I’m sorry, but using data from US averages (largely representative of single-family-home suburbs) to make sweeping statements about how urban living is bad is simply misleading and borderline irresponsible. Living in a multi-family building, living without a car, getting electricity from renewables, and using electricity for heating and cooking is insanely energy efficient. It takes advantage of density to reduce infrastructure needs, and can benefit from having resources developed / farmed at scale, further reducing energy and emissions.
If you need ANY infrastructure to connect your “shire” to anywhere else, you need to include that in your analysis. It will have a massive impact. Need a car? You’ve already lost. The road infrastructure per capita alone will put you over the edge, let alone the infrastructure required to build and maintain said car or the emissions from the car itself if not electric.
Looking back now, knowing what I know, it might have been better had I been raised in the hills of Romania, including the unpleasant bit of living under dictatorship
Is this a serious article? I’m all for getting rid of suburbs but the author seems to be advocating for the whole world to move into farming communes.
I think it lacks imagination to suggest that urban areas cannot be sustainable or developed sustainably and that instead we should all go live agrarian lifestyles.
In this particular article, I think, the author is advocating for rural communes as a solution to the American housing crisis - and, in general, as one potential form of sustainable living - that’s both cheaper and more sustainable than what the United States has been trying for decades.
The author does believe Western urban society is unsustainable due to fundamental resource constraints, but you don’t have to agree on that to think about “Hobbit villages” as one possible sustainable community model.
Let a thousand flowers bloom, right?
I think that’s fair enough but it kind of ignores the multitude of reasons that people live in cities, with job availability being just one factor. There are many areas in North America where people could go buy cheap land and set up a homestead and live this kind of lifestyle the author is advocating for but there isn’t a mass movement of people out to those places.
One of my favorite things about solarpunk is that it feels like practical utopianism, achieving the changes you want to see in society in the place you live with the people and community that you are connected to. It doesnt really feel like a solution to hugh housing costs to say “just move people to rural areas”. I think there is absolutely a place for some agrarian revival movement in solarpunk, but I prefer the vision of dense rural communities surrounded by farmland with accessibility to and from urban areas via public transit.
