Futurists should be taken with a grain of salt, especially when they claim to be able to see further than a year or two out. But they can be entertaining reading:
The suburbs have three destinies, none of them exclusive: as materials salvage, as slums, and as ruins.”
There are many ways of describing the fiasco of suburbia, but these days I refer to it as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.
I say this because American suburbia requires an infinite supply of cheap energy in order to function and we have now entered a permanent global energy crisis that will change the whole equation of daily life.
Live by the car, die by the car. It's an easy prediction to make, but transportation is becoming expensive just at the time when the communications revolution is really exploding. Funny how that works out.
Comments
These futurists should be handing out copies of the novel CITY (by Clifford D. Simak - written in 1952) if they want to see and understand the future...
Then again, they can't see MUCH with those BLINDERS on, can they?
;)
B.G.
What a wonderfully ridiculous crock O' merde. Here's a revelation, people live in suburbs because not all of us like living on top of one another, in congested areas, with high crime rates.
Suburbia will be around for generations. Liberal, tofu eating, mass transit touting, inner city loving morons with minimal income will be around for generations too I guess.
Some of us, Tim, think of suburbs as places where people live on top of one another, in congested areas, with high crime rates.
Perhaps good fences make good neighbors, but lots that are 80 acres or larger make for even better neighbors.