I disagree. I think that the less densely populated the region, the better. People living in really remote areas will fare better than those living in agricultural deserts, rural people will fare better than those in the suburbs, and suburbans will fare better than city dwellers. The more land, better topsoil & more water one has available the better, altho when mass starvation impends defending a crop from hungry marauders won't be easy.

FiniteQuantity, you need to look around the corner. The problems you describe of small town workers losing their jobs and having to move long distances for another job is an issue for 2008. By 2009 people everywhere will be losing their jobs and by then a rural location will be a much better survival choice. This is not going to play out as "a rough patch in the economic road" but as a collapse of the economic system as we know it.

Rural towns will be hard hit, of course, and poverty will be rampant.

However, rural poverty will be quite tolerable compared with urban squalor. For a while, anyway, people will imagine that their chances are better in the city, and the rural poor will continue to sell their sons and daughters into urban slavery, but cannibalism is self-limiting. Cities are not the wave of the future.

Re: Getting to a job....There is an underlying assumption that business as usual (BAU) continues in some form and that people have jobs to get to. I have long argued that BAU based upon an economy that relies on consumer spending for 60%+ of GDP is a dead end.

Aside from population overshoot exceeding our resources bases, one has to consider all of the turmoil in the financial markets and the vast, essentially unpayable, debt of individuals, corporations and governments. In my view, a collapse of some kind is inevitable. Whether it follows the five stages of collapse outlined by Orlov - http://www.energybulletin.net/print.php?id=40919 - or not is unimportant to me.

What is important is the degree to which people can provide for their own needs. In this, I agree with dd above that it is more likely that people in less densely populated areas will probably have a better chance.

One decided advantage of living in the boondocks as I do is that one has to have a large skill set to survive. We have immediate knowledge of what it takes to get by because that's the way we live now. We are also used to living low on the hog and making do. We are used to co-operating on projects and helping each other.

Here's a real life example of what I mean: We get snowed in for 1-3 weeks every winter and often more than once. The power may or may not be on. It gets old after a while but it's hardly the end of the world. My question would be, "How many urban or suburban people would take this as the natural course of life?" But, isn't this closer to what the future may hold than BAU?

Todd

I agree, Finite.

I agree because I live in Exurbia, in the outer asteroid belt, and people ARE losing their jobs, scraping by on what few benefits they can get (and out here in Reddest Red America, getting a gov't check even if just for Food Stamps is a badge of honor) and the percentage of homeless is the highest you'll find outside of San Francisco's Tenderloin.

And hi-rises if they are surrounded by ponds and fields, classic say Vietnamese style intensive farming, are very green. As green as Viet or Indian type shacks? No, but far more green than the 2-3 acres and a horse and 100+ miles commute daily that's the norm here. Or the gov't check for people not growing anything (you can't here) and living on Kraft mac and cheese.