Decentralization: Making Small Places Work Again

Decentralization: Making Small Places Work Again

 

Americans should all be able to live and earn their livelihoods in the kind of environments they prefer, from open country to central cities. In our early history, most work opportunities were agricultural or agriculture-related. People who would have preferred city life stayed on the land instead because there were no really large cities and because employment opportunities in the city-towns of the day were limited. With the rise of manufacturing, cities mushroomed as the focal points of industrial activity, and with the industrialization of agriculture, machines displaced more and more farm workers who had no choice but to go where the industrial jobs were. From a nation that was almost entirely rural, we became a nation whose people are nearly three-fourths city dwellers. Many of these people prefer city life; for them, we need only make our cities more livable. But many city dwellers would prefer life in small towns or the countryside; for them, we need to create non-urban residential and employment options. We need to decentralize—not totally, but enough to achieve balance. The decentralist impulse will be reinforced as the energy-intensiveness of large-scale US mechanized agriculture becomes insupportable and as the depletion of nonrenewable natural resources causes the contraction of heavy manufacturing. The choice is not between centralization and decentralization; the choice is between intelligently planned decentralization and random decentralization under the compulsion of inexorable social change.

America in 1976 is characterized by centralization of population and of power, both economic and political, and the uneven distribution of human and environmental features that contribute to the quality of life.

The most tangible expression of our centralized society is the geographic distribution of our population. In 1970, 73 percent of the American population lived in metropolitan areas; the remaining 27 percent were classified as “rural.” The trend of population movement to the cities, the exodus from farms and small towns, the decline of family farms, have become cliches of American life in the last hundred years. Very recent indications that a population reversal is under way—back to Appalachia, the Ozarks, and other rural and small town areas—are being analyzed cautiously, ex post facto, with little speculation about cause.

Most Americans accept the presumed economies of scale associated with centralization and specialization. Making large quantities of widgets permits cheaper widgets; they are also likely to be standardized and of less practical use. We may be given the illusion of variety by polka dots, stripes, sugar-coating, and slick advertising.

The degree of population concentration in urban areas is frequently claimed to be the underlying factor that makes possible the extraordinary character of our society. Economic opportunities, together with industrial complexes, are concentrated in cities; social and cultural activities are regarded as an urban phenomenon; public transportation systems, which serve large centers at minimal cost, serve rural areas and small towns hardly at all.

Production of durable consumer goods and even food is being increasingly automated, certified, mechanized, and centralized before being shipped back to local retailers in forms so standardized that a “fresh” tomato in Possum Gap’s chain grocery store may have the same shape and water content as one in Los Angeles, thousands of miles away. Utility companies pull huge blocks of power thousands of miles to urban areas. Television and radio broadcast from urban centers, and when local stations are given time for local programming, they lack the resources to use it; instead, they rely on canned re-t videotapes. In the end, true community vine.

Is it myth, or fact, that only a few hands are pulling the strings that make us dance our daily rounds? We have been governed by the idea that the most worthwhile activities take place in large cities; we have accepted that the best talent of a small community will leave it, and that those who stay are by definition second-rate; and we so lack confidence in ourselves that we believe good ideas come only from experts and from the milieu of central cities. These social clichés have led to a prophecy of community powerlessness that succumbs to outside control.

Centralization has an apparently inexorable effect: we deplore its consequences, and yet we feel powerless to fight it. But like many monolithic problems, it is less formidable when broken into parts. We need cc less with what the system does to us and cc with ways we can restructure our lives as individuals within local communities.

What kinds of alternatives to our present are we aiming for?

Some degree of population decentralization is a basic necessity. Too many people are living in urban settlements. Decentralization of people must also involve decentralization of the economic system that their jobs depend on. A revitalized agricultural economy, the regional dispersion of industrial activity, and a return to small-scale business and community-oriented craftsmanship are three necessary and related developments.

Technological innovations can make possible greater self-sufficiency for individuals and for human settlements of all kinds. New developments in agricultural and industrial technology and in the utilization of energy resources have thus far not been explored with the aim of decentralization; they have served centralization alone. A decentralized society, embodying true alternative lifestyles, would involve revitalized community bonds and would harness communication technologies to replace physical mobility. A less restlessly mobile society would be well served by better communications instead of motion.

Ultimately, we need to work for the decentralization of economic and political decision-making power. We should consciously seek greater control over our own futures and our own communities. Concentrations of economic monopolies or near-monopolies are antithetical to decentralization, whether they affect our television fare, our postal service, our hamburgers and breakfast cereals, or the construction of our houses.

