My urban center is on the "definitely-fucked-regardless" list. Natch.
Go further back and you’ll find the same thing in every secular millennialist movement the United States has seen since the dawn of the 20th century. Whether the apocalypse du jour is nuclear war, pandemic disease, racial conflict, Communist takeover, fascist police state takeover, the imminent arrival of Antichrist, or what have you, the accepted way to deal with it is to flee to some isolated location in the mountains and wait for the rubble to stop bouncing. I’ve tried to challenge the kneejerk application of this same way of thinking to the consequences of peak oil in a number of previous posts, but there’s another side to the picture – the widespread notion that cities in the aftermath of peak oil will be deathtraps by definition.
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Step outside the potent complex of cultural factors that make a flight to rural isolation seem like the obvious response to peak oil, and things take on a very different shape. Now it’s true, of course, that some cities are much too big and much too badly sited to survive the end of the age of cheap abundant energy. Los Angeles is probably the poster child for these abandoned ruins of the not too distant future, though most of the large cities of the Southwest could give it a run for its money – it’s easy to imagine tourists of the future wandering among the fallen skyscrapers of Phoenix or Santa Fe the way today’s tourists visit Teotihuacan or Chaco Canyon. Equally, it’s hard to imagine that Manhattan or inner city Chicago will become anything in the future but vast salvage yards for metals and other resources. Yet it’s crucial to note that the vast majority of America’s cities do not fall into these categories.
Imagine, by contrast, a city of between 20,000 and 200,000 people in a mostly agricultural region; there are hundreds of such cities scattered across the North American map, so this shouldn’t be hard. In the sort of overnight collapse imagined by too many writers on peak oil these days, that could still be a very difficult place to be – but as I’ve pointed out more than once in this blog, an overnight collapse is very nearly the least likely way the downslope of Hubbert’s peak might play out. In the far more plausible scenario of uneven decline and slow depopulation spread out over many decades, such a city would have immense advantages over a rural lifeboat community. Located within easy reach of surrounding farmland, stocked with raw materials in the form of surplus buildings, cars, and the like, and a large enough work force to allow division of labor and the production of specialty goods, the city could easily import food and other necessities by supplying trade goods to the nearby countryside, the way cities in preindustrial times have always done.
(...)
Historically speaking, this pattern – the largely independent city-state surrounded by its own agricultural hinterland – is one of the most common foundations for urban society, and civilizations that manage a broader level of geographical integration routinely fall back to the city-state pattern in times of disintegration. Some variant of it is very likely in the North America of the deindustrial future. Some areas of the continent lack the agricultural and resource base to support such a pattern; others will likely be in the path of armed invasions or mass migration, in which case all bets are off; the fate of Roman Britain shows what can happen when an urban society is overwhelmed by armed and hostile migrants (though Roman Gaul, which passed through a similar experience, came through it with a surprising number of its cities intact, and most of those are still viable urban centers today). Elsewhere, though – especially east of the Mississippi and west of the Cascade crest, where rainfall and soil quality combine to make sustainable organic agriculture a good bet for the foreseeable future – urban centers are likely to play a significant role through the approaching deindustrial Dark Ages and on into the successor cultures to come.
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