Right.

Furthermore, under peak oil prices will become even more of an important distribution mechanism that will help prevent oil from running out. Earth will never suck its endowment of petroleum dry; there will come a price point where petroleum becomes too expensive to burn.

As oil becomes more scarce, prices will rise. Value-added users of fuel will crowd out discretionary users.

Aaron, Jim: history can be a good guide here, okay. Though I’d put the boundary much further back, in the 1920s or 30s. Even in that period, some streetcar suburbs would later become auto-oriented in the 1950s. (Bear in mind, I’m thinking mainly of New York area suburbs, which became auto-oriented earlier than in the Midwest.)

I don’t think rings defined by distance are a good idea, because they depend so much on city size. This is what made Ed Glaeser’s “Chicago has too much job dispersion” argument so wrong – you can’t really compare Chicago, whose urban area breached the 3-mile radius in the 1880s, with smaller cities, where at 3 miles you’re almost in the suburbs.

Alon, I’m not sure what the best definition of the “urban core” is. Probably something like the urbanized area of the city pre-1950 + some streetcar suburbs. The percentage you could get depends on the market size, the area of that core, and regional growth rate. I don’t think that 10% is a hard and fast rule. The idea is that you pick some reasonably attainable goal that makes sense from a numbers perspective and figure out how to make it happen.

Even if Kunstler believes there will be massive ruralization, even agrarian economies will supply to the highest bidder. In order to get to markets, they must rely on supply networks that are usually in or near cities.

Also, Kunstlerian ruralism is what Jane Jacobs has described as a passive region. This is not an ideal vision for a society; for any urban society to fall into this state means that they are trapped in a dark age. They’ve lost information networks, markets and processes, and are unlikely to be able to recover them.

Europe went through this period from the fall of the Roman Empire to the renaissance. This wasn’t true for the Middle East, which was economically robust and leading the world in trade, science and education. Then in the 1400s-1500s, Europe and the Middle East essentially traded places.

I’ve read Kunstler’s book “The Long Emergency” and he actually things that dense urban cities like New York and Chicago (with their energy-consuming large buildings) are doomed.

By the way: Kunstler doesn’t think there will be massive reurbanization; he thinks there will be massive ruralization. He thinks peak oil will force the world to return to the population distribution of 1850.

http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/engine-for-growth-has-173667.html

Atlanta’s urban core has been losing jobs and its downtown is simply not on the radar as a place for companies to locate their headquarters.

Any sundry suburban boomtown is not an example I’d set for rebuilding aging midwestern cities.