American cities and suburbs have a great deal in common with their Australian counterparts when it comes to food security. We simply have not viewed cities as part of the food security equation. Food is grown elsewhere, then trucked in at great expense and the idea of sustainable urban agriculture is a foreign concept to most Americans and Australians alike.Food security based on gardening:
Food security through retention of horticultural production within and close to cities, has barely been on the agenda, while home gardening is largely ignored as irrelevant to the sustainability debate. (Retrofitting the suburbs for sustainability, David Holmgren)And, like many suburbs in the United States, Holmgren says Australian suburbs and sprawl create unsustainable, dysfunctional economies. These problems will only increase as the credit crunch chews up neighborhoods and turns entire subdivisions and city blocks into foreclosure-generated ghost towns.
Along with “sprawl” has developed an increasingly dysfunctional economic situation. We see speculative inflation of land values, capital invested unproductively, declining household (non-monetary) production of food and “backyard industry”, and a massive rise of consumer addiction based on rising household debt. (Ibid)
High fuel prices, unsustainable commutes and higher consumer goods prices will drive many younger families and professionals back to the nation’s cities. However, the new equation is not likely to continue the same urban lifestyle and demographic patters that we see today.
Sustainability, urban gardening, food security based on home grown food, and a less petroleum driven lifestyle will continue to reshape the face of the nation’s cities. Higher prices, static incomes and economic insecurity will restructure the way we buy homes, whether we buy homes, condos or share living space, and how and where we purchase food.
Currently, much of our valuable farm land has been eliminated in favor of massive suburbs which are increasingly serving more as “places to lie down your head” than in real, sustainable neighborhoods. We do most of our living, playing and working anywhere BUT home.
Large areas of our cities have become "dormitory suburbs". The average household size is declining while ever-larger homes are increasingly empty during the working day. Their blind windows look out onto streets empty of people (but all too often filled with cars). There is an alienating lack of community resulting, ultimately, in increased crime and fear. (Ibid)
In a new work, Jack Lessinger notes that environmental pressures, not the consumer lending/subprime crisis, will cut the feet out from under our suburbs.
The sub prime debacle and the ensuing cavernous fall in home prices may finally sound the last bell tolled for suburbia. But, when asked for a cause of death, the answer won’t be bad lending practices, builder’s greed, devaluation, or even inflation. Can someone say, “It’s the environment, stupid”? That’s right, while Dr. Greenspan’s last-ditch gimmicks to save suburbia are coming unraveled (fed rates harkening back to the “Great Depression Era”, Please.), America appears to be on the verge of realizing that suburbia just isn’t environmentally sustainable, anyway. (Jack Lessinger, Transformation, the Fall of the Consumer Economy and the Rise of the Responsible Capitalist)
While it is too “politically incorrect” to hawk gentrification, this is where the nation’s cities are eventually headed. Those who have enough money to purchase homes, but not enough money to sustain long suburban commutes will be driven back to the nation’s cities, in a move that will increase demand for city real estate, making hereto fore unattractive, urban and ghetto real estate a prime rib of opportunity for the new urban homesteaders.
Lessinger believes that we are on the verge of a transformative lifestyle, a radical upheaval of American society based on the decline of petroculture.
Because it disrupts an old and familiar pattern of supply and demand, socioeconomic transformation produces massive uncertainty. Like poison in the economic bloodstream, uncertainty paralyzes energetic entrepreneurs and slows economic growth. Economic imbalances bring recession. Uncertainty—breeding and building during decades of transformation—brings depression. A period of unsatisfactory economic growth will not be corrected until transformation to the new society and economy is completed. Society changes slowly. (Ibid)
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
