Rural Urbanism
I hang out in a lot of sustainability and climate circles online, which have significant overlaps with bicycle and urbanism circles. There's lots of talk here about making life better for city folk and getting rid of cars in the city, and we talk about trains too, but the conversation almost completely overlooks the suburbs and rural areas. Where they are talked about, it's often in passing and trying to bolster a point for the primary benefit of city dwellers. That's a problem. We should be talking more about how to improve life for everyone, not just those who can afford to live in a city.
Welcome back to Futurism, the only gemlog where "solarpunk sustainability" is a real phrase.
Visiting family in a rural area for Christmas this year, and taking a highway to get there, reminded me a lot of the times I was in Google Street View in rural places in Europe, and noticing that they had bus service and bike lanes that we don't even have in the suburbs and towns in North America. Obviously, you'd expect the Netherlands to have robust bike lanes and buses in its suburbs and rural areas. But I didn't expect to see highway sidewalks in Poland or buses between villages in the middle of nowhere in Latvia.
In urbanism circles, the common consensus about how to solve the myriad issues with suburbs and improve life for the people who live there is to eradicate the suburbs. It should just be proper towns and cities instead; particularly, it needs to be a lot denser. The American design of sprawling suburbs is simply not sustainable; not from a financial standpoint, and certainly not from an environmental standpoint, what with all that land wasted on parking.
[YouTube] NotJustBikes: Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math
[Nebula] NotJustBikes: Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math
I do agree with all of this, in part thanks to NJB radicalizing me. But I live in the suburbs, and I have to wonder what happens to me and my neighbors when the suburbs get removed? How does that actually happen?
I've thought up a basic plan called "folding in", in which inner-city housing is built up and set aside for the people living in the farthest out suburbs (with an attractive offer for rent). Many of those people move in, with the offer repeated as the area gets more and more deserted. The process is repeated until there's nothing left to absorb.
(Something similar should be done when upscaling: the people being evicted should be given a place to move, with rent capped at their current payment, amenities (i.e. dishwasher, in unit washer/dryer, etc), specs (i.e. bed & bath count), and space at least as much as they currently have, and options within those constraints.)
Side note: people like to own the places they live in, to have more control over them than you normally get in an apartment. We should let people buy/lease and own their apartments, or condos or whatever. We also probably need more protections for these places to prevent HOAs. And also the outlawing of HOAs in general.
The only "rural" place I've felt like I can somewhat get around on my own is at my grandma's house. The only challenge is that it's mountainous, so even an e-bike is going to struggle traversing it. If nothing else, there is a bus nearby. Where I live right now, near Raleigh, there's only one bus remotely near me; to catch it, I'd have to bike there, at one specific time and only during weekdays.
Another side note: I'm starting school soon, and Wake Tech doesn't have any buses or shuttles between campuses. Apparently there used to be. One of the things I still have to figure out is how I'm gonna get between the two campuses I have classes on on Mondays. So yay fun times for me.
I imagine that a rural area with solarpunk and urbanist considerations might consider setting up carefully-sized shared roads that go towards a local light-rail circuit, which should be capable of running off of rooftop solar, maybe a battery, and grid fallback, 24/7, fully automated. Maybe you'd have a push-button to tell it to stop, and then you can get on, maybe load some cargo to take to the farmer's market, take your bike on there, whatever. At-grade crossings seem acceptable to me in rural areas, as long as there is good fencing to keep animals off the tracks.
Keep in mind that when I say "rural area," I'm thinking of my aunt's house in Wisconsin (middle of nowhere, half an hour from the nearest gas station), my grandma's house in the mountains of NC, one of my relatives' house in the foothills (~20 mins from Lexington NC), the open green fields in the Tennessee Valley we passed through between my grandma's house and Brights Zoo, and everything in between. (Before I understood what the suburbs are, and before the tobacco and strawberry fields disappeared, I thought my area was rural too but now I know better.)
All of these areas deserve to be freed of car dependency. (I think the hardest one to do by far would be Bumfuck Nowhere, Wisconsin.)
Also on Futurism: I like trains.
Also on Futurism: From the mountains to the city, part 2
Email me: me@blakes.dev (or DeltaChat)
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