The Oil Drum

We will miss you Jane and we will keep fighting for your unique vision of better cities. You helped us realize all the little things that were right in front of us that makes cities great. Your work will be continued by organizations like Transportation Alternatives, Municipal Arts Society, NYC Street Renaissance, Open Plans, and many, many others. Your legacy is found not in what you built, but in what you taught us to preserve. Long after the buildings and highways that Robert Moses built have crumbled, your ideas will still be discussed, talked about and embraced by future generations.

Imagine instead of eating a Pizza (my favorite food), you were to separate the ingredients and eat them one at a time - first the bread, then the cheese, the sauce and finally the toppings. It wouldn't be the same right? It would be boring to eat and take a lot more time to do. That's what happens in the Suburbs - residential all in one spot, shopping in another, restaurants somewhere else, work off over the horizon...but nothing co-located. A city is supposed to be the opposite - encouraging the mixing of uses to bring all these ingredients together and combining them in different ways to create unique flavors and textures.

Why do I bring this up now?

Remember that while urban areas may be complex systems requiring significant energy inputs, they are 3-4x more energy efficient than suburban areas. Most people in NYC don't own a car because of good mass transit and dense mixed use residentital and commercial areas side by side. We also live in relatively small attached apartment houses which take less energy to heat, cool and illuminate.

When I mentioned this to a friend, he asked what Jane Jacobs thought of peak oil. That reminded me of something when back when we had the Petrocollapse conference.Kunstler Interviewed Jane Jacobs in 2000: