˆ the capacity to organize, resist and make safe.
There are things about large, dense cities that are potentially quite
dangerous. The things that worry me most are fire infrastructure in
the case of disasters, water contamination and disease outbreaks due
to water contamination. These are real issues. Again, they can be
handled by leaving and going someplace less populous ˆ but you do
only change one set of problems for another. If your house catches
fire while you are trying to keep warm in the city, you could burn
down a whole neighborhood, so you need to handle heating safely and
collectively. If your house catches fire in the country, nobody else
will burn ˆ but no one may show up to put it out, either, if things
get tough enough. Managing human wastes in the city is challenging ˆ
but in the country you may run into people who are accustomed to just
dumping as they like.
Generally speaking, cities require a high degree of cooperation ˆ
living successfully in close proximity to others requires that people
be accomodating of others. People who can‚t do this or don‚t want to
may want their own space and land. It can be frustrating,
particularly when the regulations are inflexible and strictly
enforced ˆ getting that livestock into the city will take a lot of
advocacy in some cases. And yet, that cooperation is also a gift ˆ it
means that the infrastructure of management can be invoked and used
in tough times. Rural areas without close ties ˆ and many of the
traditional neighborly ties have been set aside as people replace
cooperation with fossil fuels ˆ may be tough to work together.
The people who should most seriously consider staying in the city are
those with strong community and family ties there. Difficult times
may make it impossible to commute back and forth. If you are a member
of an ethnic, religious or minority community and that identity is
important to you, you may find yourself painfully isolated somewhere
away from them. Much of our collective fears about the cities have to
do with their diversity ˆ I‚m not at all claiming that everyone with
worries about cities has a secret fear of non-white folk, but some of
them quite explicitly do. Often our fears about cities are fears
about race, class and cultures that are alien to us. That doesn‚t
mean that sometimes our fears aren‚t legitimate ˆ but we need to be
very careful about identifying which ones are real and which ones
aren‚t. Moreover, conversations about „them‰ forget that a lot of us
are „thems‰ of various sorts ˆ and have strong reasons to want to be
near our communities.
Don‚t get me wrong, I‚m not trying to persuade anyone to go city or
country mouse. What concerns me is that people instinctively reject
both choices for the wrong reasons. It may well be a good idea for
you to leave the city ˆ but maybe not too. What it should be is a
rational choice, not one based on an instinctive panic or a set of
false assumptions.
If you are going to reconsider the question of the city, here are
some books to get you started:
_Farm City:The Education of an Urban Farmer_ by Novella Carpenter. I
can‚t say enough good things about this book! Carpenter isn‚t writing
in some affluent neighborhood ˆ she‚s farming a slum in Oakland and
doing a damned fine job of it.
_The Toolbox for Sustainable City Living_ Scott Kellogg and Stacy
Pettigrew worked their ideas for reclaiming industrial spaces through
permaculture out in Austin, but now they are doing them in Albany, to
my delight! This is a wonderful book of practical, low cost tools for
real urbanites who want to have a future.
_The Integral Urban House_ by The Farallones Institute ˆ this book is
out of print, but still deeply valuable. Published in 1979 by a
branch of the Sierra Club, it is _The Encyclopedia of Country Living_
for the urbanite, covering everything from insulation to greywater,
mitigating soil contamination to managing wastes of all kinds.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Original article available here: http://sharonastyk.com/2010/01/12/
reconsidering-cities/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://chihuahuavalley.net
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