Skip to main content
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Living with energy shortfall: a future for American towns and cities

Book ·
OSTI ID:5867301

This book represents an extension of several earlier works on spatial form by Van Til, an urban sociologist who describes himself as a guarded pessimist about the future. He examines the spatial ramifications on urban, suburban, and rural use of space brought about by changes in the availability of amount and types of energy resources. In the first three chapters, he explores these ideas by structuring the future in terms of four institutional sectors: economy (inflation, unemployment, corporate control, and distribution of wealth); culture (values, demography and life style, information revolution); polity (governance and empowerment); and voluntary action. The second part of the book explicitly considers geographic space, with a chapter devoted to describing urban, suburban, and nonmetropolitan spatial forms, and one to changes anticipated in these forms given the three future scenarios. This balanced presentation discusses both those who advocate reliance on technological development as well as those who prefer other solutions.

OSTI ID:
5867301
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English