ABSTRACT
Oil vulnerability has become a major focus of the world's cities in the early part of the 21st century. This is fundamentally because the world is peaking in oil production as many pundits have been predicting for the past two or three decades. Added to this is the climate change agenda which suggests that oil needs to be phased out anyway. Reducing oil use is thus a political necessity for many reasons. The waning of petroleum resources and the global climate change imperatives require all cities to act on their transport systems; if they don’t their citizenry will not be impressed at the inevitable increase in prices and indeed many cities will face complete economic collapse unless they are rebuilt for a decarbonized economy. The $100-a-barrel oil barrier has been broken and some analysts are saying that it could go over $300 within five years, though the collapse in the price in late 2008 with the collapse in the economy may have given us a short period to prepare for this ultimate eventuality. 1 However even if the looming fuel shortage was not driving this issue we should be doing it anyway for the following reasons:
Reducing oil use will reduce impacts on the environment. Oil use is responsible for approximately one-third of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Transport emissions are seen as the most worrying part of the climate change agenda as they continue to grow during a period when more renewable or efficiency options are available.
Reducing oil use will reduce smog. Improvements in urban air quality from technological advances are being washed out by growing use of vehicles in 39 different air quality districts in the US that are over the required standards (this is 40 per cent of the United States). Developing cities desperately need to lower air emissions as they are often well above the health limits recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). Reducing car dependence will improve human health, safety and equity. The inequities of heavily car dependent cities for the elderly, the young and the poor, will be reduced; the health impacts of car dependence such as poor air quality, obesity due to lack of activity, and depression will be reduced; the social issues such as noise, neighbourhood severance, road rage and loss of public safety will be reduced; the economic costs from loss of productive agricultural land to sprawl and bitumen, the costs of accidents, pollution and congestion, all will be reduced.
Reducing our dependence on petroleum fuels will make us less economically vulnerable. The next agenda for the global economy, sometimes called the Sixth Wave (outlined below) is about sustainability, about responding with technology and services for a new and cleverer kind of resource use. Cities will compete within this economic framework and those cities that get in first will likely do best. But the same economic competition is facing households depending on which city they live in and where they live in those cities. In US cities the proportion of household expenditure on transportation increased from 10 per cent in the 1960s to 19 per cent in 2005, before the 2006 oil price increases (which only reduced the percentage to 18 per cent), with very car dependent cities like Houston and Detroit having even higher percentages (Surface Transportation Policy Project (STPP), 2005). A more detailed study by the Centre for Housing Policy shows working families with household incomes between $20,000 and $50,000 spend almost 30 per cent on transportation (Lipman, 2006). In Atlanta within this income range the percentage is 32, and for families who have found cheap housing on the fringe it can be over 40 per cent of their income. So in car dependent cities there is an increase in household income spent on transportation especially in their urban fringe areas. Almost all of this is for car travel. Households on the fringes of car dependent cities are highly vulnerable as the cost of transport escalates. The 2007/8 dramatic increase in oil prices coincided with the subprime mortgage crisis, hitting many with a double whammy of increased transportation costs and a ballooning mortgage payment. It is now evident that cities, and parts of cities, are economically vulnerable to oil as it increases in cost and that financial institutions will not easily lend money to highly car dependent land development.
Reducing dependence on foreign oil is likely to result in more resilient, peaceful cities. Cities that are able successfully to reduce their dependence on imported oil, especially from politically sensitive areas, will have greater energy security. Terrorism and war have many causes but one deep and underlying issue is the need of high oil-consuming cities to secure access to oil in foreign areas, whether they are friendly or not. As oil becomes more and more valuable the security of supply will become a more and more central part of geopolitics. Fear can drive us to make security decisions that are not going to help create resilient cities.
Most importantly these more resilient cities will be better places to live (Newman et al, 2009). The many benefits of a resilient city include greater overall physical and emotional health; ease of movement from higher density, mixed-use communities that are walkable and have accessible transit options; better food that is produced locally and is therefore fresher; more energy efficient, affordable and healthy indoor environments; access to natural environments; and more awareness of the local urban area and its bioregion enabling us to have a greater sense of place and identity. Some of these factors are challenging to quantify but are nevertheless real factors.
