There was a great quorum piece from the New York Times Freakanomics blog yesterday on the future of suburbia. The commentators opinions range from doom and gloom from James Kunstler to somewhat more optimistic prognosis from John Archer and Alan Berube. Pretty much everyone seems to agree that the suburbs will be totally different in 2050 than they are today. Rising energy costs and, to a lesser extent, shifting societal values seem to ensure this. Kunstler, whose book The Geography of Nowhere I read in my early twenties, has some wonderful vitriol:

…American suburbia requires an infinite supply of cheap energy in order to function and we have now entered a permanent global energy crisis that will change the whole equation of daily life. Having poured a half-century of our national wealth into a living arrangement with no future — and linked our very identity with it — we have provoked a powerful psychology of previous investment that will make it difficult for us to let go, change our behavior, and make other arrangements…

The suburbs have three destinies, none of them exclusive: as materials salvage, as slums, and as ruins. In any case, the suburbs will lose value dramatically, both in terms of usefulness and financial investment. Most of the fabric of suburbia will not be “fixed” or retrofitted, in particular the residential subdivisions. They were built badly in the wrong places.

These days, an awful lot of people — the production builders, the realtors — are waiting for the “bottom” in the real-estate industry with hopes that the suburban house-building orgy will resume. They are waiting in vain. The project of suburbia is over. We will build no more of it. Now we’re stuck with what’s there. Sometimes whole societies make unfortunate decisions or go down tragic pathways. Suburbia was ours.

As someone who’s a real believer in urbanism I have to admit I love Kunstler’s dystopian vision for suburbia. I like walkable communities, public transit and population density high enough to sustain interesting neighborhoods and vibrant arts scenes. I also like rural landscapes, camping/hiking and farming communities. Suburbia has seemed to me to be at odds with both of these.

Archer and Berube suggest that suburbia will change but that its future is less bleak than Kunstler predicts. Both seem to believe that in the future suburbia will more-or-less look like a mid-density city. It will be walkable and built around mass transit hubs. It will be increasingly economically and racially diverse. No matter who is right I imagine that the American urban and suburban areas of the next 40 years will be very different than they were in the last 40.