Decentralization Means Variety

A decentralized future includes not merely the revitalization of small communities and rural areas, but also the creation of true diversity—real choice among types of human settlement with the advantages of each type maximized. The quality of life features that have been concentrated in one type of settlement or another should be dispersed among all types. It is commonly recognized, for instance, that open space should not be a unique feature of local areas but should be introduced into other forms of settlement, and equally, that social and cultural events of high quality should not be an exclusive prerogative of urban centers.

Decentralization, then, should involve the more even distribution of desirable kinds of human activity. Aspects of different settlement forms that are intrinsic to settlements by virtue of their size need to be distinguished from other aspects that are merely historically associated with settlements of a certain size. Given modern transportation and communication potentials, for example, there is nothing to prevent residents of small towns from having access to high quality artistic and musical events.

 

In part, we need decentralization of our thought processes to accommodate the acceptance of greater variety. No one could hope to—or would wish to—reduce the US landscape to homogeneity through uniform distribution of population. But we need to recognize the varied histories, sizes, and functions of our diverse communities, and to design policies that loosen the bonds of over-centralization. A desirable diversity of settlement types might be visualized in terms of ten settlement categories. Significantly, many current classifications lump all varieties of settlement under either “urban” or “rural.”

1)     Megalopolis. This represents dense population concentrations of great size, with economic and cultural variety, multiple centers, and area-wide political structures. It is questionable whether such dense and immense concentrations provide significant advantages to their residents, overall, but such settlement forms are clearly developing.

2)     Cities. Characterized by large population concentrations, cities have diverse economic bases and a diversity of lifestyles. While they benefit from some economies of scale, they suffer from some diseconomies. Evidence suggests that cities historically do not “replicate” themselves, but rather draw excess population from other areas. Cities grew as trade centers, manufacturing centers, and as centers of financial concentration.

3)     Suburbs. These have functioned principally as residential centers, although service facilities and “clean” industries have recently moved in. The classic suburb is highly dependent on the city, however, for the financial resources that make possible its comparatively low population density.

4)     Micro-cities. These settlements lie between large cities and small towns in size, in self-sufficiency and function, and in sense of community. They may serve as significant trade centers and support centers for surrounding settlements.

These four settlement types might all be called urban. Forms that are usually encompassed within the catch-all category of rural include a similar variety. Agricultural engineer G.B. Gunlogson is one of a number of people who have promoted the use of “countryside” as a phrase more descriptive of a variety of dispersed settlement patterns. Countryside blends various economic functions that arise more out of local community requirements than out of national or outsiders’ needs. A significant portion of our countryside today is devoted to the service of people who are merely passing through on highways; in a decentralized society, such facilities would be turned to the service of local needs.

5)     Small towns. Most people consider a small town to be any community under 25,000 in population and over perhaps 100. In our work with the Small Towns Institute, we have preferred to use a different criterion: the existence of a sense of community. While a sense of community is possible within larger communities—in city neighborhoods, for example—it is certainly harder to achieve. In the past, many small towns had a high degree of economic self-sufficiency and political autonomy, both which contributed to a distinct sense of community. Small towns most often grew as service centers for agricultural areas,, or grew as places where nearby natural resources were processed.

6)    Dispersed cities.   Geographer John Fraser Hart has suggested that neighboring small towns sometimes function together as a dispersed city. Some specialization among towns creates the overall diversity of economic and population structure characteristic of a city. 

7)     Farms. Use of the land as a productive resource is the basic feature of farming life. Farms are thus residential lied with the use of the land for agriculture or animal husbandry.

8)   Non-farm rural settlement. Uses of land by non-farms are primarily residential. Non-farm residents may be farm laborers or work in nearby towns and cities.

9)     Hamlets. We’ve used this term to refer to a form of settlement that has hardly existed in the US but is common in Europe. Clusters of three or more houses are identified as a village. Larger hamlets may have a cafe, a small food store, a school, or a dry goods shop. Their past function was as small-scale, concentrated residential areas for farmers and rural craftsmen.

10)   Communal groups.  The defining characteristics of communal groups, which exist as microcosms within rural areas and even within cities, are primarily ideological. Concepts of economic and political self-sufficiency and limitations on settlement size are frequently components of the communal ideology.

11)   Non-settled land. All thinking people recognize the necessity of closing some portions of our land area to human settlement. Decentralization does not imply that we should end up with the same number of people living on each square mile of the US; instead, decentralization policies must be accompanied by a clear commitment to preserve portions of our landscape from settlement.

