Excerpt: “Screen Captures: Film in the Age of Emergency”

“The End of Suburbia lays out the argument that with oil production peaking somewhere around 2027–28, and from then on heading into a steep decline, the living standards of those in suburbia will decline also.”

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from the chapter “Metropolis Now!” in Screen Captures: Film in the Age of Emergency, which was published in September by Newstar Books. This excerpt has been lightly edited.

The suburbs of North America were created as an antidote to the industrialized city. They promised those willing to escape a kind of gentry lifestyle away from the dirty and noisy inner city, as well as greater autonomy in their lives. But this has not been the outcome. Two documentaries on the subject of suburban living, The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream (2004) and Radiant City (2006), show that this method of habitation is unsustainable in the long run. In fact, any sustainability that the suburbs might have once had passed decades ago.

In The End of Suburbia, social critic James Howard Kunstler states that “Suburbia is not what it promises to be. It’s not country living; it’s a cartoon of country living in a cartoon of a house. It has none of the real amenities of country life, no connection with real organic systems or other living things, rivers, forests, fields, agriculture. You just get a lawn, an industrially produced artifact.”

The original dream of the suburbs might not have been like this, but as more and more people have flocked to the outer limits of the city, highways, expressways, huge shopping centers, and housing developments have eaten up the green farmland that once existed between the city and the suburbs. Those who ventured out many decades ago might have lived this promise for a few years, but slowly their access to fields, woodlands, lakes, and hiking trails has been snatched away. In their place, an unwalkable slab of concrete pasture has landed and cut into the natural landscape. To get to a shopping mall, a school, a friend’s house, or a restaurant, a dweller of suburbia must get into a car. As Andrés Duany, a town planner and co-author of the 2000 book Suburban Nation suggests in Radiant City, “Suburbia disaggregates the elements of daily life. So, you have to drive from one to the other.”

The End of Suburbia lays out the argument that with oil production peaking somewhere around 2027–28, and from then on heading into a steep decline, the living standards of those in suburbia will decline also. The price of fuel will skyrocket over the next few decades, and this will mean that driving a car will become a costly exercise. As Kunstler puts it, the suburbs will become “slums of the future.”