Cities after oil - 1: 'Sustainable development' and energy futures

Abstract

One facet of City over the years has been a rather dark foreboding that the trajectory of urbanisation around the world is accumulating problems that refuse to be solved and that in the foreseeable future we will see some kind of apocalyptic collapse. In New Orleans we saw one version of this, in other cities there may be others yet to reveal themselves. This paper is one of a trilogy that focus on the 'sustainable development' of cities and that, by the end, spells out a rather specific scenario of collapse as a consequence of energy starvation that we will, in all likelihood, be seeing unfold over the coming decades. Here we take a distanced view of the whole 'sustainable development' and 'sustainable cities' discourse, concluding that it has become diffused and lost in a welter of fragmented analyses, hopes and small projects that, prima facie, is failing to address deteriorating environmental conditions. The point, however, is that the real source of unsustainability of our civilisation lies in its extreme and increasing reliance on fossil fuels which, in the coming decades will be declining in availability. This paper makes a preliminary assessment of the relationship between 'development' and its demand for energy, noting the consistent avoidance of any meaningful assessment of this or what should be done in an effective way to avoid an emerging crisis. This will surely reveal itself with the progressive difficulty, and thence impossibility, of satisfying our energy demands in a situation where the widely held belief in the imminent rapid growth of alternative sources of energy proves to be without foundation. The next paper in the trilogy looks at the reasons why our society is so blind to the tragedy ahead and the third sketches the probable trajectory of the collapse of our civilisation and the consequence of this for the future of cities both in the north and the south.