Urban futures, rural futures

There’s one last bit of business outstanding from my previous project critiquing ecomodernism. This concerns the forces that may drive either ruralisation or further urbanisation in the future. In comments on this site, perhaps most relevantly here and here, Cameron Roberts disagreed with my view that future ruralisation is likely – and that if we don’t try to make it happen by design soon, it’ll happen by default later. I said I’d offer a longer analysis of this issue, and here it is. I’m going to structure it around Cameron’s comments, but his points are widely held so I see this post as staking out more general ground.

First, there are some important framing issues to discuss.

Framing Issue 1 – Choice and limits

Cameron’s comments are inflected with a sense of limit-transcending choice, which is representative of much mainstream opinion – but problematic. For example, he writes that he lives in a Canadian city with growing extremes of heat and cold that are not survivable for humans without heating and air conditioning – hence, “we WILL need [air conditioning] in the future given the level of climate change currently locked in” and “demanding people live without air conditioning is signing their death warrants”. Electrified urban transport systems are another essential in his vision.

I think this reveals a widespread assumption of modernist culture that what people want or need they will somehow (through technological innovation if necessary) be able to get. But, for better or worse, I think this is untrue. My position stems in large part from the view that, like it or not, we cannot have low-carbon, high-energy settlement patterns worldwide in the future that match current patterns of urbanism, especially at existing rich-country levels of energy availability.

This suggests that, at best, we might face trade-offs. Maybe we could have air conditioning, but not transport – or some air-conditioning and some transport, but at lower-than-present levels. What would urban life look like in that situation?

More likely, I think it suggests significant human population movement, at least in the long term. If the city where Cameron lives is not survivable without high-energy and high-tech gadgetry, then my punt is that there’ll come a time when nobody will be living there. Or maybe there will be some people living there, but many fewer, and their way of life will look more like that of the area’s premodern residents.

That punt is complicated by the fact that access to energy isn’t evenly distributed worldwide. It’s likely that Canada and other rich countries will be able to maintain high-energy urbanism for some time to come, while people in poorer countries will bear the brunt of climate change without a high-energy cushion. Climate-indifferent urbanism for the rich, climate-challenged ruralism for the poor. I believe we should face the future together fairly, worldwide, rather than assuming someone will invent a cunning techno-fix that allows poor countries to enjoy the energy cushion we currently have in the rich countries, so that we don’t have to change our ways. But ultimately I suspect some of these choices will be out of our hands – out of an increasing number of people’s hands, including in the rich countries – as they already are for many of the global poor. We might want air-conditioning, dense transport networks and so on. But an increasing number of us probably won’t get them.

Cameron’s implication that I’m somehow signing people’s death warrants is a little aggravating, but at least his approach is generally serious and issue-focused, and he doesn’t liken me to the Nazis as one ecomodernist has. Still, I think it’d be good to try to take some of the heat out of this debate by reserving phrases like ‘death warrant’ and ‘Nazi’ for the kind of people who wish others to be deliberately killed. For my part, I do not ‘demand’ that people live without air conditioning. But I do think that policies to promote urbanism on the grounds that urban networks are more efficient will result in greater mortality when it transpires that they’re also not affordable in the long-term. This brings us to questions of efficiency versus cost.

Framing Issue 2 – Efficiency and cost

Many of the debates about social futures, including the urban/rural one, are bedevilled by confusions between the concepts of efficiency and cost. There’s no question that to provide people with services that are organised and paid for by human society, there’s usually an efficiency gain with greater residential concentration because of network benefits. So, for example, the cost per capita to provide a densely settled city with the necessary transport links to serve its urban metabolism (food, energy, water, sewerage, work commutes etc.) is lower than the corresponding cost would be to provide that same metabolism for widely spread rural houses.

