A New Development Cycle

About a year ago I interviewed my old urbanist friend Jim Kumon on the podcast (Part 1 | Part 2) about his work developing missing middle housing in the Twin Cities and other spots around the country and he mentioned something super interesting that a colleague reminded me of recently about the cycle of our growth regimes in the US that also reverberated around the world.

“And so humanity has a pretty good cycle about every 70 to 80 years where we flip a switch and something serious happens. You know, whether it’s the industrial revolution to things that happened around post-Civil war and the railroads, and then World War II and suburbia, and we’re kind of running on the fumes of that last 80 year cycle, right? We’re kind of past due. And now the pandemic and other things that have changed, we’re into a new cycle. We don’t really know what that is yet.”

These development cycles upended what people knew about cities, transportation, urban planning and design. Urbanization happened intensely and at a full burn since the industrial revolution to where we are now.

What’s more interesting though may be starting to get glimpses of what a new 80 year cycle looks like.

From an energy perspective, the cycles went from wood burning to coal to gasoline and with the Iran War raising the cost of oil, it looks like a lot of countries are looking for stability and certainty in something old but evolved: electricity. A new item in Phenomenal World discusses the rise of the “electrotech” powered by overwhelming Chinese investments in electrification, everything from cars, trains, and ships to energy grids and renewable energy investments exported around the world.

These investments and long term thinking began for China after the 2003 Iraq War and are now being realized on a large scale, and adopted by countries across Asia Pacific, Africa, and Europe.

Here in the United States the highway lobby which includes car manufacturers, oil companies, road builders and more are continuing to pull in the direction of the post world war development regime and against a new electrotech future. But people that live in the existing system are waking up to the expense and unaffordability of oil dependence and the urban systems it has installed and expanded.

Moving aside for the moment the impacts on our planet’s climate, this push towards a monolithic unbalanced transportation system has increased costs for families that I don’t think people still quite grasp. Housing costs tied to job accessibility and distance. Transportation costs tied to how far we are forced to drive, how much new vehicles cost to operate and insure. Public health tied to access to fresh food and care infrastructure.

Electrotech thus isn’t the only answer because much of it is tied to enforcing a previous regime built on automobility. But what comes with electrotech is the potential for a reset button on the poor built environment decisions that have been made over the last 100 years as well as our local economic systems. Instead of profits exported from our neighborhoods, we get to keep them if our utilities and neighborhoods are structured correctly.

A reduction in cost of living for families and improvements in health will grow people’s quality of life and create a value unmatched and unknown in most of the country. It’s something to look forward to, not fight against.

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