A dream is born…

 The idea of a life outside

the increasingly
industrialized American
cities began to shape up at
the end of the 19th century,
when the by-products of
the growing industry made
life in the urban centers, if
not impossible, at least
very hard to cope with on a
day-to-day basis.
 Pollution and poor housing
conditions drove workers
to seek other living
arrangements.
 The beginnings of suburbia
 The structure of the
American society would
undergo serious
changes after the end of
the First World War.
 The 1920s brought
about a boom in the
automobile industry
which in turn gave
impetus to the suburban
sprawl and propelled
more members of the
middle class toward the
realization of their one-
dog, one-white-fence
house dream.
 The Automobile Age
 Affordable cars, higher wages
and shorter working hours are
the prerequisites for the
model of urban development
that came to characterize
suburbs across the US.
Higher-paid workers could
aspire to own houses as well
as cars, while shorter working
hours allowed more time for
commuting. Workers could
trade off cramped inner city
tenements for detached
suburban homes, linked to
workplaces and shops by the
car. The new world pioneered
by Ford made car-based
suburbia possible, but was it
inevitable?(Mees 2010: 12)

The postwar suburbia
The soldiers who fought in WWII
returned from the front with the
yearning to settle down to a quiet life,
in a home of their own.
 National subsidizing programs were
set up to accommodate them.
 The quest for ownership, for a home of
one’s own, for leisure and meditation
far from the maddening, crime-infested
city center drove millions of people to
settle the buffer zone between urban
and rural America.
 This new, 20th century type of
settlement skyrocketed in the early
1970s, with a 25% increase in number
of suburbanites over 1960. According
to the 1970 census 74.9 million people
were classified as suburbanites. The largest suburban areas developed
around great American cities such as Los
Angeles, New York, San Francisco or
Baltimore
The 1970s or how oil became and
issue in the suburbia
 A great number of freeways were built in the postwar era in
order to facilitate the commute of the suburban dwellers and
each year the traffic on those freeways become more jammed.
Millions and millions of commuters drove more than 50 miles on
a daily basis in order to get to their place of employment and
back.
 Apart from high resources of patience, the commuting
suburbanites also needed appreciable quantities of gas to fill
their tanks. In the 1920s, when the suburbia craze began to
intensify, the US oil production reached 450 million barrels. Oil
prices were low and they were about to get even lower, as new
rich oil fields were discovered in Texas, Oklahoma and
California. By 1931, the price of oil had fallen to 10 cents a
barrel, despite the attempts of the government to reduce drilling
quotas.
 In the 1970s, however, the graphs of oil production indicated a
rather pessimistic future for the oil industry, as well as for those
whose life style depended on the existence of cheap oil.
 Enter M. King Hubert
 M. King Hubbert (1903-1989)
an American geophysicist
working with Shell made a
tremendous contribution to
the understanding of the cycle
of oil production.
 In 1956, during a meeting of
the American Petroleum
Institute, Hubbert predicted
that the American production
of oil would peak in the 1970s
after which it would go down
never to rise again.
 The principle behind his
theory is rather simple: oil is a
finite resource that can be
exploited up to a maximum
point before the production
would start going down until
the oil reserves will finally be
exhausted.
 Hubbert’s Peak

On Hubbert’s original 1956 graph, the lower dashed curve on the right gives Hubbert’s estimate of U.S.
oil production rates if the ultimate discoverable oil beneath the curve is 150 billion barrels. The upper
dashed line, for 200 billion barrels, was his famous prediction that U.S. oil production would peak in
the early 1970s. The actual U.S. oil production for 1956 through 2000 is superimposed as small circles.
Since 1985, the United States has produced slightly more oil than Hubbert’s prediction, largely because
of successes in Alaska and in the far offshore Gulf Coast.
(Deffeyes 2008: 3)
 Going global
 In 1997, Colin J Campbell, an independent oil industry consultant,
published a country-by-country evaluation of oil extraction. His
findings support Hubbert’s guess that the global oil production
would peak at the beginning of the 21st century.
 These estimates however rely heavily on what the OPEC
(Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) report for the
general public. Up until the 1980s, the productivity of each OPEC
nation would be determined according to its annual production
capacity. In the 1980s, these regulations were changed: every
nation would be assigned a share of the market according to its
annual production, but also to the estimate reserves that they would
‘estimate’ themselves.
 Despite of all the information and technology available, scientists
cannot come up with an exact date at which the global oil
production would peak. As Matthew Simmons, a former energy
advisor to US President George W. Bush, explained in one of his
interviews for The End of Suburbia documentary, oil peak is a sort
of a ‘rear view image’: we’ll know it happened after it had ended.
 The end of cheap oil = the end of
suburbia?
 According to The New York Times, in 1992
115 million people lived in the suburbia, as
compared to 78 million living in central cities
and 56 million living outside the metropolitan
areas.
 A huge number to begin with and further
surveys show a tendency for the population of
suburbanites to increase.
 As proud owners of millions and millions of
SUVs, the inhabitants of suburbia will feel the
shock of a sharp rise in the price of gas much
more powerfully than the urban or rural
dwellers.
 The end of cheap oil = the end of
suburbia?
 Possible consequences of the oil
shortage:
 Food and household supplies will
be among the first to be affected :
on the one hand, most of the
US’s food products come, thanks
to the comfortable quantities of oil
available, from great distances
such as China or South America.
Once the logistic cost associated
with importing staple goods from
far away countries skyrockets,
the prices of these goods will
soon follow.
 On the other hand, the Americans
have become dependent on the
great retail ‘monsters’ such as
Wal-Mart which are not always
situated at a convenient distance
from the homes.
 The end of cheap oil = the end of
suburbia?
 The commute:
 Public transportation will
probably be the only available
solution for the severe oil
shortage. The bad news is
that public transportation in
the suburbs does not rise to
the expected standards, seen
as there has been little
investment in this department
in the latter years.
 The authorities have good
reason for their reluctance to
focus on this type of projects:
low density of the population
and the low degree of
demand for public
transportation in regions
where most houses are built
with a three-car garage.
 Show must go on, though…
Alternative sources of energy
 Natural gas already accounts for about 25% of US
energy consumption, so the system for extracting natural
gas is already in place. However, natural gas is most
likely to follow a Hubbert-type curve, which means that
increasing extraction will only lead to the exhaustion of
this natural resource.
 Hydrogen, which could provide important quantities of
clean energy in combination with oxygen, has its
disadvantages: there are no underground ‘deposits’ of
hydrogen on the cost of extracting hydrogen from water or
hydrocarbon sources is always higher than the value of
the energy that it yields.
 Hydroelectricity, which currently accounts for 9% of the
energy produced in the US, poses a series of
environmental threats by interfering with the natural water
flow and with the habitat of a great number of species.
Going green…
 Other voices support the
development of renewable
sources of energy, such as
solar or wind power.
 Good examples in this
direction are Germany and
Spain, which in the later years
have become world leaders in
terms of wind power
technology.
 The main downsides to
alternative sources of energy
are the huge investments
required to install the
turbines/solar panels and
develop new transmission
lines and the relative
’unreliability’ of such sources.
So what options does suburbia
have?

 Well, suburbia in itself will disappear, as

any unsustainable way of life. There’s
still hope however for the
suburbanites…
Cultiver son jardin…