Choosing What Our Cities Will Look Like in a World Without Oil

WorldChanging has a post on a talk (and book) by Curtin University's Peter Newman on the future of cities in the post-peak world - Choosing What Our Cities Will Look Like in a World Without Oil.

As we draw nearer to reaching the point of Peak Oil, it benefits us to imagine what our cities will look like in a world without oil. Does this conjure up images of cities turned into urban farms just to produce enough food for us all? Do we devote all our energy to growing, bartering and trading the food we grow? Or will the city become divided, with the wealthy moving to the center while higher costs of living force lower-income families to the outer-ring suburbs, where access to goods, services and transport will be limited?

If we start now, we can choose what we want our cities to look like in the future. We can make them the resilient, sustainable centers of culture, justice, art and creativity that we hope they will become.

Author and Professor Peter Newman is asking us to imagine and then get to work building these urban centers. His book and talk, both titled Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change, ask audiences to honestly look at what will happen to our cities when we reach Peak Oil. During his 90 minute presentation last night at Seattle's City Hall, Newman explained to the full house how peak oil will soon change reality as we know it; and how if we choose to make it so, we can take this challenge as our opportunity to create a functional, just and sustainable world.

Picturing a future where we do nothing resulted in some frightening scenarios: ones where we are barely getting by and injustice is running rampant. But, as Newman explained, picturing a future in which we respond to the challenge by building resilient cities results in images of a flexible and supportive, flourishing society.

In order to build the new resilient city of the future, Newman said that “we need to stop building extra urban road capacity and urban scatter; we need to start building electric renewable cities with much greater localism in the economy and infrastructure.”

“We need both at the same time," Newman said. "Or they will undermine what we need to do together.”

Here are a few exceptional points, summarized from Newman's worldchanging presentation:

End Agglomeration Diseconomies

The freeway is a failed technology. Freeways don’t actually ultimately help people get where they want to go any faster; they simply scatter people and economies. Freeways fail as public spaces; as infrastructure, they are dinosaurs. Their impact on cities is not good for economics or people. So we should stop building them. We should instead organize and advocate for rail systems so we can reclaim and rehabilitate our open spaces. Car-dependent cities can begin to reclaim freeways by investing in rail transit and building up local economies around station hubs.

Density, Walkability and Affordable Housing

High quality, high rise developments in the city will increase walkability, and decrease the number of trips taken by car. These developments will function best if developers work in partnership with land use planners. To end the division and disagreements that high density development creates, we have to require all developments to allot 15 percent of space to social housing, and require 5 percent of the value of a development to go toward social infrastructure, like landscaped open-to-the-public space, public art, community centers, schools, arts facilities.

Complete Streets, Smart Grids

Cars won’t go away completely, even though the oil we currently use to power them will. The cars of the future will run on alternatively produced electricity. We can link the extra energy produced from solar and wind production systems to the batteries in our cars with Smart Grids. These energy linking systems help buildings and transportation power each other.

Eco-villages colonizing the fringe

Build eco-villages on the outskirts of the urban ring. Built with their own water, power and sewage systems, we can turn the crumbling suburbs into self sustaining eco-communities of the future.

What We Need to do Now

Newman gave vibrant examples of each of these ideas happening in cities all over the world, from Seoul to London, Copenhagen to Vancouver, B.C., these cities are proving that this is possible. All we need now, said Newman, is imagination, post oil strategies, partnerships and demonstrations, and above all HOPE!

I think that most cities will muddle through without oil. Horses and carts or even human powered wheelbarrows would be the new porsches.

The real killer will be if they had to survive without electricity. What would happen if an isolated city e.g. Perth just had its power cut off without warning and it was never restored? Total chaos I would imagine.

An interesting question and having lived for a considerable time in Perth at one point including working at Curtin University as Peter Newman took on his new role as Professor of Sustainability it is interesting to see this book and others by Newman triggering some debate.

Perth without electricity would not be a pretty picture particularly at this time of year. Summers have just got longer and hotter or so it felt and life without air-conditioning would be intolerable for many. Last year on boxing day was 46 degrees. An interesting effect of the boom in WA was according to a friend in the trade a massive increase in people buying refrigerative air -conditioning units to replace the older style evaporative units. The result has been a very large increase in electricity usage.

Then we have to consider the very highly acclaimed desalination plant purportedly running on renewable energy resources. Yes about 15 percent comes from a wind farm further north, the rest from the grid. During the gas supply crisis in early 2007 the desalination plant was turned off for this reason.

WA is primarily reliant on gas for its electricity power stations and so the thin thread to Karratha is what keeps it ticking.

So hot and dry would be a good summary. Yes last winter was wet but the long term trend in Perth is a drying climate.