But that tells us nothing about whether those urban costs can continue to be paid in the long-term. And it doesn’t address whether the rural costs need to be paid at all. Can we afford to build and maintain the urban network, and the services it’s delivering? If not, we need to rethink. The case for ruralism lies in the fact that we may not be able to keep paying energetically for the intensive networks required in a heavily urbanised world, but it’s possible that nature can provide for free many of the services that we have to pay for in the city, if we spread ourselves out thinly enough so as not to overwhelm her. Or else she affords us the opportunity to do without them. Costly transport systems are essential in cities so that people can get to work and otherwise serve and be served by the network. They’re not so essential if work, energy, food, water and sewerage are all close at hand, as is feasible in less concentrated rural situations.

In one of his comments, Cameron makes some points about the superior efficiency of electricity, of electric grids in densely-populated areas, and of other energy services like transportation. He writes that this is a knockdown argument against the anti-urbanist position, and that someone trying to claim otherwise would have to counter at least one of those three points. I think they can all be countered rather simply by making a single point – he’s picked the wrong variable. What matters more fundamentally than efficiency is cost.

They can also be countered more complexly by getting into specifics about the nature of the costs in each case, which I’ve done to some extent in the case of energy here and in the case of food in Section (4) below.

Framing Issue 3 – Settlement density gradients

But let me not be too dualistic. It’s unlikely we’ll be able to afford current levels of urbanism in the future, but that doesn’t mean we have to spread out evenly, miles from neighbours, isolated in rural space. In practice, people tend to concentrate at multiple levels: in hamlets, villages, small towns and larger provincial ones, among other reasons exactly for the network efficiencies that Cameron mentions. The past few decades have witnessed breakneck urbanisation worldwide, and also the growth of mega-cities, to the extent that the majority of the world’s people live in urban areas, with more than 7% of the entire global population now living in just thirty cities/agglomerated urban areas (like Tokyo-Yokohama). These thirty cities occupy in aggregate a square with sides less than 200 miles across¹. Suggestions by the likes of me that this recent trend is not sustainable and that there’s likely to be a need for some future ruralisation are often treated as an abhorrently extremist or city-hating form of ideology. I find this baffling. To me, it seems more extremist to think that concentrating over half a billion people in the equivalent of a 200-mile square represents an acme of sustainable civilizational progress.

Framing Issue 4 – Brass-tacks

Cameron writes “to be persuaded of the energy advantages of small farms over apartment blocks, I need to see specific answers to how exactly these energy demands will be met in a small farm future? How will we heat and cool our homes? How will we cook? How will we travel? This stuff needs some brass-tacks answers.”

Fair questions no doubt, although the same applies in reverse, of course: show me how you’re going to fund energetically the food, water, sewerage, heating, cooling, transport and industrial metabolism of a majority urban world in a low-carbon global future. I’ve not seen convincing answers to this, which is why I think things will default to a more rural future than the present, if we don’t arrange for it in a more orderly fashion first.

I have given brass-tacks answers by way of negative example on this front, showing how it’s unlikely existing energy use can be sustained long-term through low-carbon electricity and showing how it’s really unlikely that mass nutritional needs will be met through microbial foods. But I’ve found people tend to shrug off such analyses as if nobody has made them and then renew their demands for quantitative proof that high-energy urbanism, microbial foods and what have you are unsustainable, or else dismiss the case for lower-energy agrarian localism as mere nostalgia.

So, sorry, I’m not falling into that ‘brass tacks’ framing trap again. It’s a case of show me yours first. What I will do below is lay out briefly and schematically some issues that I think urbanists and ruralists less battle-weary than me might usefully try to clarify between themselves.

1. Grids: scaling and resilience

I was in Paris recently and saw an apartment of 10m² on sale for €120,000. If everyone on Earth occupied an apartment of that kind of size, we’d all comfortably fit into a space the size of Britain. Hopefully I don’t have to explain why that wouldn’t be a good idea in terms of network efficiency, let alone on other grounds. But that’s where an over-simplistic emphasis on the scale economies of increased residential density ends. So it needs to be complemented with a counter-emphasis on the scale diseconomies of increased residential density. I’d like to see that kind of discussion, and what kind of optimum settlement patterns would emerge from it.

