Suburban Dystopia and the Threat of Peak Oil: A Review of the Videos The End of Suburbia, Escape from Suburbia and Radiant City.

Gregory Greene (Director) Barry Silverthorn (Producer). 2004. The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream. The Electric Wallpaper Company, 78 minutes, ISBN 097369470X/DBCN (CaAE) a583352, US $23.95 (DVD)

Gregory Greene (Director) and Dara Rowland (Producer). 2007. Escape from Suburbia: Beyond the American Dream. Escape from Suburbia Inc., 95 minutes, US $25.00 (DVD)

Gary Burns and Jim Brown (Directors). 2006. Radiant City: A Documentary About Urban Sprawl. Burns Films/ Alliance Atlantis/NFB, 85 minutes, DBCN (CaCE) a653385, US $38.95 (DVD)

Reviewed by Patricia Ballamingie, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Carleton University, and Lorelei Hanson, Centre for Global and Social Analysis, Athabasca University

The End of Suburbia, Escape from Suburbia and Radiant City are three videos that discuss the growth and impacts of suburban developments in North America. They vary somewhat in their discussion of suburbs, but all raise a host of questions about the sustainability of this form of urban residential design.

In The End of Suburbia, Greene and Silverthorn argue that peak oil (the end of cheap petroleum when global demand outstrips a declining supply) will ultimately result in the demise not only of the suburbs but also of the American Dream--a scenario they assert will occur within the next 5 to 25 years. The film provides a short historical overview to explain how suburbia first developed as people fled polluted, industrialized urban cores (replete with factories and dense row housing), to seek a sense of space, affordability, family life and upward mobility. Growth of the suburbs coincides with growth of the middle class. Following World War II, the suburbs offered a convenient solution to housing the returning troops and their families, combining the best of both the city and the country. The film also illustrates how the suburbs have become embedded in our consciousness, uncritically accepted as the American dream--a dream from which we must collectively wake if we wish to mitigate the inevitable geopolitical conflict that arises in the case of acute resource shortages.

The End of Suburbia discusses the social, political and economic contexts within which the suburban form emerged. For example, many of the developers of the first suburban neighborhoods in America paid for trolley cars to connect suburban areas to the city. However, General Motors, Firestone and Standard Oil conspired to destroy light rail to the suburbs by lobbying government to shift subsidies away from public transit toward building roads through the Federal Highway Program.

The film explores at length theories and evidence that we are at the cusp of global peak oil. The 2003 blackout along the north-eastern seaboard that left close to 57 million people without power is cited as evidence that North America has reached the limits of its generating capacity due to short-sighted energy planning, political hubris and a failure to accept that we need to become radically less reliant on fossil fuels.

The film offers a skeptical outlook on the capacity of alternative energy sources to provide adequate solutions to the coming crisis, stressing that no combination of renewable sources will allow us to continue living as we do since most offer only low-density, intermittent power. Moreover, wind turbines, solar panels and nuclear power plants all require fossil fuels as an input in their creation. And alternative fuels such as hydrogen and ethanol require more energy to create than they are able to supply. The film features a diverse array of experts, including assorted geologists, professors, writers and oil industry pundits. However, commentators are not rigorously identified, their titles vary, and interviewees are almost exclusively middle-aged white males.

Escape from Suburbia is the sobering 2007 sequel to The End of Suburbia. Directors Greene and Rowland follow the plight of three families motivated to reinvent their lives in the face of peak oil. One couple flees their suburban home in Portland, Oregon, intent on joining an ecovillage in Canada. Two gay men from New York City pare down their possessions and hone their farming and permaculture skills as they plan their escape. A single mother from Toronto decides to remain in place, and work towards suburban transformation. Her motto: "Stay where you are, dig in, and make it better." The film reinforces the general hypothesis that peak oil will result in the collapse of the American Dream, and uses the varied responses of these protagonists to spur individuals and communities to respond preemptively to the challenges ahead. These stories are interspersed with views from what is fast becoming the standard line-up of peak oil experts: James Howard Kunstler, Richard Heinberg, and Matthew Simons, Mike Ruppert and Guy Dauncey. In fact, all three films draw heavily on the views of Kunstler, a New Urbanist who offers a mocking and strident critique of suburbia. Kunstler raises the specter of peak oil, coupled with the twin challenge of climate change, as a future that will compel us to live differently--whether we want to or not. However, his stark pronouncements and narrow knowledge of social development, contribute to an over-simplified view of the attraction of the suburbs as both a form of development and residential choice.

