She wants to see a world where more people are drawn to rural life, rather than lured away by opportunities elsewhere, creating diverse, thriving communities.I wonder if she dreamt it auf Deutsch.
But her dream vision would involve an even greater overhaul of land use. “To me, it’s concentric circles,” she said. “Nearest to the humans would be the most highly perishable crops — so, around small towns is more fruit and vegetable production. The next layer out from that would be milk and dairy systems that would be grass-based as much as possible.” And extending out from there, fields of broad acre crops would be grown in varied rotations.
In 1810 [Johann Heinrich von] Thünen began gathering data for the book for which he is remembered, Der isolierte Staat (1826; “The Isolated State”). In it he imagined an isolated city, set in the middle of a level and uniformly fertile plain without navigable waterways and bounded by a wilderness. He used this model to demonstrate methods of maximizing agricultural production in concentric zones. Heavy products and perishables would be produced close to the town, while lighter and more durable goods could be manufactured on the periphery. Because it would cost more to transport goods to areas distant from the city centre, the returns to the outlying areas land would diminish until, at a certain distance, land rent would become zero. Moreover, methods of cultivation would vary—with land cultivated more intensively near the city, because the more valuable land near the city would demand a high rate of return. Subsequent writers have often built upon the model that Thünen devised.The book von Thünen wrote is still in print. And indeed, subsequent writers have built upon that model. Again it is helpful to know your Germans, as Walter Christaller and August Lösch developed central place theory in order to make sense of large cities surrounded by smaller cities, with towns filling in the space, and orchards and milk sheds in Thünenesque rings around the cities.
Central Place Theory sought to explain the economic relationships of cities with smaller settlements. It also seeks to explain why cities are located where they are geographically and how they serve the surrounding smaller settlements with speciality goods and services.That class of location and land use models stipulates a featureless plain in order for the math to work out. (I speak from experience.) The interaction of scale economies and information spillovers leading to population centers, let alone population centers getting bigger, is messier still. It's easier to get a handle on those dynamics by running simulations rather than deriving them with the help of a very large blackboard, even if you're Paul Krugman.
The theory was used to explain a generally isotropic landscape, in other words a flat and homogeneous surface, and how varied urban locations dispersed on such surfaces. The population was seen as generally evenly distributed with settlements being generally equidistant.
In the standard view, consumers and sellers also have generally equal economic and purchasing power, which affects markets and placement of services. Given these assumptions, then a number of results are observed.
First, as settlements get bigger, then fewer large settlements emerge. The larger settlements grow the further larger settlements are from each other. As settlements grow, its range and functions that it provides also grow. As settlements grow, they tend to specialize more and provide greater services.
Central Place Theory can be visualized is a pattern of hexagons and networks that form when setting up the arrangements of the different order of settlements. Over a homogenous landscape in terms of population distribution, soil fertility, and transportation systems, lower order settlements (villages and hamlets) form a hexagon pattern around intermediate order settlements (towns) which in turn form a hexagon around higher order settlements (cities).
Distribution of goods and services is then served to the settlements closest to the central place. High order settlements offer specialized goods and services that requirement [c.q.] a higher threshold of demand.
In real life, though, plains, even the Great Plains, the steppes, or the North German Plain, are anything but featureless. Spencer Scott, who operates Solar Punk Farms, offers a different vision of land use, based on his observation.
“There is a lot that we can learn from why cities can be enjoyable and why density can be enjoyable — but we can also have that at a smaller scale in rural places,” he said. “I’ve seen a couple places in Eastern Europe, these small, rural farming towns are all kind of packed close together on a road, with the farmland extending back in these long lines. And so they all live very close together, but then they have all of this open space around them where they’re farming.”I'll leave for another day the libertarian coda to that excerpt. Focus, dear reader, on that "packed close together on a road." Clustered to support the church and the green-grocer, perhaps. Think, though, about the metropolitan corridor. There might have been antecedents of the metropolitan corridor along waterways. The moment you introduce watercourses into your otherwise featureless plain, you lose any opportunity to offer generalizations about land use. Think of the railroad as a similarly fixed feature, only permitting more rapid movement along it. The major road functions similarly: the farms along the road, the communities develop at the side of the road, the strip farms (well, with the farm tractor, the quarter section) away from the road. In like manner to the railroad-located metropolitan corridor leaving traces behind, so too is its successor along the likes of Route 66 leaving traces behind in the form of motor courts and truck stops, even as the divided highway sacrifices two lanes to a bike trail or in place is simply where the Interstate runs.
He hopes to be part of creating that mindset shift. “That is kind of our explicit purpose with Solar Punk Farms, is changing what is seen as aspirational,” he said. But, in addition to the messaging and educational work it takes to change attitudes, there are some practical barriers to building that dream vision. Policy shifts — for instance, upzoning for denser housing — can be more difficult to achieve in rural areas, for logistical reasons. Solar Punk Farms is on unincorporated territory in Sonoma County, meaning the area doesn’t have local governance.
And yet, it is the private automobile that does more to free the plain from the constraints of watercourses and geography. As hilly as Iowa is, for example, its political map is a near-Cartesian grid of counties, and those counties are traversed by section roads. A road or street grid gets you about as close as you can to that featureless plain with transportation rates dependent solely on distance. (I dimly recall some effort in regional modelling to base rates on such a street grid rather than on Euclidean distance.) Thus, if you want the land-use patterns of central place theory or Thünen rings, you're probably relying on the private automobile, irrespective of its power source. That freedom of choice makes it possible for the New Urbanist types to find themselves in a central place they like, without antagonizing others.
In cities, you tend to have more compact living spaces,” said Mark Chambers, an architect and city policy expert who now leads partnerships for the cleantech investor Elemental Impact. Homes that are smaller and closer together — in the same building, or wall-to-wall — tend to be more efficient to heat and cool. And where there are masses of people, there is the opportunity for mass transit, in the form of trains, buses, and other communal offerings like bike shares and rideshares.No, nor should we. "Connected community" is easier to carry off with like-minded community members, and the Puritans were not able to make it happen in sparsely settled New England. Bring a bunch of urbanists with rigid ideas about what a neighborhood should look like, and prepare for the homeowners association from Hell.
“There’s an efficient use of resources, because your proximity to those resources enables you to tap into them without having to have them isolated solely for your use,” Chambers said.
Those working on the future of city living are focused on how to make the most of those inherent efficiencies — concepts like the 15-minute city imagine dense, walkable neighborhoods that create connected communities.
But one of the biggest challenges to realizing the sustainability benefits of denser living is that, in reality, many people still don’t want to live that way. Most Americans still aspire to own larger homes that are more spread out from one another. The chokehold that the single-family home has on the American consciousness — not to mention, our zoning codes — creates a significant obstacle to implementing denser housing arrangements in places that don’t currently have them.
“Urban environments force compromise,” Chambers said, suggesting that may be viewed as a negative for many in the U.S., because it runs counter to deeply ingrained ideals of rugged individualism. “We don’t necessarily have a lot of great narratives around collectivism that are aspirational,” he said.
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