Neal Peirce

“Small is beautiful.”

Washington Post Writer's Group, Apr 04, 11.

Tagged with environment, cities, climate change, planning

“Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful.”

Think about the emergencies roiling worldwide and the words of the late economist E.F. Schumacher ring truer than ever.

We’ve been reminded that the huge technology, mass capital systems Schumacher inveighed against can come unglued. Witness, after years of assurances they’d never happen, Japan’s nuclear power plant emergency — following by a few months the disastrous discharge from an oil well deep under the Gulf of Mexico. And recall that the global fiscal crisis was triggered by a financial industry that claimed it was preserving our investments.

“Low-probability, high-impact events,” Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein notes, have plagued “human experience since Noah and the flood.”

But Schumacher saw how our overreach, constantly embracing mega-systems rather than smaller and more flexible ones, could well exacerbate global disaster risks. One of his prime targets, in fact, was nuclear fission and its perils.

Alive today (he died in 1977), Schumacher would doubtless be stressing climate change too. Although a gruesome competitor is now heaving into view: the possibility that food shortages could trigger economic turmoil, wars, even waves of death by starvation.

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Thinking through these Schumacher-like themes, I decided to test them on my friend Scott Bernstein, founder of the Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago. He supported the decentralization advantage but underscored another: innovation.

“The principle,” Bernstein said, “is that a larger number of smaller interventions is a better solution than a smaller number of large ones. Smaller units mean less risk, less dependence on single solutions, less peril of technological lock-in like utilities buying the same nuclear plants. Plus, standard, legacy solutions crowd out good innovations.”

Cities and regions, in this view, work best if they’re seen as points of talent, creativity and production — and not simply as targets to be sold goods and services by some outside corporation.

Our cities and regions aren’t short on water, Bernstein suggests, if they use it with much higher efficiency. Innovation can also yield major dividends applied to advance localized (and “greener”) energy systems, to interlocking transportation systems (roadways, busways, subways, streetcars, even ferries), and to workplaces focused in downtowns and transit-accessible town nodes instead of suburban office parks.

Plus, we can be less dependent on distant, interruptable food chains if we start spotting locations in or near a city region appropriate for growing essential crops.

Rather than “bigger is better,” Schumacher advocated “lots of small, autonomous units,” committed to “the indivisibility of place and also of ecology.”

Critics will reply, fairly: we do need some big systems– for air traffic control, Internet and globally connected phone systems. Still, starting locally never sounded better.