The film questions the potential for civic engagement in the face of oppressive forces, citing the 2006 destruction of an extensive and well-loved community garden in a low-income neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles, to be replaced by a warehouse, as evidence. This dramatic and deeply disturbing footage cannot help but produce a visceral reaction at the blind injustice. However, the cooperative efforts by the residents of Willits, California, to relocalize their town of approximately 13,000 for greater energy self-sufficiency and community resilience, prove more uplifting.

Although the film provides concrete options for people to model, it does not adequately convey how imperatively those actions are needed. Moreover, the general message might have had a broader appeal had the protagonists reflected more mainstream social identities. But it succeeds in generating critical discussion around the best response to the coming apocalypse--'fight' or 'flight'?

Burns and Brown blur the line between fact and fiction in Radiant City, a 2006 documentary-style critique of urban sprawl. The film intersperses narrative, expert testimony and compelling statistics with scenes from Cohen and Javerbaum's Suburb: The Musical, for an acerbic, engaging and humorous but oftentimes disturbing sociological expose of life in the suburbs. The film offers a self-reflexive gaze on the truly inane suburban reality we have collectively, athough perhaps tacitly consented to. Alternating the perspectives of various members of the Moss family, this film illustrates the disparities between what we long for--a sense of community and place and belonging--and what the contemporary suburbs offer--sterility, uniformity, placelessness and anonymity. Kunstler summarizes: most of what has been built in the last 50 years is "brutal, depressing, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading."

Radiant City shores up critiques of the suburbs, depicting them as dysfunctional monocultures in which people don't know their neighbors and are forced to commute on four-lane highways amidst a sea of SUVs. Apparently, the small print on the suburban contract reads: Thou shalt buy one car for each adult. Anders Duany, architect and planner, critiques the proliferation of cookie-cutter subdivisions based on single-incomes, where the basic elements of daily life are so disaggregated that residents are obliged to drive from one to the other. In fact, in 2001, 90% of kids were driven to school (National Centre for Biking and Walking), and in 2003, the average adult suburbanite weighed 6.3 lbs. more than their urban counterparts (Centre for Disease Control and Prevention)--presumably a result of car-dependence.

Philospher Mark Kingwell posits that suburbs represent an opposing movement of people away from the close proximity offered by the city, as they flee from each other into isolation. He further argues that people seek the suburbs to achieve some idyll and then find themselves stranded in this awful environment, where community becomes a "cluster of houses with people inside not talking to one another." Architecture professor Marc Boutin laments the fact that people can ride from garage to garage in their car without ever seeing a soul--an experience that propagates private space, leading to increased social intolerance. Kingwell similarly argues that social alienation, isolation and loss of communion result in a deteriorating sense of citizenship.

Radiant City cites a number of compelling statistics. For instance, the average size of a suburban home in North American has increased, from 800 sq. ft in 1950, to 1500 sq. ft. in 1970, to 2266 sq. ft. in 2000. This trend illustrates clearly how increased consumption per capita has become normalized and uncritically accepted. Moreover, people tend to aspire to ever-larger, and presumably more prestigious homes. But, interestingly, average living space per capita varies significantly around the globe: North Americans enjoy 646 sq. ft., while Brits live in 409 sq. ft., Japanese in 334 sq. ft., and Chinese in 108 sq. ft. (Ministry of Construction, China).

The film includes a series of successively more disturbing footage of an otherwise sensitive and intelligent teenage boy, Nick, along with his buddies, who clearly do not have enough to keep themselves productively occupied. The brutality of these manufactured vignettes culminates in a climatic scene involving a real gun, shot towards a real girl, with an unexpected twist. Unfortunately, all of these somewhat sensational episodes leave the viewer feeling rather manipulated.

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