Urban Design After The Age Of Oil

A number of great journalists were covering last weekend's Re-Imagining Cities: Urban Design After the Age of Oil symposium in Philadelphia. The University of Pennsylvania School of Design and Penn Institute for Urban Research hosted this conference, which was organized with support from the Rockefeller Foundation to address the need to re-imagine and rethink how cities are designed and organized in a future without oil. Our own Alex Steffen gave a mainstage talk at the international event, which featured a number of thinkers whose work we've written about before here, like Bull Dunster, Elizabeth Kolbert, Robert Socolow, Andy Revkin, William J. Mitchell, David Orr, Neal Pierce, Bill Rees, Thomas Campanella, Harrison Fraker, and ARUP's Sir Peter Head.

From brief recaps of plenaries and workshops to lengthier discussions of the theories presented (and their presenters), the pieces posted to the Next American City liveblog offer a taste of what was seen and heard at this innovative gathering of great minds:

Read the whole story here.

Comments

[Semaj51]

Before you get people moving back into the cities, you must satisfy the reasons they moved out in the first place.

[KillTheMessenger]

Before we can fix the cities we need enough people with money to move back. And somewhere between your statement and mine lies the problem...

[JScott]

Well we could first stop popping out so many humans on the planet

If we don't it'll be like the urban monads of the sci fi book "The World Inside" (google it)
most all of the 76 billion of population lives in huge sealed buildings-it's a crime to go outside-the
rest of the planet is all ag, no wilderness and no other animals, kinda shocking

[KillTheMessenger]

We already have. Human population will likely not exceed 11-12 billion people, which is a number that can be supported (although not easily) if most of us live in suitable urban environments.

The 76 billion figure is nonsense and, as you say, comes from a SciFi book, not serious research literature.

[1rewd1]

Excuse me, but I'm getting a bit tired of all this "end of times" crap that's gripping this nation.

Turn on the TV and you are constantly bombarded with "specials" about what the world will be like without humans and how everything we seem to base our lives on is doomed.

Look, oil isn't going anywhere despite what the Greentard movement wants to shove down the world's throat, and neither is coal or nuclear. This past year and a half the world's economy was brought to it's knees not only by malfeasance and in the financial sector but also in the commodity sector.

Oil will be quite prevalent as long as "green" sources remain expensive and boutique.

[KillTheMessenger]

Not sure where you are getting your "information" from but oil is going away. It's just not doing so on a two week schedule. But on a twenty year time scale (which is from birth to freshman year of your kids), oil and natural gas economics will change very significantly. Now, that alone means exactly nothing because as oil and gas become more expensive, renewable alternatives and efficiency measures become more competitive and can replace the production volumes of oil and gas that will get lost due to peak oil and international competition for these resources.

Indeed, tv is not a particularly good source of insight of what is going in in the urban design arena. Traveling to major population centers and taking a first hand look, on the other hand, is. And there are also any number of professional publications which contain the specifics and the numerical data.

As far as urban design is concerned, energy efficiency was never the main driver for other nations. Social and economic factors like higher standards of living in inner cities and the need to house and employ more people on finite real estate were far more important. The US, which suffered from a lack of will to tackle these problems effectively (e.g. by paying for schools rather than prisons) basically gave up on its inner cities and it deployed its enormous area to defer rather than to solve the problems. Hence we have suburbia, Europe and Asia have
modern cities.

[1rewd1]

Of course oil is "going" away, but only because there is a movement afoot to actively discourage locating it.

As far as urban design goes ... I'll take it seriously when I see windfarms on the roofs of every building in Chicago.

[ImagesAndAdjectives]

The International Energy Agency released it's 2008 Energy Outlook today. Go check it out. It's not Greentards. It's about as common knowledge as you're going to get. We're running out of cheap oil, and it's going to take the equivalent of 4 more NEW Saudi Arabias to keep us in the "black" so to speak.

http://www.iea.org/Textbase/press/pressdetail.asp?PRESS_REL_ID=275

[KillTheMessenger]

Exactly. We are running out of CHEAP oil. So we will have to pay more and use a little less. Big deal, not. In any case, you might have noticed that the IEA beats the dead horse of "constant growth scenarios" year after year after year as if it would make any more sense today than it has in the 1970s (which saw a decline after the oil shock). But I suppose if all you have is a hammer, the world looks like an anvil. To extrapolate from 2008 to 2030 with a single parameter model is like a kid playing with legos and pretending to be the architect of a skyscraper.

So what will happen in reality? Well, Europe will go out on a limb with energy efficiency and renewables. India and China will grow, but not in as much a capitalist and purely egocentric fashion as we might expect. The nightmare of two billion people driving an SUV will never materialize (physics won't let that happen). It will be interesting to watch how these countries will solve their transportation problems (I would keep my eyes on buses, subways, streetcars and high speed trains). The US will limp behind the rest of the world, whining that it can't have gas turbine powered monster trucks on 30 wheels that can be parked ABOVE the garage without even as much as touching the roof with the differentials.

[KillTheMessenger]

So what are we talking about here? American urban design being at least thirty years behind the times? That is not even newsworthy. Anybody who has ever been to major centers in Europe and Asia knows that.

[santaklaus]

It may not be newsworthy, but it is certainly debate-worthy. This site is not so much about "news" but about opinions and debate.
There needs to be a debate about new urban planning in America.

[KillTheMessenger]

I can certainly fully agree with that.