I conduct ‘thought experiments’. These can be fun. They cost almost nothing, you can do remarkable things to anyone, anywhere, anytime — and they don’t even notice! My favourite experiment focusses on metropolitan Adelaide (you can do this too). It’s simple: at the height of summer, turn off the city’s water supply for two weeks.
There is outrage! There is universal expectation that ’someone’ will fix it but after just 24 hours the situation is critical because virtually every aspect of maintaining sanitary conditions depends on hot water for cleaning, boiling water for sterilisation or simply water to flush the toilet.
The very young, the elderly and the infirm suffer most, and quickest. Society’s most vulnerable members quickly feel pain from the disruption of ‘normality’.
After a week, violence is breaking out. Anyone who can is leaving town. Owners of rainwater tanks are attacked by desperate people, less and less able to think straight as they get thirsty, dirty and scared.
The government declares a state of emergency.
Within two weeks the city collapses completely. Normal order is impossible. Violence is routine. Desperation, fatigue and fear have replaced any sense of security the city once provided. Pestilence and disease overruns the city as normal services break down. The thin fabric of civilisation begins to tear…
In my even nastier experiment, I turn off the electricity for two weeks as well!
Continuing this exploration of possibilities, imagine all the cities and towns dependent on the Murray-Darling system for their water supply becoming independent. Then imagine them weaned off fossil fuels…
Can cities be independent in this way? The answer is ‘yes’, but instead of poisoning the lifelines of our waterways we should be cleaning and conserving them. Our urban centres must be planned, developed and redeveloped on the basis of their interdependency with the landscape (and vice versa — no farmer would have a livelihood without cities to feed).
We need to transform the landscape. But the landscape that has to change first is the invisible landscape of legislation, because in an advanced civilisation that is one of the principal foundations of its existence.
We need cultural change. It happens at the grassroots level of communities and committed citizens, but it can be accelerated by supportive, intelligent legislation and that is the responsibility of government.
The amount of water we use is about the same as the amount of rain falling on the metropolitan area every year. In Adelaide, at the height of the summer of 2020, let’s look forward to turning off the tap!
Now conduct your own thought experiment — imagine living in an exciting, beautiful city that fits the ecology of the land. Then, if your ecological city feels good and works well, move it from the realm of imagination, start figuring out how to build it, now begin…
This essay, date 8 October 2003, is an abridged and modified version of a longer paper given at the Region 7 Seminar of the Murray Darling Association on 26 July 2000.
tim heath | 17-Dec-06 at 10:10 am | Permalink
here is another thought experiment used to emphasise the importance of physical landscape, climate on cultural landscapes. we turn NZ upside down (north to south)and expose it to exactly the same global climate and deep sea currents etc. amazing what it does for the urbs!