When one sees a modern city from the air, especially at night, it is a truly awe-inspiring spectacle. The immensity of the project is a testimony to the power and creativity of human beings. However, on the ground and actually living powerful, and built and operated to serve their needs rather than
Today the destructive effect on the quality of urban life of 10% or more of the city surface is asphalt and Motor vehicles also directly kill and maim large numbers of Public transport systems are weak and take second place to • Then look at what the developers actually construct. Modern houses and buildings are generally not only hard to maintain but
In the cities, public land-modest though it is is constantly being devoured by greedy developers in league with councils and
Not only are house prices soaring beyond the reach of most housing and rely on the market to solve everything (preferring to people to rely on cars to do their shopping. But these juggernauts
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What would a liveable city look like? use them and they thus fulfil a social function but access and control is wholly in the hands of the private owners. • As the supermarkets and malls kill off many of the neighbourhood shops, their place is taken by chain outlets all offering emergency supplies at much higher prices. • Within the city we have the monstrous swelling of the city centre (full of truly ugly buildings all jostling
DAVE HOLMES for position) and the bleak wasteland of the sprawling suburbs. • In the 1960s, "decentralisation" was a buzzword. Governments encouraged a modest movement of services and industry to regional centres. But today country towns and villages are dying as governments cut services and jobs and banks close branches. This has a multiplier effect. People move to the city (or at least to the big regional centres) and the rural crisis intensifies. • There is a movement back to some regional centres butunder the wonderful capitalist system we have—it becomes a ghastly caricature of what is really needed. The rich and middle classes build holiday homes in coastal towns, forcing up prices and making life impossible for ordinary working-class pensioners and renters who have to move elsewhere. Peak oil and climate change On top of the all this, as the concept of peak oil and the eventual end of this finite resource laid down over millions of years gains currency, the fragility of the modern city is suddenly laid bare. If the motor vehicle as we know it goes -i.e., can no longer serve as mode of mass transport-then the urban sprawl becomes even more untenable and an alternative way of living becomes desperately urgent.
Similarly, climate change has put a big question mark over the modern city. Effecting a drastic and rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is a life-and-death question.
All in all, climate change calls into question many aspects of our current urban existence.
The motor vehicle culture that big business has foisted on us is no longer viable (if it ever was). Public transport systems will have to be developed to replace it. • The urban sprawl especially characteristic of
31 Australian capital cities which compels people to travel vast distances to get to workwill have to give way to some form of consolidation. The growth of the city centre and the bleakness of much of the suburbs needs to be overcome. A much better spread of jobs would mean that people didn't have to travel vast distances to work.
As currently constructed, our houses and buildings embody huge amounts of water and energy and considerable greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, their actual operation is characterised by a high and unsustainable energy and water consumption. • Climate change will put our food supply under extreme pressure. What foods we eat, how they are transported and distributed will become important questions. As well as finding ways to guarantee our food security, reducing the water and energy consumed in the whole process will be vitally important.
We need a much more uniform distribution of the population over the countryside. At the very least, the cities must get smaller and the country towns grow. But, unlike what is happening today, this needs to be done in such a way that jobs and services move out also, transport access is maintained and actual living communities are created. In time, the traditional isolation of the countryside would disappear along with the swollen capital city with its bloated centre. City park in Curitiba, Brazil
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In this regard socialists reject the current developerdriven model whereby greenfield housing estates gobble up precious farmland and create ghettos on the fringes of the city, isolated and with few amenities, a trap for the less mobile and a terrific burden for those who have to travel vast distances to work. We can surely work out something much better. Abandon affluence? As an aside, Ted Trainer, in his 1985 book Abandon Affluence, had a lot to say on the modern city. But his non-Marxist, radical green framework marred a lot of the useful points he made.
He saw "over-consumption" by the West as the source of the global ecological crisis. In his book he bases everything on reducing consumption.
