Peak Oil Task Force Report - City of Bloomington - State of Indiana

Report of the Bloomington Peak Oil Task Force
LAND USE
The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction,
under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other direction,
under another pine tree. We shall both have our own car.
We shall use up tires, wear out road surfaces and gears, consume oil and gasoline.
All of which will necessitate a great deal of work … enough for all.
‐‐ Le Corbusier, The Radiant City (1967)
The Human Scale
Historically, our communities have been shaped by the mode of travel available to us.
While horse, rail, and the street car allowed us to go further and faster than ever before, for
most of human history we have lived our lives on a scale that was within walking distance.
That is, we were able to meet our needs of daily life by walking to the grocery, to work, the
hardware store, school, and other activities. This ambit wherein we meet most of our
essential daily needs can be understood as the “human scale.”
The Automotive Age
The human scale was completely redefined with the advent of the personal automobile.
Thanks to technological advances, the personal auto became much more commonplace
after WWII. After the war, just about everyone owned a car. As the personal auto became
the norm, it dramatically reconfigured the geographic space we could traverse in a day:
people could easily live in one place, work in another, while shopping, schooling, and
conducting all of the other aspects of daily life in equally distant places. 127 In turn, the
ever‐increasing distances between home and the rest of life radically reshaped land use
patterns.
127 Real-estate interests reacted quickly and predictably, introducing the legal concept of zoning in order to place
legal restrictions on what land use activities were allowed or prohibited. Originally sold to the public on the basis
that these rules were a way to ensure that no slaughterhouse, refinery, factory, or prisons would, or could, be built in
their residential neighborhoods, zoning became a powerful tool by which developers could guarantee infrastructure
investments in their parcels while simultaneously vastly increasing the demand for land, thereby driving up its price.
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