NEO-URBANISM - A BAD IDEA

City planning concepts come and go. There have been many good ones - from the garden city concept proposed in the sketches and writings of Ebenezer Howard to Van Haussman's plan for Paris to move troops swiftly through the city. But there's a new wave of thought emerging called "Neo-urbanism." Being espoused by peak oil theorists as the correct way to go (and we need to do it now - oh, and let's bash a few architects along the way), the concept is simple: societies will abandon sprawling suburbs to re-populate newly redeveloped walkable urban centers. There will be a rebirth of local, high density, population centers with locally-grown agricultural products. (Food will no longer be mass produced on an uber scale by diesel-powered machinery on mega-farms; neither will it be imported from far away places - so goodbye to strawberries in February!) These densely packed population centers will be connected by a network of rail systems because cars will become a thing of the past - since no one will be able to afford them anyway as the cost of oil spirals to astronomical heights in direct relationship to the supply of oil becoming more scarce.

Of course, being an architect, I am intrigued by the concept - beautifully landscaped, appropriately scaled, pedestrian-friendly environments - but here's why this neo-urbanist concept won't work. Let's take our fair city, Washington, DC, for example. First, the price tag for a modest townhouse in a "desirable" and safe quadrant of the city will start at $800,000 - and that's for a "fixer-upper." Who has this kind of money? You can, of course, risk your life and be an urban pioneer choosing to live in a "less desirable" neighborhood and dodge bullets everytime you walk home from the Metro. When I've challenged this concept, proponents of neo-urbanism retort that populations will just have to downsize and return to renting single rooms in other people's houses. Right now, Rob & I own a 4 BR, 2 BA house - I've got to tell you, it would be tough for us to scale down to the point where we could live out of one room in someone else's house - with 2 doggies.
Second, there's not enough real estate in cities for everyone to move back into them. The only way to support huge migrations of people moving back into cities is to build skyscrapers - the very building type that peak oil theorists despise because skyscrapers use tremendous amounts of energy and resources (not only to construct but also to maintain over their life cycle) and because skyscrapers can not be renovated once they are past their prime - they have to be torn down (again, using up tremendous resources). Third, the infrastructure can not support huge dense population centers living together. Concentrating masses of people together in one place breeds unsanitary living conditions. Shoot, just walking to my office from the Metro station at Farragut West, you can see how much difficulty people have just keeping chewing gum in their mouths as evidenced by the flattened black spots on the sidewalks stretching as far as the eye can see. Can you imagine dealing with all of the other waste people produce? The reason why local dense population centers worked before was because there weren't so many people.

Neo-urbanists had better think on a much grander scale and come up with better solutions like how to connect the sprawling suburbs with a network of rail systems, because unless there's a huge "thinning of the herd," expecting cities to absorb huge migrating populations is just not feasible.