I doubt that discussion would point to settlement patterns as dense as our present world, where – as I mentioned above – over 7% of the population live in thirty cities occupying in aggregate a square with sides of less than 200 miles. It strikes me that the emergence of that kind of density has less to do with grid efficiencies and more to do with property values (somebody’s doing nicely out of selling apartments at €12,000 per square metre!), trade and economic policies, and energy abundance. David Orrell has argued that things like the populations of present cities involve fractal patterns, and “fractals are a kind of signature of complex organic systems operating far from equilibrium, which tend to evolve toward a state known as self-organised criticality”².

Self-organised criticality implies the likelihood of rapid collapse, which wouldn’t be a great thing for city populations, or anyone else. In the face of present fractal settlement patterns, I’d suggest it might be better to start optimising on resilience rather than on efficiency. This implies loosening rather than tightening the grid, dismantling its hard spokes oriented toward urban centres and ramifying softer rural loops. The language here is ruralisation, soft-energy paths, micro-grids, limits, optimising for local needs and so on.

2. Path dependency and trade-offs

It may be true that energy and other costs can be optimised in theory with dense urban settlement. It may also be true that they can’t be optimised in practice given past decisions about urban location that create path dependencies inappropriate to present circumstances. About half of the world’s thirty biggest cities are located on coasts, for example. With the sea level rises expected from global heating, it’s probably not a great idea to encourage further population concentration in them. Likewise in relation to growing aridity and water stress. The USA’s second largest urban area, Los Angeles, doesn’t look a good bet on either count.

Possibly, new urban centres could be built in place of older, badly sited ones. But the costs of the new build would have to be offset against the supposed efficiency gains. The same may be true in reverse for processes of ruralisation. The difference is that in the case of rural smallholdings the infrastructure costs are more modest. You don’t have to build such huge transport, water, sewerage and food networks, nor skyscrapers and other energetic drains.

Rural smallholdings often aren’t part of a gridded water network at all, but sink their own well or borehole. Possibly, this is less efficient in terms of money or energy cost per litre of water provided. On the other hand, the rural smallholder is or soon will be aware of the absolute limits of their water resource, and is therefore likely to use less than an urban on-grid consumer with access to cheap municipal water. In other words, going back to questions of cost and efficiency, there may be cost-efficiency trade-offs that point to the greater longevity of ‘inefficient’ rural residence.

Another cost-efficiency trade-off is the urban heat island effect. Efficient city grids may be able to supply each joule of air-conditioner energetic cost at a lower price than in the countryside, but they’ll need to supply more joules and this has to be put into the cost-efficiency equation.

One final cost-efficiency trade-off I’ll mention arises specifically in relation to renewable electricity. Wind and solar farms are usually sited where wind and sun inputs are highest and – more importantly – where land costs are lowest, given their relatively land-intensive character. Usually, this is a long way from where people are clustered in dense urban settlements, meaning that grid costs are higher – maybe even that grid provision is less efficient. Of course, you could relocate cities closer to the energy source, but this would push the price of land up. For sure, you’re not going to find wind or solar farms where land costs €12,000 per square metre, or indeed orders of magnitude less. This trade-off seems an intractable one for renewable energy. Renewably powered cities may be less efficient than they theoretically seem on paper.

3. Sufficient conditions: sewerage?

Cameron writes that the only advantage of rural living in relation to water issues is in sewage treatment, and that the energy costs of wastewater treatment are between and eighth and a quarter of total water energy costs – so, potentially a significant cost in an energy constrained world.

High urban population concentrations generally aren’t great for people’s health in the absence of good sanitation and other environmental public health measures. How certain is it that such measures will be sustainable long-term? Clearly it wouldn’t work to argue ‘city living is superior to rural residence in every respect except the devastating cholera epidemics that regularly decimate the urban population’. In other words, there may be sufficient conditions in low energy situations that militate against urbanism no matter what other theoretical advantages it has. We may be a long way from that reality today, some places much further than others, but it’s possible that a trade-off is looming. Sewerage, air-conditioning or a functional transport network? Is it possible that there’s an energy threshold for all three, below which urbanism becomes untenable?

4. Independent network effects: the case of food

Cameron’s remarks focus excessively on network efficiency and assume that the items furnished by different kinds and scales of network are the same. So in the case of food, the issue for him is simply whether urban or rural networks are optimised for delivering this undifferentiated and generic thing called ‘food’.

That’s not how it works. The type and scale of network affects the kinds and quantities of food produced and consumed, and this matters. To cut a long story short, urbanism and the resulting long commodity supply chains tend to encourage the overproduction of cheap cereals and grain legumes, which aren’t particularly great for human health or ecological integrity.³

They also tend to encourage the overproduction of expensive luxury foods in ways that destroy the sustainable resource base. For example, in his interesting history of fishing in Britain, Casting Shadows, Tom Fort describes how the salmon fishery on the Tweed, which had been managed fairly sustainably for a long time using small boats and local netting stations, was quickly undermined with the arrival of offshore fishing boats looking for new catches after the collapse of the herring industry. Over a ton of salmon were caught before 6.30am on a single day in 1961 and sent to London. Despite efforts to rein in the plunder, it wasn’t long before the Tweed fishery collapsed in turn.

It would probably be wrong to blame urbanism or ‘London’ per se for this, but there are affinities between urbanism and overexploitation of food resources which are mediated by the high-energy, high-capital, long-supply chain economies that urbanism requires. Generally, there needs to be tighter local feedback between producer and consumer with economic teeth of the kind that long and competitive supply chains can’t provide. This is encapsulated in ideas like the ETC group’s distinction between the industrial food chain and the peasant food web.

Another way in which networks can have autonomous effects relates to famine and hunger. The suggestion that food localism – the peasant food web – is a formula for mass death is standard ecomodernist fare, but that’s rarely the case except where there are unforeseen and catastrophic dislocations. On the contrary, strongly networked food economies typically enable food to be shipped out to the highest bidders, potentially creating local want – as shown generally by analysts such as Amartya Sen and Alex de Waal. I discussed a historical British example here. Sen has shown convincingly that hunger is caused by lack of social entitlement, not lack of network efficiency.⁴

Finally on this issue, the case for urbanism is often made along the lines of the positives associated with independent network effects – concentrating people together creates greater economic action and wealth creation. Not everyone agrees that this is so, but if it is I think we also have to consider this as a negative. Since we seem incapable of decoupling our economies from increased fossil energy use, resource drawdown and nature destruction, greater economic action and wealth creation can’t really be considered an unalloyed good. In the present state of the human game, the lesser economic action implied by more distributed communities with less capital and energy availabilities than is typical in the modern city who are more focused on producing diverse wholefoods for themselves could bring many ecological benefits.

5. Energy futures and ruralism

It seems likely that persisting urbanism within existing global political and economic circumstances is going to lead to some bad energetic feedback loops. Drawing on Brett Christophers’ work, I mentioned some of them in this comment and this essay, in relation to the electricity crises in South Asia and Europe of 2021-22. Heatwaves, electricity shortages and blackouts; lower-income country governments scrambling to bring fossil power stations online, higher-income country governments supplementing renewables by buying fossil energy on global markets, pushing energy prices out of the reach of poorer countries, and so on. Air-conditioning for rich people, and not for poor people. Renewable energy for rich countries, and not for poor countries. More fossil fuel use, more climate heating.

I don’t claim that ruralism magically solves our future energy problems. I just think that it offers the potential for lower energy use. I also think that in circumstances of major energy constraint life is somewhat less unbearable in rural areas than in urban ones, and that people will ultimately therefore vote with their feet unless they’re forced to stay in cities and face the music. Governments do have some power and incentive to stack the odds artificially in favour of urbanism at the expense of rural people, but they’re not omnipotent and they can’t keep doing this everywhere forever.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all energy approach in rural situations, unlike in the urban case (renewable electricity!) Generally, it’s easier to substitute natural and biotic approaches for primary energy-based ones in rural situations (shade, water, biotic energy). That may not be enough – it’s just that it seems to me likely to get closer to enough than will be possible with grid-dependent urbanism. If governments were sensible, I think they’d be moving might and main to ease the transition to lower-energy ruralism, not least by identifying ways of supplementing the not-enough of natural and biotic approaches with sensible rural soft energy paths. Unfortunately, this isn’t the model they’re signed up to.

A final word on biotic energy, specifically on what Cameron calls ‘traditional biomass’. Addressing himself to pro-rural commenters on my website, Cameron wrote:

There were a few suggestions that wood stoves should handle most of the cooking and heating. I can’t see this as anything other than a recipe for catastrophic global deforestation, with consequent climate-ruining land-use emissions, and ecocidal impacts on habitats. I’m sorry to be blunt, but it is just not a serious proposal.

I’m not sure how well-founded this bluntness is. A lot of people don’t seem to realise that when you ‘cut down’ a tree, it can grow up again. If you manage such harvesting carefully, it doesn’t necessarily cause deforestation, net emissions or ecocidal habitat impacts. It certainly can do, but equally it can facilitate afforestation, carbon sequestration and habitat integrity. Everything depends on how you do it, how much you do it and what you do with the harvest. Conversely, ill-considered supposedly carbon-offsetting plantations can have all the negative impacts Cameron mentions. Generally, people who know how to live in and work woodlands long-term (back to the local feedbacks I mentioned in Section 5) can do so pretty sustainably, provided they’re not lured into overproduction by the blandishments of the wider (urban) economy and its endless resource extraction.

Cameron might be right that biomass combustion alone is inadequate to meet people’s energy needs. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be a serious proposal for helping to meet some of those needs (possibly a more serious one than importing American woodchip to make electricity in the UK, as currently happens). But his comment is of a piece with the current mood music of mainstream and ecomodernist narratives about the non-seriousness of biomass. Blunt pronouncements along the lines that everyone knows such-and-such a technology is non-serious can be an effective way of stopping people from asking questions about the seriousness of the high-tech alternatives. And people need to ask those questions.

6. Conclusion

I’ve raised more questions here than answers about the relative merits of the urban and the rural. If other people would care to dig into them in good faith and careful detail, I’ll look with interest at what they come up with. It’s unlikely I’ll do much more digging myself. As a lone, independent writer I don’t really have the resources, and I think I’ve already done my share of it over the years. Besides, bigger drivers of ruralisation are upon us. While – as per framing issue 4 – ecomodernists would love to send their critics down endless rabbit holes to ‘prove’ the ruralist case, there are more important things to be doing right now.

Claims that existing (or augmented) patterns of urbanism are more pro-social and pro-nature than rural alternatives appeal to people’s contrarian nature. And since most people live in urban areas, especially in the rich countries, it also tells them what they want to hear – that they’re doing the right thing, and their way of life is ecologically optimal. Unfortunately, I think this is probably untrue.

Notes

1. http://www.demographia.com/db-worldua.pdf p.21

2. David Orrell. 2012. Economyths. Icon. p.94

3. As I argue further in my A Small Farm Future. See also: Glenn Davis Stone. 2022. The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World.

4. Amartya Sen.1981. Poverty and Famines. Oxford; Alex de Waal. 2018. Mass Starvation. Polity.

Current Reading

David Elias Shaping the Wild: Wisdom from a Welsh Hill Farm

Sarah Langford Rooted: How Regenerative Farming Can Change the World

Guy Shrubsole The Lost Rainforests of Britain

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