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A Word from Richard Risemberg for July, 2003Food and Fuel
No smog, no noise, no traffic jams; no asphalt wastelands, no dreary commutes; no treks across bleak parking lots, no glaring aisles of tasteless food and sullen wage-slaves; no homes and businesses and tax base lost to traffic lanes, no oil wars, no miles of sprawl scabbed over the valleys and the hills…instead, a world of sidewalk tables where you can converse without having to shout; of clean and quiet subways speeding smoothly underground; of children playing in the streets, of merchants who will know your name and stock your favorite wine or bread or brand of socks; of a government that can afford good schools, fast trains, rich libraries, and handsome parks; of a life with room and time for life in it. And the most delicious side-effect of all: food will taste better, everywhere you go. How will that work? As most of you will know (and those who don't should look at J. H. Crawford's Carfree Cities site for a thorough overview), cities become energy efficient by putting more people into smaller areas, while they become emotionally more satisfying by not trying to fit their cars in there with them. Since a car takes up much more room than a human--to cite just one of many factors, each car in a city requires an aggregate of eight parking spaces!--taking cars out lets one increase density without increasing crowding. Collective transport--one of the main factors that helps a city become efficient--works better the more persons are within an eight minute walk of a transit stop. And of course, if a three-meter-wide road serves a block of 1,000 residents in a carfree city, where an automobile-dependent block requires a 15-meter-wide road that serves only a hundred; if likewise the same hundred meters of water, sewer, electric, and other utility structures serve the block of 1,000 rather than the block of one hundred; then public financing of the urban commons is likewise cheaper, along with energy use. So, as my girlfriend asked recently, if the twelve million people of the greater Los Angeles area now fit into one-tenth the space, and all the extraneous asphalt and redundant structures are gone, what will we do with all that extra space? Well, the first answer that comes to my mind is: Nothing: let's give it back to the world and let the deer and the panthers and the hawks and the butterflies and all our co-denizens of the earth have a place to live too. That's not so bad an idea, is it? The second answer is, naturally, parks and such, of course. But the best answer is perhaps to put farms there. Modern agriculture is a mess. It's almost completely oil-dependent, not just to transport food hundreds to thousands of miles from megafarms to cities and towns, but also for the synthetic fertilizers and poisons dumped on the plants and soils to maximize yield while minimizing labor costs. As cities and suburbs sprawl, they crowd farms farther and farther from their markets and onto ever-more-marginal land that requires ever more fertilizer; farming becomes so expensive that big corporations take over the provenance of food, and one way that they enhance their bottom line--which is the only thing they care about--is to minimize the variety of foods they offer you, thus simplifying their supply chains and their inventory management. The result is tasteless food of minimal nutritive value, further degraded by the dollops of salt and fat required to make it palatable at all. When we first took my son to a high-end restaurant where they served what are nowadays called "heirloom tomatoes"--which were daily fare everywhere a few decades ago--he said that if all tomatoes tasted like this, he would eat them every day. But of course they don't. Well, they can. Small, locally-owned farms right next door to your carfree conurbation would mean that every market was a farmer's market, that every vegetable was fresh and tasty and cheap, and that an immense variety of foodstuffs would be available on every corner. Small farmers, like small merchants, have more flexibility to accommodate their customers' tastes--rather than dictate them as the bigbox stores must do. Even more so if those farmers are, as they then would be, members of the communities they serve. And the nearly costless transport means that even labor-intensive organic produce would be cheaper than the bland food pebbles you now find on your supermarket shelves. Impossible, you say? Not so, my friends: it works even now, in our imperfect and oil-stained economy. I have a permanent farmer's market twenty minutes' walk from my apartment, and several weekly farmer's markets, on various days, within five miles. In every case, the food they sell is better tasting, more nutritive, freer of poisons and fertilizers, and cheaper by far, than the same vegatables my neighborhood supermarket sells--although the variety the supermarket offers is much smaller. In the new world we envision here, we would have a paradise for foodies. Everyone would eat like rich folks do, and probably better. And it wouldn't cost us as much as it does now.
These aren't radical ideas. They've been out in the world at least since Chris Alexander and his team published So what are we waiting for? We're all hungry for justice, for equity, for sustainability, and for lunch. Let's get to work on it today!
Richard Risemberg Go to A Word from Eric Miller
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A preponderance of the talk extolling the advantages of a denser, pedestrian-oriented urban development focuses on energy efficiency and social richness--and well it should. Densely-developed carfree neighborhoods--filled with people walking narrow streets and sunny squares among a multitude of small and friendly shops, cafés, and so forth, and going home to, among other things, rows of townhouses surrounding private mini-parks in the center of each block--would combine the tranquility many seek in the suburbs with the excitements found only in the city, while not burdening individuals or their government with the myriad costs of car-centered development.