Cities after oil—3

Adrian Atkinson

City, 2008, vol. 12, issue 1, 79-106

Abstract: In this third and last instalment of 'Cities after Oil’, I envision the stages through which 'modern’ civilisation will collapse over the coming decades. The first essay analysed the discourse on sustainability and how this has abjectly failed to deflect what has become a fatal global development trajectory. The essay focused on the coming decline in available energy and the inability of our civilisation to function without vast and increasing energy supplies. The second essay looked at the general parameters of 'the collapse of civilisations’ and then in detail at two key aspects of our civilisation that are driving it over the edge, namely, suburban living and the obsession with the automobile. It is not at all clear how fast and through what stages the collapse will unfold because there are many variables which will interact differentially and depend crucially on political decisions taken—and possibly major conflicts—along the way; however, we can be sure that in general the decline will be inexorable. By the latter decades of this century, a radically altered world will have emerged, with a greatly reduced population living surrounded by the defunct debris of modernity, comprised of fragmented and largely self‐reliant political entities. Our complex, 'globalised’ world of megastates and technological hubris will be but a fading memory. The impacts of global warming and other environmental legacies of our age will reduce the options for reconstruction, possibly fatally. The essay ends by surveying the attempts in the shadows of our current civilisation to envisage and even live 'alternatives’ that might be seeds of the reconstruction of a civilisation viable within the resource and environmental constraints that can be expected to prevail.

Date: 2008
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DOI: 10.1080/13604810801933768

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