Last year, I watched an incredible documentary entitled Subdivided, a film about life in contemporary suburbia -- depicting isolation, lack of community, and the sprawl that plagues the outlying of our American urban landscapes.  It validated everything I've always thought.

Sprawl and the lack of public transportation in traditional suburbs have long defined the suburban lifestyle -- the need for constant driving, long commutes, heavy energy use, rampant air pollution and ultimately the destruction of both open spaces and farm area.  And it's finally coming to an end.

In a new world with high gasoline prices and an impending energy crisis, people will have to learn to adapt.  There are no quick fixes to this problem.  Drilling for more oil here at home isn't going to save us.  Some new technology isn't going to emerge to allow us to continue to behave the way we have the last half century.  There just simply isn't a fairy that's going to wave a magic wand and make everything better. 

By design, suburbs were born from cheap and plentiful oil. And without that cheap and plentiful oil, the suburban model will no longer work. 

The suburbs as we know it will cease to exist in the next twenty years, maybe even sooner.  People will be forced to move closer to their jobs in the city cores in order to survive.  The demand for housing in cities across America will skyrocket to accommodate the rush of these suburbanites.  As for food, the days of getting groceries that come from thousands of miles away will be a thing of the past.  We will depend on local farmers for our food more than ever.  (Farmer's Markets are awesome, by the way.)

And what will happen to the suburbs?  They will for the most part be left abandoned.  Empty strip malls.  Empty big-box retailers and seas of parking lots with no cars to fill them.  There will still be people, but they will be ghost towns compared to what they are today.

Above, I pictured a sad little tree from the film Subdivided (which was filmed in suburbs north of Dallas).  The picture was taken behind a new shopping center in Frisco, Texas.  Everything was scraped away, paved and cemented, and then they made a little island for this lonely, pathetic tree.

You see, America used to create environments where people wanted to be -- places with beautiful architecture and community, like the town squares and Main Streets of the early 20th century.  For some reason, after World War II, we decided to do away with all of that -- and for the last fifty or so years we created places where no one wants to be (like the shopping center above).  Luckily, in the last ten years designers have embraced the earlier models of mixed-use developments that we saw prior to the suburban age.  Open-air communities with multiple-story buildings with shopping, retail, and office together have made a huge comeback.

So we screwed up, but it looks like we'll have another chance -- even if it is forced.

Oh, and I didn't even get to talk about how we need more trains ...