Urban monoculture

One thing governments and big business can't deal with is diversity. After decades of government intervention, 'industry concentration' - the degree to which a few large firms dominate, is very high in the the input and processing agribusinesses; that might have happened anyway, but the trend has been amplified by government. Its subsidies go overwhelmingly to the biggest landowners, input suppliers and processing companies; it creates a regulatory environment that imposes disproportionate compliance costs on small, local, businesses (the irony being that its the activities of the larger companies that generate the need for regulations at all); and it identifies economic success with the fortunes of bigger companies. Apart from the environmental depredations and unappealing aesthetics, the resulting monoculture in the countryside leaves us open to potentially disastrous pest or disease invasions.

Now the same looks like happening in the cities. Government and its cronies in the construction business have imposed a road-based infrastructure on of the world's cities. As with industrial agriculture, it penalises small, local businesse and ordinary people. And as with agriculture too, it is absolutely dependent on oil. What government failed to factor in is how vulnerable this leaves us when the oil runs out. We might find our urban monoculture just as fragile as our agricultural monoculture