Maybe one of the main reasons for the excessive use of electricity is the fact that the unit price has not increased in over 17 years, I KID YOU NOT. I have a 1992 SECWA flyer and the tariffs are much the same as on Synergy's website now (plus 10% GST - Federal government).

People's big bills come from using alot of electricity, encouraged by the dirt cheap unit price of it. And it is bills that people pay, not unit prices, a fact sadly forgotten in the race to keep unit prices artificially low (Synergy and Verve are currently being bailed out by the state government to the tune of millions of dollars a day). The biggest encouragement to conserve is higher unit prices. People may still need airconditioning, after installing insulation and ceiling fans, but they can be smaller units and on less frequently.

As for Desal 1 being powered by wind, sorry but that is a furphy, the Renewable Energy Certificates were already sold to sombody else - desal 1 is run on black power like the rest of Water Corp despite aggresive marketing to the contrary. The ACCC finally picked this up.

Interestly, there is a proposal to put in a large transmission line to Geraldton which would open up the whole of the area to more wind - there are a large number of large windfarms proposed. All this wind plant would reduce the consumption of gas, though not the need for existing gas plant. It would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, supply local farmers with an extra income (wind turbine rent) and avoid the need to increase the size of the gas pipeline.

Grid expansion is something we need around the country in order to increase penetration of renewables in the power market - hopefully the Gerladton link goes ahead.

Its funny that Perth power prices are staying flat - they've been rising at double digit rates in NSW in recent years...

Even funnier, is that had prices kept up with inflation, then wind plant could probably be installed without the need for such high REC prices. We have more wind in WA than you have in NSW. High prices or high winds, either one will help the economics of wind - 20% crashes in the Aussie dollar notwithstanding!! The latest Windpower Monthly suggests that the global financial meltdown has yet to seriously hit the orderbooks and my manufacturer still demands eighteen months for delivery!

We need to be careful about the term grid expansion - there are many towns on the edge of grid here (OK, anywhere outside metro Perth and down to Bunbury) who really ought not to be linked up - interesting to see what the upcoming crash in PV prices (global production is going to go from less than 5GW a year to 20 - 30GW/year, THIS year) might do once Western Power Networks works out that PV generates when airconditioning maxs out the local network.

That said, already in SA they need transmission installed to enable further growth on the peninsulas. And for geographical spread to reduce wind variation. Here, we ought to put in adequate transmission to other windy areas such as the vast plains east of Albany as the wind regime there will be completely different to that just north of Perth.

A final note; the Office of Energy has recommended 50%+ increases for the price of electricity but the state government (ALP or Liberal, whatever) would rather bail out Verve and Synergy. Fingers crossed they will do it this year.

The main problem with rashing PV prices is that it will stop capacity expansion dead unless there is plenty of government enforced buying.

But I agree that in regional Australia (and the suburbs for that matter) that PV will help reduce the need for new plant if we make the sensible move of using it to shave off peak demand periods (form the point of view of the rest of the grid).

WA is lucky with wind - as you say, much more than NSW and good coverage between south and west coasts.

When I go to Perth I take my son onto an over-pass and say, "See all the cars, see all the people. How are we going to feed them without oil?"
The inputs to a wheat farm are fertiliser and oil. The output is wheat.(or barley for beer-which is better:)
The conversion ratio which I got from the oil drum is 10 units of oil energy makes 1 unit of food energy.
We are headed for yet another evolutionary bottle neck.
H Sap has recently aquired a cortex. He finds it uncomfortable. He prefers to have it anaethatised. With beer. His limbic system is quite adequate for his purposes.
I am hoping that the Son of Man will be at ease with his cortex. But it is hard to predict evolution's path.

There was an interesting Friday copy of the West Australian that arrived on my desk during the earlier gas supply crisis in 2007/2008.

The articles on the pages read separately meant nothing until with a wider understanding of the world you pieced them together.
Farmers were talking about bumper wheat crops and new land available due to cattle destocking because of the drought [Climate shift/ change]. They were encouraged by Wheat prices on the rise due to the increasing global shortage.
But what they failed to see was that WA soils need massive amounts of artificial fertilisers to produce anything. They are some of the worst soils in the world. The area around Perth in particular considered the Swan coastal plain.

“Soils of the Swan Coastal Plain are some of the least fertile in the world in their native state. The three main soil types are Spearwood sand, Karrakatta sand and Bassendean sand. There would be few soils in the world which have such little capacity to retain nitrogen as these.”

http://www.agric.wa.gov.au/content/hort/veg/nut/f07701.pdf

They are like big sponges that need large amounts of fertiliser to function.
Another article in the paper referred to the Indian owner of the Oswal Ammonia plant on the Burrup Peninsual [used for Fertiliser] being contacted to ask if some of the gas used by his factory could instead be diverted to Perth City to keep it running which he did and was hailed as a hero.
Later articles were concerned at the profit Oswal made from the crisis ;)
http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,23256960-2761,00.html

And of late Oswal has been counting the cost of the Varanus Island Gas explosion that severly affected WA in 2008.
http://www.thewest.com.au/default.aspx?MenuID=3&ContentID=113626

So in the end it can come down to do you want to run your car on LPG and have electricity or have fertiliser to grow the food for your ever expanding population.

