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.