Marxists, of course, see the fundamental problem not as "over-consumption" but the capitalist drive for profits ahead of all else; achieving a relative material abundance is essential if humanity is to leave class conflict behind. With modern technology, it would be quite possible to achieve relative material abundance and by improving production processes and eliminating the wastefulness of capitalist production and society-at the same time actually reduce our ecological footprint massively.
One can say generally that the West consumes too many resources but this obscures the reality that these are classdivided societies and a large proportion of the population doesn't consume very much at all. For example, in the United States there is a huge internal Third World which radically under-consumes the necessities of life. They are not responsible for the reckless extravagance of the US. + N While we oppose the wasteful use of resources and while we too are opposed to capitalist consumerism, posing the problem in terms of reducing consumption as such is wrong and would be political suicide for the socialist movement. For instance, supermarkets, for all their capitalistic form, are actually a tremendous labourand time-saving convenience. The liberation of women and the whole working class has many aspects; a key one is reducing drudgery to the minimum. We want to go forwards from capitalism, not backwards.
Trainer's city of the future has a very definite reactionary, feudal, labourintensive feel to it, but even allowing for this rather basic weakness, he does paint a thought-provoking picture of the new city, with the old freeways and roads dug up, with vegetable gardens where the factories once stood, etc.
Making our cities liveable and grappling with peak oil, climate change and sustainability are really one and the same thing.
Ideally, we would have a big discussion, develop a rational plan and then organise ourselves to implement it. If we were, say, a small community living in ancient times before the development of class society, that is exactly what we would have done.
But today, the problem is not that the population has grown but that the economy on which we all depend the productive apparatus and everything associated with it is not owned collectively by society, but by a tiny handful of capitalists. Working people's labour operates the means of productionin that sense it is socialbut only a few per cent of the population privately own it.
This is the elephant in the room. At every turn of the wheel it has to fed. Its ravenous appetite must be satisfied ahead of any human need. What it wants-profits
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Curitiba public transport is not what the rest of us want: meaningful action on climate change and other social problems.
For example, in Victoria right now, the big-businessoriented Brumby ALP government is moving at high speed in the opposite direction to what is needed to confront peak oil and climate change: Public ownership and planning In order to grapple with the crisis of climate change we need a total mobilisation of society and a drastic, rapid reorientation of our entire economy. But to imagine that anything can compel a horde
304 03L02 of profit-crazed corporations to be "responsible" is utterly fanciful. The commanding heights of the economy must be in public hands. • Socialists call for the nationalisation of the entire energy sector. This vital infrastructure must belong to the community—whether it is in federal, state or municipal hands. The charter of this sector must be to phase out the fossil fuel power plants and make the "big switch" to renewable energy as quickly • The public transport and freight systems must also be in public hands. The aim must be to achieve a rapid, substantial reduction in the use of motor vehicles. The roads should be kept safe; apart from that, massive investments must be poured into rail, trams and feeder bus systems. • The automobile industry should likewise be nationalised. The car plants should be retooled to produce public transport stock and renewable power equipment.
As the crisis of climate change bites deeper, food security will become a big issue for society. We can't leave the bulk of the distribution system in the hands of profit-gouging supermarket chains, that exploit small suppliers and consumers alike. They too should be brought under public ownership. • The banks, which
33 underpin the capitalist economy, should be nationalised and a single state bank created. This would guarantee bank workers' jobs, provide services and generate funds for the reconstruction of the economy.
Economic planning based on public ownership of the means of production has tremendous power.
Of course, the capitalist class has immense power and wealth and will not give it up without a tremendous struggle. Only the growth of a vast popular movement. solidly based on the great working-class majority, can suceeed. The development of a movement to fight for meaningful action on climate change will at the same time prepare the political conditions for a workers government which will finally bring the economy under collective ownership and control.
This-and only thiswill enable us to begin to construct a society based on the fulfilment of human needs and living sustainably in harmony with nature. W Dave Holmes is a member of the Socialist Alliance in Australia. This article is based on a talk presented at the Climate Change -Social Change Conference in Sydney earlier this year. The conference was organised by Green Left Weekly