Without fossil fuels many articles predict the carrying capacity of the planet to be as little as 2- 3 billion people. The future predictions of 9 billion will never come to pass.

"Cars won’t go away completely, even though the oil we currently use to power them will. The cars of the future will run on alternatively produced electricity."

If all cars are running on electricity, rather than oil, why would they "go away" even a little bit?

Peter Newman's ideas of future city planning are good before or after peak oil. No need to dress up with fear of running out of oil. Peak oil is a transportation problem that can be solved by replacing oil based transport with electric based transport, that includes electric mass transit but also electric single passenger vehicles, electric bicycles etc.

Some of the visionary cities of the last century( Brazilia, Canberra) should give a warning that today's visionary models may become dated. Will a future city be blighted by decaying high rises and abandoned mono-rails or decaying suburbs?
If more than 50% of the population is retired, and 90% of the rest work from home, those peaceful shaded green suburbs may look very attractive.

The New York Times has some interesting thoughts on renovating suburbia to keep it functioning.

http://arieff.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/what-will-save-the-suburbs/

I don't have a huge objection to clean, green suburbia in principle (I grew up in it and it was OK) but I find endless urban sprawl and the modern day suburbia of treeless, gardenless tracts of land covered in McMansions to be a long, long way from the suburban dream - give me high rise and transit oriented development (with plenty of parks) any day...

While I'm dropping in links about the future of suburbia, here's Tom Whipple's latest column plus another one from Alex at WorldChanging :

http://www.fcnp.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3987:th...

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009299.html

Unfortunately, the idea we can replace our current oil based transport with electric cars is a little bit simplistic.
The issues if it had been tackled 10 or even 20 years ago during earlier oil shocks might have been surmountable. However, if you read the literature on the subject [and I have] you rapidly come to the conclusion we have left it a little bit late [say 10 or 20 years].

The current developing world recession/ depression combined with the current low oil price is also killing off investment in renewable energy sources which take time to develop.

Many alternatives are touted for renewable energy such as wind, water and solar but the truth be told they require energy to produce them and time to change over the current infrastructure. With oil at $35 a barrel why should I go for an electric car people ask? Add to that the battery technology needs to improve or they will remain the expensive toys of the few. You should watch a copy of "Who killed the electric car"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car

Then realise why GM and other car manufacturers are currently getting their just deserves.

Peak Oil is not just a transport problem; but that it was so simple and electric transport has not as yet come of age.

Fifty percent retired!!! I very much doubt and since many retired people are now being forced back into the work force, since their superannuation has been devastated or putting off retirement for the same reason. The new evolving world doesn't seem to fit your utopian view.

The suburbs are a waste of time and exactly what jobs can 90 percent of the population do from home. Are you saying 90 percent of us are going to be telecommuting service workers? Unrealistic and people will in the near future have to relocalise in terms of their lives, work and food.

The car may be there in some form in the future, but in a far more limited capacity.

Correcting a few misconceptions above :

1. Peak oil is primarily a transport problem - go and look where most oil is used.

2. Its not too late to shift to electric transport - the economic downturn actually makes this more likely to happen, by delaying the peak and reducing its height (and thus the rate of the downslope). We'll be seeing green new deals driving the transformation to renewable energy + electric transport instead of high oil prices - which is probably a better way to do it.

3. I've yet to see any compelling evidence that we can't feed 9 billion people in the absence of oil.

I wish to differ and you completely over look our dependence on fossil fuels in agriculture. One of my earlier stints at Uni was at an Agricultural College/ Uni in North Wales so I took several units of Ag science and worked for an extended period up in Northern WA on a cattle station when first in Australia, so I have seen firsthand the dependency of modern agriculture on oil.

We can find some alternatives for transport, yes electrical mass transit railways etc powered by clean [;)]coal. But many sources and I will send them through confirm that without artificial fertilisers most of our main bread baskets would only produce about one third of their current levels of food.

The food crisis of last year has not gone away, it is simply not in the headlines at present- but it will be back in the near future.

I suggest you read Eating Fossil fuels [Oil, Food and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture] by Dale Allen Pfeiffer to give you some wider perspective on the impact of oil on food supply and subsequently population carrying capacity.

