The suburbs are often lined up for derision. They have too many roads, too many cars, the houses are too big, they suburbs wasteful, they are ostentatious and so forth. But suburbs are popular, and develop strong and tight communities. One school of thought seems to be that the suburbs will end up wastelands as energy prices increase to the point where they are unsustainable, an opposing viewpoint is that the suburbs can become the focal point of intellectual, food, energy and commercial production.

Commerce

In his novel Distress Greg Egan writes of a post-information age Sydney where the CBD is a wasteland. His main characters live in the suburb of Epping and actually travel into the CBD to see the new tourist areas that the government has paid for to try and bring the suburbanites back into the city centre to spend their money.

In Egan's post-information age world, telecommuting and an entrepreneurial-contractor commercial landscape turned the CBD into a ghostland. Without commerce to support it, the CBD had no reason to exist and the suburbs took over as the dominant place of economic, social and cultural activity.

Telecommuting is on the rise as bandwidth becomes ubiquitous. It is predicted 3.4 million Australians will telecommute by 2008. Other than Sydney and Melbourne, telecommuters, as a group, are larger in number than most Australian cities.

That has the potential to be transformative.

Food

Suburban land is some of the best agricultural land in Australia. This is a result of the way that modern cities have grown from agrarian origins. Bill Mollison developed the technology of Permaculture which is a suburban technology as much as an agricultural one. This takes advantage of natural patterns in plant partnering, location and watering to maximise the output of a square metre of land.

The method of food production is successful enough that small blocks of land, such as the old suburban quarter acre, can provide up to 80% of a household's food needs. This isn't for everyone, however, most suburban yards are purely decorative but even a little addition of food production can take pressure of the family budget.

Permaculture mixes in food bearing plants with decorative plants to radically change the whole notion of the front and back yard.

Even with houses getting larger and blocks smaller, as is the pattern in recent developments in western Sydney, there is still ample room on a building block to lay decorative garden beds that can produce food. Another aspect of permaculture is that it is permanent agriculture, there is no seeding each year, the system is set up so nature does that itself.

So it is self-sustaining. Once a permaculture garden is started, it is off and running.

Energy

The North-east blackout in New York showed the vulnerability of heavily centralised energy systems. The suburban environment is prefect for decentralised energy system like solar power. Houses carry ample surface area and can feed their surplus energy production back into local or national energy grids.

A decentralised energy system would also protect against catastrophic failures in central systems such as the New York blackout, or something more common such as trees pulling down power lines.

Telecommunications companies have set up small generator networks that can load balance in times of stress. These are a decentralised response to possible failure of the major energy grid. Suburbs can do this as well, and if excess energy production is possible, make it commercially productive for the home-owners.

Conclusion

The suburbs are often denigrated, but they are thriving social and cultural areas, with strong community ties. Their reasonably large land plots means technologies such as permaculture and renewable energy have advantages in a suburban environment. The changing nature of telecommunications and work patterns to an entrepreneurial self-employed style of commerce also strengthen rather than weaken the suburbs.

It is possible that the suburbs will become the place of dominant production output.

I am not sure why suburbia cops so much in the way of hostility. I grew up in Sydney's north western suburbs, and other than a stint in Coogee/Maroubra, the rest of my time in Australia and the United States has been in suburban environments. Even now I am living in suburbia. I like it.

Normally the stereotypes of suburbia are thrown up, such as the row upon row of aesthetically similar houses, townhomes and condos. Like in the picture above which is a new suburb in Nth Virginia. What isn't seen in that picture is that those townhomes back onto a town-squarish type of mall.

The other arguments against suburbia are that it is boring, looks too similar, lacks culture, people are fleeing back to the urban environments because of gas prices, houses use too much gas/electricity, roads and petrol consumption, etc. While urban environments achieve green economies of scale the impact from suburbs is not that great. Most of our fossil fuel emissions are from stationary energy sources, not road transportation. Same with water consumption, agriculture is the biggest user of fresh water, not residential (urban or surburban).

There has been an exit from suburbia recently - as in the last two decades - as young people seek more cultural lives in the town squares of cities and the increasing cost of suburban housing followed by the foreclosures - have placed pressure on the suburbs. Historically there has been an ebb and flow from the urban and suburban centers. This is nothing really new. The urban-scapes will most likely one day become unpalatable for a multitude of reasons and the suburbs will grow again.

The other issue is that as technologies decentralise, whether it be transport of the 1950s, telecommunications of the 80s and 90s, or maybe solar technology of the future. The large land areas of the suburbs will most likely come to the fore as productive areas again. A roof is a large solar collector for instance, more than a condominium balcony can offer.

The suburbs contain a lot of land and space which is not being put to productive use other than as a living space. I expect as aspects of our modern life decentralise, such as energy, then we will see suburban communities go from sustainable solutions to productive ones.

It will probably not be too dissimilar to how I have adsense on this website. It doesn't make me a living salary, but it does cover the cost of the site. If solar cells could pay the property taxes and so on, then it would be more than useful for most people.

Ironically via the same website that prompted the hostility to suburbia post.