Resilient Suburbia (TOC)

Here is a consolidated table of contents to my four-part series, "Resilient Suburbia?":

1.  Resilient Suburbia:  Sunk Costs and Credit Markets (also at The Oil Drum)

2.  Resilient Suburbia:  Cost of Commuting (also A Resilient Suburbia? 2: Cost of Commuting)

3.  Resilient Suburbia:  Weighing the Potential for Self-Sufficiency  (also at The Oil Drum)

4.  Resilient Suburbia:  Accounting for the Value of Decentralization (also at The Oil Drum)

This series primarily analyzes the standard Peak Oil critique of suburbia--that it is unsustainable and will collapse.  While I agree with this insofar as we conceptualize suburbia as a static thing, this series also challenges that notion and points to the significant (perhaps even trailblazing) potential for suburbia to adapt to future challenges.  In that sense, it should be read in conjunction with my Diagonal Economy series, which is a much more detailed account of exactly how we can build a vibrant and sustainable civilization despite energy descent (and how Suburbia can play a significant and positive role in this transition).

Rhizome is published every Monday morning.  You can subscribe to this blog's RSS feed at:  http://www.jeffvail.net/rss.xml

Simplicity, Resiliency, and Artifacts

I won't begin the promised "Diagonal Economy" series quite yet.  The main reason is that I don't want to start down that path without putting full effort into it.  So, in the interim, I've wanted to write a bit about lifestyle design and philosophy.  While this may seem like a major departure from my general themes, I think it's actually complementary:  by approaching our individual and community patterns as something to be consciously designed, rather than merely followed, we have the opportunity to make our lives more resilient, more energy efficient, more environmentally sustainable, and more pleasurable.  That can't be all bad?

First, two blog recommendations on this topic:

Tim Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Work Week.  This has been on my sidebar for some time.  Superficially, his book is about figuring out how to make quick money off the internet and then take long vacations.  At its core, however, he is working to design a set of tools and principles for living that can be used to adapt to rapid change, build a more resilient lifestyle, become healthier, solve problems--a host of useful things.

Leo Babauta, and his blog Zen Habits.  Leo has build a very successful career for himself by applying one simple principle:  examine and simplify everything you do.  Will be added to my sidebar soon (along with several other blogs I've been meaning to add for some time).

While it's relatively easy to dismiss these two as self-help gurus, I think they offer something more.  More than the actual tips they offer, they serve as examples of the kind of lifestyle and process design that I think will be increasingly important (at least if individuals or communities want to succeed) in a post-peak oil, post-Nation-State, post-caretaker-economy world.

The notion that we should look at everything we do, deconstruct it, and design it to better meet our needs, is one that will become increasingly important as old assumptions no longer remain valid.  A complement to this is the notion that we should simplify as much as possible.  While it's not exactly sexy advice, the continuous application of these two principles will serve us well in the coming years--no matter what they hold.

Personally, my life is far from simple.  I'm not sure my life is really any more complex than most people--kid(s), demanding job, interests and hobbies, etc.--but I know these principles have been useful to me.  I'm healthier, fitter, better informed, more successful, and happier as a result, and I still have a long, long ways to go.

So, take a moment and check out the two links above if you're so inclined.  But, if they don't immediately appeal to you, perhaps because you initially find them irrelevant to the reason you read this blog, as an exercise try to figure out how they offer tools that ARE helpful to the reasons you are reading this right now.  Perhaps in future posts I'll get into the details ("diagonal lifestyle design"?), but I think readers will find these ideas readily applicable to issues of energy, geopolitics, and societal transition.

