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Growing the Shire, Not the ‘Burb: Facing the Housing Crisis with Ecological Sanity
(www.resilience.org)
this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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Is this a serious article? I'm all for getting rid of suburbs but the author seems to be advocating for the whole world to move into farming communes.
I think it lacks imagination to suggest that urban areas cannot be sustainable or developed sustainably and that instead we should all go live agrarian lifestyles.
In this particular article, I think, the author is advocating for rural communes as a solution to the American housing crisis - and, in general, as one potential form of sustainable living - that's both cheaper and more sustainable than what the United States has been trying for decades.
The author does believe Western urban society is unsustainable due to fundamental resource constraints, but you don't have to agree on that to think about "Hobbit villages" as one possible sustainable community model.
Let a thousand flowers bloom, right?
I think that's fair enough but it kind of ignores the multitude of reasons that people live in cities, with job availability being just one factor. There are many areas in North America where people could go buy cheap land and set up a homestead and live this kind of lifestyle the author is advocating for but there isn't a mass movement of people out to those places.
One of my favorite things about solarpunk is that it feels like practical utopianism, achieving the changes you want to see in society in the place you live with the people and community that you are connected to. It doesnt really feel like a solution to hugh housing costs to say "just move people to rural areas". I think there is absolutely a place for some agrarian revival movement in solarpunk, but I prefer the vision of dense rural communities surrounded by farmland with accessibility to and from urban areas via public transit.