Suburbia's Adaptability to Life After Cheap Oil

Suburban development is usually looked at as detrimental to the environment and energy conservation, but David Holmgren envisions suburbia's adapdability to life after cheap oil.
EnergyBulletin.net | Peak Oil and Permaculture: David Holmgren on Energy Descent | Energy and Peak Oil News:
by Adam Fenderson -- June 7, 2004

...we can look at our suburbs and say they are an infrastructure. Our cities water system has the biggest articulated agricultural landscapes in Australia. So the water is there. We have an infrastructure of hard surfaces that actually harvests storm water, which is seen as a problem at the moment, which allows augmentation of natural rainfall to direct that water into the remaining areas that are potentially productive. We've got mostly individual houses that can be retrofitted to have solar access because they're generally set far enough back from neighboring houses to get that. Now that might involve cutting down a lot of gum trees in those leafy suburbs, but there's a lot of ways in which the suburbs can be incrementally retrofitted in an energy-descent world.

One of the things I think a lot of the urban planners miss is that they assume that any future framework will be driven by public policy and forward planning and design. Whereas, I think, given the speed with which we are approaching this energy-descent world, and the paucity of any serious consideration of planning or even awareness of it, we have to take as part of the equation that the adaptive strategies will not happen by some big, sensible, long range planning approach, but will happen just organically and incrementally by people just doing things in response to immediate conditions. So if you live in an apartment in a multistory building, and you've got to work out how to try and retrofit that in an energy-descent context, there's a lot of complex, technical infrastructure and organization involved. In the suburbs people can actually just start changing houses and doing things—give or take planning regulations—without the whole of society agreeing on some plan. The suburbs are amenable to this organic, incremental, adaptive strategy.

In practical terms, what that really means is that big suburban houses that have one to three people living in them, mostly not present, will actually re-adapt to have people work from home based businesses and retrofitted garages with workshops and people making things, even with food production in them, will increase. The street, which is a dead place at the moment in suburbia, will again become an active space because people will be present rather than commuting away. Now that re-creation of active urban life will be not that much different to what existed prior to and even into my childhood in the 1950s. It's not really a radical a thing to envisage suburban life where there are larger households—whether that's a family or shared households where people are taking in borders to help pay the rent or mortgage or whatever, and help share the tasks that need to be done in larger, more self-reliant households. So I'm quite optimistic about how the suburbs can be retrofitted.