Centralization has been reflected in population patterns, economic and political power, and the uneven distribution of factors enhancing the quality of life. Generally speaking, decentralization must involve less concentration in and dependency on megalopolises, cities, and suburbs.

In order to achieve an orderly process of decentralization in the US—of population and of political, economic, and social activities—there must be sweeping changes in the way we apply laws on everything from taxation to environmental protection.

Current laws and administrative regulations favor a continued concentration of power in corporate monopolies, financial institutions, and government bureaucracies. Recent emigration from cities and repopulation of “rural” areas will not necessarily lead to functional communities. We still have many laws that assure the transfer of monopoly economics to the countryside.

Administrative regulations and propaganda force rural and small town dwellers to create urban-scale problems so that urban bureaucrats will move in with urban solutions.

Public Policy for Decentralization

To meet the challenge of functional decentralization, we must enact federal and state programs that make monopoly unprofitable and that promote the vitality of individual, group, and community activities. The following six-point program suggests changes that would favor decentralization both of political power and of population

  1. Land Reform

In America, the problem is not only to get land into the hands of individuals who will use it productively in a community context, but also to get it out of the hands of monopolies (including government monopoly) without destroying the economic structure that will make individual land ownership possible.

The 160-acre limitation law for irrigated land should be strictly enforced. Legal provisions should be made to allow local planning agencies to enforce other land limitation laws appropriate to regional conditions. For example, 640 acres per person (one section) might be an appropriate limitation in Iowa, while 22,040 acres (one township) might be applicable in parts of Texas. Developers might be limited to speculation on only 160 acres in any one township, thus preventing a single individual or corporation from monopolizing land in areas under development pressure. Railroads that are no longer fulfilling the responsibilities assumed under their original land grants should have the grants revoked; the land returned to public ownership should be opened for or withdrawn from settlement, as appropriate.

With the exception of lands genuinely needed for public purposes, such as wilderness, recreation areas, and wildlife preserves, the vast government-owned lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the US Forest Service should be opened for homesteading and subsistence farming. Much of this land is now leased to mining companies, corporate farms, and other large corporations, yielding little benefit to the public.

Mineral rights held separately from the land should be taxed to the owners of such rights. Government-held mineral rights should be placed in the hands of farmers and homesteaders so the inroads of strip mining can be checked by those who live in the community.

2. Financing for a Small Scale

Land reform would make more land available and benefit both existing farmers and future homesteaders by reducing land prices. A central problem would remain: how to get land ownership into the hands of the young, the alienated, the urban poor, and the rural sharecropper.

Much could be done by revitalizing the old homestead laws and enforcing them better. Government could start with its own lands, avoiding the costs of compensation that would be necessary when new forms of land limitation are applied to private lands.

Low-interest loans could be made available to poor people to purchase land from owners of excess acres, such as those in California’s Central Valley. Loans at 2 percent interest would be cheaper than welfare costs, not to mention the costs of relieving urban blight and other related problems. Similar financing could be made available to enable young people to start very small businesses (a natural foods store, for example) or to buy out existing businesses in small towns.

3. Restrictive Laws

A great deterrent to people seeking self-sufficiency with small-scale enterprises are the restrictive laws and regulations that are gradually strangling things of human scale in our society. National and state health and safety codes, for example, tend to dictate the specific technology that can be used to achieve health and safety goals. Most of these regulations merely have the effect of promoting specific products and have little to do with health or safety. Some communities ban composting, prohibit the conduct of small businesses in homes (even if they meet zoning requirements), enforce expensive building codes that are imposed on some buildings and not others. One man in Washington State was arrested for building a log cabin because it was not designed by an architect; another was fined for having too many fire extinguishers. In a typical case, fire codes required a building owner to install a fire escape that safety codes condemned as a safety hazard.

Even environmental laws are administered in ecologically unsound ways. Water pollution is encouraged; health codes don’t allow composting toilets that produce usable fertilizer; small steam-operated lumber mills closed down for polluting the air while big firms with tall stacks are permitted to “dilute” their smoke in the upper atmosphere, producing acid rains; farmers are fined for having dusty roads in their fields and are forced to spray oil on otherwise productive soil. To be good, environmental laws must be ecologically sound.

4.  Technology and Quality

The decentralization process must take account of the need to bring technology into harmony with people. This means we must encourage technological skills that begin with craftsmanship and culminate in quality.

