Future-proofing Our Towns and Cities
By the end of 2008, more people will live in towns
and cities than in rural areas.
This by itself would be nothing to worry about.
What is worrying is quite how badly we've designed these cities.
Our cities sprawl outwards over the land, polluting the air and the
rivers, speeding us towards global catastrophe. And they are
massively dependent on cheap, plentiful energy from fossil fuels.
Energy that will soon be a lot less cheap and plentiful, thanks to
the twin threats of climate change and peak oil.
So what can we do? Some of the changes we need
to make are relatively painless. Insulating our houses,
switching to more efficent lightbulbs and appliances etc,
re-plumbing our homes to use greywater and rainwater whenever
possible. Doing these things may cost a little more to begin
with, but afterwards they will actually save us money.
Unfortunately, correcting our utter dependency on oil will take a
little more work. A house without power will still provide us
with shelter. But a car without petrol is just two tonnes of
useless metal. You can no longer drive to work
to earn money for food, or to the shops to buy it.
But what about the much touted alternative fuels? Hydrogen and
biofuels.
Well, hydrogen is not actually an energy source.
You can't just go out and drill for hydrogen. You have to
produce it. And it will always take much more energy to
produce that hydrogen than you'll ever get back out of it with a
fuel-cell. Solar panels and wind turbines provide only a small
percentage of our current electricity needs, never mind producing
enough extra electricity for hundreds of millions of cars.
Plus it would cost billions, billions that would be far better spent
elsewhere.
A massive switchover to biofuels would be similarly
flawed. We've already seen the knock on effects with the
recent global food shortages, and that's before we start producing
biofuels on any kind of useful scale.
Car manufacturers would do far better to invest in
making their cars as efficient as possible.
But we need to stop trying to fix the car, and start
fixing our towns and cities instead.
That means making them far more compact, mixing homes and shops and
work places together rather than building them miles apart, making
our streets a good deal more pedestrian and bicycle friendly, as
well as improving public transport, and it means growing a lot more
food locally.
Such towns and cities will be better for the environment. And
they'll be better for us.
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