Meeting with Permaculture North & West, Sue from PW raised the issue of our Western suburbs – and by extension, the question of suburbia generally.
Business as usual for people who live a long way from their jobs & public transport (and further than walking or biking distance from shops and social amenities) looks a worry – but the transition model doesn’t depend on business as usual.
‘McMansions’ are rarely energy efficient – often with quite a lot of internal space and with large inefficient windows because they are not oriented north or, if they are, are not shaded in summer. They probably don’t have useful thermal density because they are not very solid (or as a man who builds passive solar houses said to me, they have thermal mass, insulation and reflective surfaces exactly where they shouldn’t, or are even ‘inside out’). Retrofitting them would be an interesting challenge.
But the suburbs are not doomed for lack of space to grow food, collect and recycle water and produce goods. They have plenty of space, if not always in their own gardens.
We perceive them as less communal because we assume people have chosen to live in these rather isolated spaces without community facilities because they don’t want to know their neighbours. We also make the historically odd assumption that because they are possibly less educated and not so well off as the middle classes who can afford the inner city, that they are and will remain politically passive. In fact, we hold the stereotype that people who live in suburbia are really part of the problem. Not organised as the working class; not aware like the intellectual middle class… Radicals can be terrible snobs.
In fact, we know (if we think about it) that many end up in the more isolated suburbs because they can’t afford nicer areas, and yet want decent housing and room for their children to play. Quite a lot of people in suburbia didn’t chose to be there at all – teenagers, for example. Many in suburbia will still belong to unions and may well belong to decent churches, so it is not true that there are no communication channels.
Many of them will actually be within easier reach of farms than inner city dwellers – and only a generation away from living on the land.
We know we face a problem with high density communities. As I think Rob Hopkins pointed out, inner cities may have lower energy & carbon footprints than the suburbs – but they face bigger problems on resilience because of space.
The Transition model, and the work of James Howard Kunstler (as he describes in The End of Suburbia and his book The Long Emergency), incline quite strongly to what I might call a ‘market town’ vision. There is no question that this is rather appealing. Large and central enough to have nice bookshops and cafes and some ‘urban’ jobs, but within easy reach of fields and farmers – and if the town for some reason has already attracted artists or greens, probably relatively easy to organise. A market town can be a good place to live. (I grew up in one – a large one which is already appearing on the Transition radar.)
But most of us do not live in market towns. CBD & inner city dwellers; residents of suburbia; and at the other end of the scale, isolated farmers – most of us live where there is not much space per person OR further than a bike ride away from jobs & amenities. Or both. But people in suburbia may even live at the right density to grow & produce enough locally but close enough to co-opt their nearest mall as a distribution centre.
Those of us who want to bring about transition for the Sydney Basin – none of us, I believe, are interested in the ‘lifeboat’ model (‘to hell with the rest of you’ in a wholly self-sufficient and detached community, probably requiring guns to protect it). Our instincts tell us we’re in this together, and that the Sydney Basin, NSW, Australia and beyond have to work something out for all of us. This includes developing a powerful and atractive vision for the suburbs – and why not?