Centralization robs individuals of diversity, transferring many of their roles to specialists. The process is manifest in gadgetry that we are taught to use but not to understand. As with the malfunction lights on auto dashboards, we are not permitted to know that something needs attention until it is too late. With a home appliance that’s “sealed for life,” there’s no way for consumers to extend that life by providing needed maintenance and repair.

Since most people have only a shadow of the knowledge needed for a more self-sufficient life today, we need new programs in schools and colleges to enable those who want to participate in the decentralization process to do so. Courses on Being a Good Consumer and How to Shop for the Best Buys should be replaced, or at least supplemented, by practical courses in carpentry, mechanics (including foundry work and blacksmithing), ceramic technologies, and horticulture. These courses should focus on such self-sufficient and community-oriented skills as small-scale (including by-hand) milling of lumber; designing efficient small-scale mechanical technologies, and making castings and forgings; growing and preserving food.

5. Research on Appropriate Technology

While it is obvious that most Americans have been alienated from the technology of our society, a major factor in this situation has been the public funds poured into the development of large-scale technologies rather than into more efficient small-scale ones. In agriculture, education, transportation, and other fields, research has led to larger scale technologies and increasingly centralized management.

For more than 60 years, agricultural colleges have focused on development of foods that would conform to mechanized harvesting techniques while neglecting research on plants that would produce yields high in quality and volume on small plots of land. In transportation, research favors the increased profitability of vehicle sales rather than more efficient use of fuel and land devoted to transportation facilities. This results in the concentration of technology, marketing, financial capabilities, and even land resources in the hands of monopoly businesses and federal agencies.

Tax structures should favor products manufactured locally and marketed to local consumers. This proposal could be implemented for some products by a tax based on the distance between finished products and their markets. Research funds in agriculture should be allocated to small groups of individuals working on energy-efficient technologies rather than production “efficiencies.”

   6. Regionally Oriented Industry

With the development of small-scale technologies appropriate to local ecological conditions, it would be more efficient (as well as profitable) to decentralize industry. Federal and state governments should consider tax incentives for decentralized industries. The “distance tax” would be one example. Decentralization would result in more local employment opportunities, the stimulation of local investment in industry, and a wide diversity of production facilities. A decentralized industry could ride out crises that would shut down concentrated businesses. Existing conglomerate industry would find it more profitable to disperse its plants as more and more workers showed a preference for countryside environments.

To design public policies working toward decentralization presents something of a paradox in our over-centralized age. We have tended to let centralized government do more for us, rather than less. Many of our policy suggestions are in accordance with an emphasis on the use of existing centralized systems to achieve a decentralized society, but individuals must work hard for decentralization. The following principles aid decentralization; they are the basis on which your town, city, or region may be built.

1.     See that governments at all levels make strong commitments to decentralization.
2.     Where goals can be accomplished locally, make a strong effort to do so with local personnel, funding, and authorization.
3.     When you need outside expertise or monetary help, ask for the minimum possible amounts; don’t embark on any project without some local matching effort.
4.     Make sure legislative requirements allow for variations of scale; don’t require a $3 million water plant for a town of 330 people, as was done in a recent case featured on TV’s “Sixty Minutes.”
5.     Seek diverse, innovative solutions to local problems; let solutions grow out of the nature of your community, its situation and skills; find out for yourself how towns are coping; don’t rely on overworked officials to investigate innovative techniques.
6.     Don’t be afraid to force centralized authority to conform to your local requirements instead of the other way around; some towns and cities have successfully pressured national franchises into conformity with local building styles rather than passively accepting standardized design and 50-foot-high signs.
7.     Support decentralized institutions in your community; sell to, or buy from, the local farmers’ market; patronize businesses that represent local enterprise.

If centralization in our society has come about because of governmental and industrial policies that profit from it, there is no assurance that a short-term political reversal is going to keep massification from happening again.

Worldwide, the centralist process has become a part of governments ranging from dictatorial to democratic, from communist to capitalist.

The most essential element of decentralization is to get the ownership or control of national resources—the land, minerals, energy, agriculture, finance, everything—into as many hands as possible. Government ownership obviously doesn’t bring maximum benefits to the people. Governments already own minerals and land rights, but much of this is leased to giant conglomerates while small farmers (and smaller corporations) are frozen out. Eliminating individuals from economic participation has been a major element of many government programs, from urban renewal to agricultural research.

We can work for new legislation as suggested in this chapter, but we must also implement the decentralist society by building practical communities in a decentralist pattern.

