If It’s the End of the Modern, What’s Next?
After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in September 2017, it was often declared that "modern life" on the island of 4 million people had ended. Mostly, this meant a grueling descent into life without electricity and the benefits it provides.
We often equate what's modern with technologies: the steam engine that touched off the Industrial Revolution, the automobile, the skyscraper, and electricity. These technologies led to enormous changes in the nature of cities.
But technology is not the deep story about how cities became modern, as we learned doing the research for our book, Life After Carbon. Ideas drove the process of change and paved the way for development and adoption of new technologies. Long before Thomas Edison set up the first central power plant in lower Manhattan in 1883, ideas about markets, economic growth, efficiency, consumption, engineering, and centralized control had taken hold, especially in Europe, the US, and Japan--and were championing and advanced by the advent of a global fossil-fuel economy. These ideas, and their technological applications, transformed cities and urbanized the world.
Now, as we report in Life After Carbon, which will be published in the fall, these modern-era ideas are being replaced, as cities strive to decarbonize their systems and to increase their resilience to climate change.
As Puerto Rico emerges from the pre-modern state to which it was blown, some leaders are looking, at least in part, to skip past simply rebuilding the modern model of development and move on to a post-modern approach. One example of a radical departure from modern-as-usual is the call for development of a distributed system of microgrids producing and distributing renewable energy, rather than a central electricity grid powered by burning fossil fuels. It aims to restore electricity, of course, but it brings new ideas--renewables, distributed production, and resilience--to the fore.