Distributed Economies: Focus vs. Distractions

John Robb recently wrote about developments in distributed manufacturing and distributed production.  While I share John's enthusiasm for the potential of peer-to-peer, decentralized, localized, and otherwise distributed manufacturing and production, two of the projects he highlights are excellent fodder for a discussion of some thorny issues on the topic.  Take a look at these two videos:


Video 1:  Microfactory table cutting tool (link to article )


Video 2:  Windowfarm (link to website )

Forgive my skepticism, but despite my general enthusiasm these projects both look like gimmicks.  Is this weakness merely because these projects are at an early stage in the evolution of truly important techniques, or does this demonstrate a deeper problem?

Take the window farm concept:  good intent--an attempt to increase the ability of dense urban areas to feed themselves.  However, execution and focus are lacking:  this solution is high-tech (relies on artificial growing mediums that derive nutrients from industrial liquid fertilizers, not natural soil processes), high-cost/energy input (at least to the extent that light bulbs are required), while producing very low calorie output.  All the windows in an average family's urban apartment could--by this model--probably produce less than 1000 calories per year in salad greens.  Is it realistic to think that we can ever produce significant quantities of calories/nutrition in sparse urban windows, or is this just a token effort?  Certainly, by failing to recognize this weakness and address projections to output significant levels of nutrients or calories in future iterations, this projects seems off track.  Is there any kernel of value here, or is it so distracted from substantive distributed production as to be nothing more than a token?  While I don't think there is significant potential to adapt urban windows to significant calorie production, it may be more realistic to focus on significant nutrient production through the provisioning of year-round, high-nutrient vegetables (here the salad greens approach is OK, but a much better focus would be on spinach, chard, kale, etc.).  Bottom line:  window-farming may have real promise, but the failure to focus on any meaningful metric in this project makes me conclude that it is more gimmick--and potentially harmful to the point that it advances symbolism over substance.

Now consider the table cutting tool (Microfactory MOW):  again, good intent, to empower decentralized groups to capitalize on open-source design databases to increase their ability to provide their own manufactured products.  However, this certainly seems like an overly complex solution to a simple problem.  In the example of the coat hangar in the video, it would be significantly simpler and would require significantly less reliance on externally produced advanced tools like the various electric motors involved, to simply cut the design with a box cutter.  What is impressive here is the information distribution process:  the open-source provision of the DESIGN.  The actual manufacturing process seems like more of a gimmick.

However, while the automation of decentralized manufacturing may seem like a gimmick at this point, these efforts are pioneering a process that may bear fruit.  It would certainly be significant if:

- we could reach a level of automated, decentralized manufacture that could, utilizing only locally available materials, replicate itself
- we could use such decentralized manufacturing to--on a systemic analysis--reduce our localized dependencies on external systems
- we could use such decentralized manufacturing to save significantly on the energy required for transportation of products by, for example, only transporting the manufacturing system and then leveraging local materials to provide manufactured items to the locale

I'm actually fairly optimistic about the ability of distributed manufacturing to provide some of these sources of value mentioned above.  What concerns me about the cutting tool highlighted in the Microfactory MOW video is not that they are still at a very early stage along the road to these types of value, but that the designers do not appear to be consciously aware of these end goals or the current shortcomings of their design.  To the extent this is true, I see their efforts as more gimmick than substance, which is unfortunate as they clearly have the intelligence, motivation, and funding to pursue potentially important advances.

In a somewhat related note to "distributed economic systems," next week I'll introduce my open-source litigation checklist wiki project (for those interested in the future of law and legal systems).  The link is already available on my sidebar if you want to take an early peek...

Resilient Suburbia Mention

I'm a bit behind the time, but I just learned today while doing an interview on renewable energy transition that Bill McKibben recently mentioned my Resilient Suburbia series.  McKibben writes:

Though our sprawl is designed for the car, the sunk costs of those tens of millions of houses mean they're not going to disappear just because the price of gas rises. They'll have to change instead. "Suburbia, not as a model for material consumption, but as a legal and social lattice of decentralized and more uniformly distributed production land ownership, has the potential to serve as the foundation for just such a pioneering adaptation," writes Jeff Vail, a widely read economic theorist who envisions "a Resilient Suburbia."