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201 comments on Can We Stay in the Suburbs?

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budr on April 17, 2008 - 11:20am Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

Excellent post Aaron. I have always thought that Kunstler has overly discounted the ability of Suburban neighborhoods to beome much more food/energy independent than they are now. The widespread employment of microfarms and simple improvements to reduce energy could make make Suburbs much more viable in the future. Ofcourse some will degrade to slums, but the potential is surely there. I have a 100 sq foot garden in my saburban home that produces 150 lbs of produce per season (using mostly compost for fertilizer). It could easily be expanded to 20 times that size -- and I would have no problem transitioning my yard from ornamentals to food producers. With respect to energy I have taken steps to reduce my energy use by some 40% with only modest financial investment. I could reduce it much further with modest investment and some life style changes.

So I believe the tools are available to transform much of suburbia towards much higher sustainablity. Just have to hit the point of pain where it becomes desirable, or necessary.

Best wishes for Saburban Microfarms.

Budr

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Dayahka on April 18, 2008 - 1:08am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I wholeheartedly echo your comments that "I have always thought that Kunstler has overly discounted the ability of Suburban neighborhoods to become much more food/energy independent than they are now." The entire article is a good start to thinking past the dogmatism of Kunstler. One thing I did not see mentioned is the move away from flush toilets to compost toilets, which allow us to use the results to improve the land and do away with a total waste of water (IMHO). Another point to consider is that the suburbs of the last 60 years were not the first time we had "suburbs" with living spaces widely separated from each other: in the "old" West, each family had a homestead and went into town once a month or even once a year (by horse). I prefer the city and a small patch of land as I once had in Denver, but lots of other people could manage from the suburbs, small local villages. Anyway, good article.

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artaxt on April 18, 2008 - 9:43am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

The only difference being that the homesteaders weren't commuting to work every day. The idea of suburbs is not that living spaces are widely separated. Instead, it's the idea that a person can live far from work, so that they don't have to wake up in a noisy, dirty city.

Living in New Jersey, suburbs are pretty much the rule. There are various levels of suburbia though. Most of the older developments near the city are pretty crowded. They might sit on 1/10 to 1/4 of an acre. Fortunately, the houses aren't too big, but the yards are still small, and if you happen to be on the wrong side of the street most of the land that could be a garden is shaded. The middle aged developments tend to be sited on larger parsels of land and are farther from city centers. They usually sit on 1/2 to 1 acre of land. Shade still plays a big factor in how much of the property is actually usable, but not as badly as with the older houses unless they happen to have a number of trees. The newer developments go one of two ways depending upon the zoning laws for the town. First, they can be even more crowded than the older developments. The houses almost universally have 1/10 acre plots and a huge footprint for the house. It's not uncommon to have 3500 sq. ft. houses on tiny parsels of land. The other trend is monster houses on 3-5 acres of land.

Barring other factors, the owners of the monster houses might have a chance of growing enough food (minus grains) for a normal sized family. Unfortunatley, one of the first things that developers do when preparing a build site is to bulldoze off all of the top soil and replace it with sod. The other types of suburbia don't stand a chance of growing a reasonable amount of food with the land they have. Limited space and shade from trees and, more importantly, the very house that we're trying to save get in the way.

In the absence of a robust transportation network that can move enormous amounts of food from where its grown to where its eaten, the suburbs (at least in New Jersey) simply won't work. The Green Revolution has allowed us to pave over and build on what used to be very good growing land, and it's going to be very difficult to get it back into use.

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201 comments on Can We Stay in the Suburbs?

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