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intense1: you cannot be serious.
so in your world, one day an automobile magically appears in some imaginary town. the residents of this imaginary town see the car and say "dang now there' a fine machine" which alerts the Bureau of Market Forces--presumably a wholly owned subsidiary of the Invisible Hand LLC--and then the Bureau of Market Forces gets its special daimon agents to work and then POOF the suburbs simply happen. And then folk in the present look around them and say MY MY WHAT A FINE INTERESTING AND NECESSARILY RATIONAL DEVELOPMENT for which of course endless gratitude is the only possible response.
you cannot seriously believe that your little parable about market forces explains anything in actual historical terms about the rise, consolidation and problems of the suburban model.
i mean you can always make anything into a little reassuring fable about capitalism and it beneficence if you leave out enough information, i guess.
but if the point of the thread is to prompt a discussion about the relationship between the suburban model and problems with petroleum, the such little fables really are not terribly interesting: they describe nothing, they analyze nothing, they point to nothing (except articles of the capitalist faith), they diagnose nothing, they consider nothing.
the suburbs as they current exist are the direct result of a particular phase of capitalist development--they are in many ways the perfected expression of the form of capitalist organization fully in effect in the united states from the end of Wolr dWar II into the early 1970s--the phase that over the past 40 years has been gradually giving way to globalization. being tied to an older form of capitalist organization, the suburban model is based on a series of assumptions about infrastructure conditions--that they are adequate, that they are renewable, that they will always be available---these preconditions have been altered or eroded by mutations in the form of economic organization they are a function of.
in other words, the american suburban model is the result of choices made by human beings based on assumptions concerning resources and infrastructure and finance and on and on. they do not follow naturally from any fiction called "market forces"---capitalism is a historical phenomenon, one made by human beings functioning within a history that they may or may not fully understand. there is no capitalist god that uses human beings as meat puppets to implement phases of reality that are always necessarily rational.
capitalism changes in its overall mode of organization.
if that overall mode of organization is the framework within which particular phenomena are decided upon (the burbs and the infrastructure they presuppose to function--highways, roads, etc.) then it follows that changes in the overall organization of capitalism will change the meaning--and raise questions about the functionality--of phenomena rooted in previous forms of organization.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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