I understand from your blog that you live in Canada. I think this must have informed your perspective somehow. In Canada you produce food, have a wealth of resources and the potential for a lot more with global warming. So there is at least a semblance of a link, no matter how abstracted it has become, between what happens in cities and the land around you.

Last year I did a masters degree in Urban Planning and it was incredibly boring. But, along the way, i became very interested in the unchallenged assumption behind a lot of public policy that the economy will grow forever. House prices will rise, there will be this many more white collar jobs over the next decade, the demand for call centres will keep growing, we need this many more shops to cope with the retail demand, etc etc etc…. The government say this, and no-one challenges it, though in fact it is completely irrational. Because the whole basis of the growth is flawed, for the very reasons you identify. Economic growth in its current form just reinforces an unsustainable pattern of consumption, that will one day collapse. And I believe that the collapse has now started.

Anyway, i live in Britain. I begun to wonder what our economy is based on. We dont manufacture anything and we dont have any large scale food production, anymore. On the latter point, the government are even paying farmers to take fields out of agricultural production. I dont understand why they do this, it is a total mystery. The economic situation we currently have is that the only driver of the British economy is the financial services sector. That is it. You can even read reports by the office of national statistics that say things like ‘without the financial services, there would be little need for the British Isles in the 21st Century’. Everything else is just creaming off this one, bloated industry which is now teetering on the verge of collapse.

To cut a long story short, i think were going to have to go down the ‘hard way’ here in Britian. We are so dependent on financial services we are now completely screwed if/when it does all go wrong. Ultimately, We will need to go back to the land to survive. We dont have any capacity for industrial produciton, even. And, we will probably end up mining our coal again, as well. So, im sorry to say, from where i am sitting it is all looking a bit depressing. If theres a point to this very long comment it is this: I can see how things might look a lot better in Canada.

As for your comment about financial speculators, it’s a good point. The problem with our system of exchange is that it has become so complex that it’s easier to make money by manipulating the system rather than actually exchanging or producing something. The production and exchange of money becomes increasingly detached from any sort of physical reality- but, the money made in that context can still lay claim to very real physical resources (cars, houses, yachts, you name it). I’ve always found it strange that places can have finance as their main “industry”. Is it an industry at all?

So you have a measure of wealth that, really, has little relation to the physical world beyond our own ideas of supply and demand, and yet that wealth has very real physical effects. The current economic mess in the US might have the silver lining of bringing finance back down to earth, literally. Again, the problem with finance is not the idea itself, it is how it is used- making money off money as opposed to genuinely productive investment (like environmental tech). If interest in renewable energy in these sectors is more than a fad (which I hope and think it is), then that is slow positive change in the right direction.

This makes me think of a realization I had will I was working in northern Mozambique (probably one of the more rural, isolated parts of the world you could find). I mean here are people written off by your average industrial denizen as “desperately poor” (as in they exist quasi-outside the global industrial system).
But there, I met people who could build their own homes, grow/fish/catch/kill their own food (and cook it) and do god knows what else without a thought. Meanwhile, my survival depends on a bunch of numbers in a computer database somewhere. I know little to nothing about where any of my food comes from. The power goes out for an hour and you’d think it was the apocalypse around here. Or god forbid their is no cell reception.

So in strange way, who is really worse off if things hit the fan?

Where I am going with this slightly disjointed tirade is this…I think that the economic mess that is emerging right now is intimately related to environmental problems in the way that we have become so detached from what supports us that we believed we could survive on money- scratch that, debt. Change to the fabric of cities- how they are built, thrive or fail - is going to be concurrent with changes in our economic and financial thinking.

I think enough people see the trouble up ahead that we can pro-actively adjust. Because then there is the “hard way” alternative, exemplified by Detroit: urban farming has made a big comeback because the industrial economy there has basically collapsed.

Do you think an economic downturn will help prompt the ‘transformation of economic thinking’ that you talk about above? I mention this because consciousness of environmental issues has really only hit the cultural mainstream in the last three years or so, at the tail end of the biggest economic boom in history. I suppose that when you are earning lots of money and your life is relatively easy, its easier to care about things like pollution, global warming and the future of the planet. When your main issue is surviving and looking after your family, these things are less important.

Im saying this because I can see the transformation that you are discussing happen in the world around me. I think we are seeing a kind of economic ‘rush to stability’ take place, this is probably the real reason why oil and food prices are what they are - less to do with supply and demand than the changing habits of financial speculators. However, in reality, there is no such thing as stability, it is only ever a construct. There is only the land that we live off, and the people that work it, and the people who control it. If this is the lesson of whatever is coming to us, economically, then perhaps our system of exchange (that money is a product of), will be more sustainable.

Where i am going with this slightly disjointed tirade is this… perhaps cities are not the future at all.

I don’t see any example anywhere which currently demonstrates the real emergence of this thinking in an urban form. It will take some time- and let’s hope we can afford it. It’s easy to be hard on China (take a whiff of that sweet air!), but at the same time we are all still stuck in the old thinking. Which is why the new Beijing- the 20th century with a shiny architectural facelift- is declared visionary by so many (or at least so many on the payroll of Western media outfits).

If Beijing defines the end of the twentieth century, what example would you use to demonstrate the emergence of the next? Ive thought about this question quite a bit myself, and i have no idea what the answer is. The problem is the underlying assumption behind the ‘global industrial dream’ that you allude to in the post, that economic growth is permanent and unending and not restrained by diminshing natural resources, is coming unstuck in a big way. If all the wealth that has driven the growth of the global economy is essentially an illusion, and this is reflected in the form of cities, where do we go from here? answers on a postcard please….

Only i think you hit a wrong season… its usually very sunny in Belgrade during the most of the year (well, not autumn and winter of course).

Greets from Belgrade