the question at hand
Let’s pretend, for a moment, that we’re doing a project about the suburbs. What’s going on, in 2010, post housing-market crash? Are poorer people moving out there? Are the people out there just seeming poorer by virtue of lost jobs? Are the houses losing value?
What’s going to happen when the energy for heating, cooling, and commuting gets to be expensive? Really expensive?
My theory is that those houses will be abandoned, or possibly filled with the disenfranchised, living off the grid post-apocalypse style, see California Love. Can you dig it? In a way, this isn’t a totally disagreeable image. There must be a thousand post-apocalypse stories which essentially boil down to a dream of a simpler life, where choices are clearer and there are only two ways to be, a kick-ass survivor or dead. Where the urban landscape, embodying the money and the master plan of people richer and more powerful than you, has become merely a surface to navigate, a derelict playground divested of rules, conventions and the need to share space with a million other people.
An emptier place.
Unfortunately, most of these stories seem to be predicated on one particularly flawed premise, which is that the world will be an emptier place when all of those resources run out. In fact, it’s likely to be a more crowded place, with an ever-increasing need for housing. So while we might not have the resources to maintain all of those suburban homes, chances are they will be occupied anyway. Sound like a recipe for horrible things like rampant violence, disease, injury and fear?
The ability of an elected governing body to create a semblance of order is inextricably tied to its ability to guarantee a degree of safety and consistency, and equally important, resources such as water, food, and power to its constituents. I don’t love the idea of a big unwieldy bureaucracy, with attendant corruption and costs. But in light of the fact that I’m not alone in the world, it seems like a not-unreasonable sacrifice to give up the illusion of being sole master of my destiny, in favor of being able to access the information, the creativity, the tools and ingenuity and systems that are a product of organized human networks.
With that in mind, it seems to me that something has to be done about the suburbs before they are beyond repair, and beyond the reach of a city’s, a society’s, resources.
It has to be systematic, an intervention at every level, and one of those levels is the individual house. The split-level McMansion cookie cutter snout-house: I think maybe I might have some ideas for what to do about them.
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