Groups of people can easily buy large land holdings cheap. (In Washington State, European multinational investors recently bought thousands of acres of potential agricultural land for less than $100 per acre; it had been for sale for years.)  Collective buyers can become individual owners or hold land in a trust. Eventually, decentralists should acquire scattered ownerships within 25 miles or so to prevent large corporations from moving in on decentralized communities and raising taxes.

Decentralist communities have one advantage over corporate landholders: people can vote, and they can eventually control local government for the benefit of the community and local enterprise.

Economic practices are extremely important in establishing a stable society. Using low-energy technologies, recycling wastes in the local ecosystem, using appropriate “soft” technologies to supplement labor-intensive productivity, a small community can produce food, goods, and services at only a fraction of the costs of food and some other commodities that are produced nationally and transported long distances. Large companies cannot compete with farmers’ markets or small local industries—provided that local goods are marketed only to the community and not leaked to outside consumers, thereby exceeding the ecosystem’s capacity to provide basic resources. Export your ideas and designs, and educate people who will replicate the decentralist process in their own communities, but don’t try to expand production beyond the locality’s capacity to support the system.

An essential element of decentralization policy is the maintenance of a steady population. Centralization has come about partly because local citizens produce more than enough children to provide continuity to the next generation. This has been happening for hundreds of years in most of the world’s peasant and agricultural societies. Excess children end up in cities where the amount of people overwhelms the amount of useful work to be done.

Non-producers gradually build up employment hierarchies of centralist jobs: inspectors, bureaucrats, investigators, record-keepers, government agents—occupations that are either unnecessary or minimal in a true community.

Many recent surveys indicate that Americans are eager to move from large cities to small towns and rural areas, lacking only the assurance of economic opportunity. Public consciousness is increasingly in tune with small-scale, diverse solutions. What sorts of individuals would experience difficulties in a decentralized society? The experience of New York City suggests that cities and their residents would suffer most from a decentralization movement. The physical and social facilities representing our current over-investment in urban areas will not be easily wound down. The danger is that the wealthy might be the only ones who can afford to decentralize, and the poor will remain. Continued investment in urban areas will surely be necessary to ease the transition to smaller population concentrations, and legislation favoring economic decentralization must ensure opportunities for the urban poor. Programs favoring the reuse and recycling of physical facilities in urban areas through conservation and preservation rather than extensive building programs are also a vital strategy. More urban open space can be a result of less severe population pressures. One long-range result of decentralization is sure to be more livable cities as well as more vital small towns and rural areas.

A centralized society not only requires institutions that hold centralized power, it also requires citizens who accede to the demands of that power. There are indications that Americans are becoming wary of centralization. We all know people who are accepting reduced economic rewards but taking advantage of simple opportunities on a small scale and prizing quality of life and a sense of community as parts of the pay-off. Decentralization won’t succeed without firm individual and community commitment to the benefits of small-scale as well as large-scale institutions.

Recommended Actions

•        The President should commit himself to decentralist policies, as should governors, county officials, mayors,            neighborhood leaders, heads of families, and individuals.
•       Lawmakers at all levels should amend or repeal laws that have the effect of encouraging the concentration of land, political influence, or economic power.
•       Federal homestead  laws  should  be  reenacted  with tighter enforcement provisions, and public land  unsuited to such public purposes as recreation or wildlife preservation should be opened to homesteading and subsistence farming.
•       Anti-Monopoly laws should be vigorously enforced.
•       Health, safety, and building codes, and similar administrative regulations, should be amended to eliminate arbitrary stifling of individual initiative.
•       Schools, colleges, and institutions offering adult education should develop courses promoting individual self-sufficiency such as carpentry, organic gardening, handicrafts, accounting for the small shopkeeper, and elementary mechanics.
•       Incentives to decentralize (and disincentives to centralize) should be built into the tax structure.
•       Low-interest government loans should be offered to people wishing to buy land or small businesses in small towns.
•       The law limiting to 160 acres the amount of land irrigated by federal waterworks that can be owned by one landholder should be rigorously enforced; and as the law provides, holders of excess acreage should be required to sell it at pre-irrigation prices.
•       Federal research-and-development funding should be diverted from “high” technology (especially nuclear fission and fusion) to “low” or “intermediate” technology that is applicable everywhere.
•       Railroads still holding original land grants should be required either to sell the land and apply the proceeds to the improvement of rail service or to cede such lands back to the federal government; where appropriate, land returned to public ownership should be open to homesteading.
•       Municipal officials should be encouraged to study ways in which decentralization can be made to work to the advantage of cities and not to their disadvantage.
•       The urban poor and rural sharecroppers should have highest priority in the homesteading and low-cost loan programs.