If it is true that according to projections by the U.S. Census Bureau, the annual world population growth will peak in 2011 at 80.9 million that still means we are adding roughly four times the population of Australia to the planet each year. The data on that site is also interesting since it does show the move inexorably towards the widely touted 9 billion.

http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpop.html

A nice visual is found at the following link that shows the growth in real time,

http://ibiblio.org/lunarbin/worldpop

But, that is all based on being able to increase agricultural production when everything is working against that dependency. Lack of water, soil degradation and the increasing cost of artificial fertilsers are making it harder and harder to maintain the Green revolution that has supported our population growth, but it is easy enough to find articles that point out that not all is well eg

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4994590.stm

http://www.foodfirst.org/media/opeds/2000/4-greenrev.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7078857.stm

http://www.overpopulation.org/whyPopMatters.html

To put agriculture into the oil context the following is useful to consider:

"The Green Revolution increased the energy flow to agriculture by an average of 50 times the energy input of traditional agriculture. In the most extreme cases, energy consumption by agriculture has increased 100 fold or more.

In the United States, 400 gallons of oil equivalents are expended annually to feed each American (as of data provided in 1994). Agricultural energy consumption is broken down as follows:

• 31% for the manufacture of inorganic fertilizer

• 19% for the operation of field machinery

• 16% for transportation

• 13% for irrigation

• 8% for raising livestock (not including livestock feed)

• 5% for crop drying

• 5% for pesticide production

• 8% miscellaneous8

Energy costs for packaging, refrigeration, transportation to retail outlets, and household cooking are not considered in these figures.

To give the reader an idea of the energy intensiveness of modern agriculture, production of one kilogram of nitrogen for fertilizer requires the energy equivalent of from 1.4 to 1.8 liters of diesel fuel. This is not considering the natural gas feedstock. According to The Fertilizer Institute (http://www.tfi.org), in the year from June 30 2001 until June 30 2002 the United States used 12,009,300 short tons of nitrogen fertilizer. Using the low figure of 1.4 liters diesel equivalent per kilogram of nitrogen, this equates to the energy content of 15.3 billion liters of diesel fuel, or 96.2 million barrels. "

Reference: http://www.energybulletin.net/node/281

The above is a good introduction to the book I mentioned earlier and so as I see it, we eat fossil fuels and so with less of them there cannot be more of us.

So I would say these are not misconceptions and are a viewpoint based on wide and informed reading. Just because you have come to different conclusions does not make mine and others conclusions misconceptions.

I take your mainstream view but would state simply "Argumentum ad ignorantiam" -[ A fallacy in which it is claimed that a proposition is true only because it had not been proven false (or that it is false only because it has not been proven true]

Blaidddrwg,
I agree with your statement that agriculture is almost totally dependent on fossil fuels, as is the rest of the economy. However, this is not the same as saying its completely dependent on oil, or that many of these activities cannot be replaced by nuclear or renewable electricity.

Your figures for energy use don't seem to add up. For example if all agriculture and distribution used EQUIVALENT energy in 400 gallons/person/year that approx 9 barrels oil/person/year, so fertilizer would use 2.8 barrels(31%).
But you stated that nitrogen fertilizer only used the EQUIVALENT energy of 96million barrels/300million people= 0.3 barrels/person/year.

ALL of US commercial trucking and rail uses 25% of total US oil(private vehicles 55%, aircraft 10-12%, heating and industry the rest). This is approx 3barrels/person/year. However, you claim that agriculture uses 35% ENERGY EQUIVALENT for field machinery and transport( mostly oil based) so at least 3 barrels of oil/person/year. That doesn't leave much for other transport. A more realistic number for OIL used by agriculture in 2008 would be 3% on farm and perhaps 5% for off-farm transport (20% of total truck transport/rail). That's excluding recreational vehicle use and other strictly non-agriculture activities(recreational shooting and fishing).

Of the list of energy uses in agriculture, all except some field operations and some medium distance transport can be readily replaced by nuclear or renewable electricity. It will be slow because farm machinery and trucks have a long life, but the decline in oil availability( at least for essential uses such as food production and transport) will also be slow.

Well - I read Dale Allen Pfeiffer's book 4 or 5 years ago (along with Richard Manning's "Against The Grain") and have seen many articles in a similar vein appear over the years.

However, I don't agree with their conclusions.

The amount of oil used for agriculture is just a small fraction of the total. If we shifted our other uses of liquid fuel (ie. transport) to electricity from renewable sources (which can be scaled to meet all our needs and more if required) we wouldn't have any problems with agriculture based on a lack of oil / fertiliser / pesticides etc

So there isn't a problem with population per se - just with how we use the resources we have available to us.

I did a long winded rant on this subject a while back, in which I also noted that we should probably try to rid ourselves of the fertiliser / pesticide paradigm as much as possible anyway, and that some studies show organic farming methods can have just as good a yield as following industrilaised "green revolution" methods.

http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2007/10/fat-man-population-bomb-and-green...