The University of Pennsylvania and the Rockefeller Foundation marked the 50th Anniversary of their groundbreaking 1958 Conference on Urban Design Criticism by holding an international symposium on the Penn campus on November 6 - 8.

Fifty years after the first Urban Design conference at Penn, the subject was revisited on the threshold of at least two relatively unexpected events that will have a massive impact on life as we know it. Peak oil and global climate change threaten to overturn our notion of the normal, the usual, and the pace of change at the dawn of the third millennium.

Urban design after the age of oil may have to wait until urban designers get over their inability to wrap their finely tuned aesthetic minds around the Black Swans of the end of cheap oil, the possibility of global energy and resource insufficiency, and the vagaries and uncertainties of global climate change.

After two days at Penn, watching, listening, questioning and commenting in the company of a stellar cast of international speakers, precious little new information emerged to illuminate what urban design might look like after the age of (cheap) oil.

What happened to the topic after a promising opening by Professor of Urban Design, Dean Emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Design, Gary Hack, and Judith Rodin, President of the Rockefeller Foundation, is anybodies guess. Although global climate change was mentioned a bit I didn't hear nearly as much about the end of oil except for a public complaint about it's absence. That came from Trudeau Foundation Fellow, William Rees of British Columbia's SCARP in Vancouver on the last day of the conference, and was greeted by applause.

As a sustainability advocate who has spent half a decade grappling with a host of related energy issues (and over twenty years coming to grips with environmental issues at a critical threshold, approaching phase change) the enormity of the design challenge seemed to have escaped the attention of most of the otherwise talented and often brilliant presenters.

A presentation at the start of the second day of the conference, Managing Cities After the Age of Oil, promised one inescapable topic that I had looked forward to hearing. I had hoped to be able to take home nuggets of sound advice to my second-class Pennsylvania township from the top leaders in managing cities. But, with the exception of Clive Doucet, a "maverick" Councillor from Ottawa, none seemed prepared for managing a city after the age of oil. Doucet seemed well aware of the need for a plan but admitted that Ottawa was, as yet, virtually unprepared for peak oil.

I posed a simple direct question on the subject to Andrew Altman, Deputy Mayor of Economic Development for the City of Philadelphia, arguably the eighth greenest city in America. "If Philly was threatened", I asked, "by a sudden, unexpected interruption of petroleum fuel supplies that could last at least for a month, what is the plan for coping? His answer was that there was none, and his facial expression seemed to confirm that fact.

Perhaps the answers to this egregious lapse of focus lie in two areas. Emotionally, few of us are prepared to accept the inevitability, let alone the uncertainties of the hazards that could accompany peak oil and global climate change. It's likely that the stages of grief (more appropriately known as "Stages of reaction upon hearing catastrophic news") come into play and can short circuit the even the best educated and experienced designers. The second is that fewer professionals have entertained what it might be like to create designs under the potentially dystopic conditions of life after the age of oil.

Is urban design after the age of oil an oxymoron? Will humanity survive?
I think both mislead in much the same way that E. F. Schumacher says these questions mislead. What is needed, he might say, is to roll up our sleeves and get to work.

What is the work we must do? The signs and symptoms are numerous enough to say that our best hope is to begin the real conversation on life after the age of oil, and life in the age of global climate change. This is a conversation that must include other stakeholders, as articulated in the Manifesto crafted by four working groups convened at the end of the last day.

Which stakeholders should be invited into this conversation? Many come to mind, but among the first must be Daniel Lerch, author of Post Carbon Cities, Rob Hopkins, author of The Transition Handbook, and the Natural Step innovators, Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt, and physicist, Dr John Holmberg. Other essential participants include Sandy Wiggins, ex-president of the United States Green Building Council, Amory Lovins, Paul Hawken, Hunter Lovins, (all originally from The Rocky Mountain Institute), Steven Nadel (From the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy), Dr. Wolfgang Feist, Passive House Institute, (Cepheus Project), Harold Finigan (arguably the best informed researcher of net-zero building in the Delaware Valley), and finally, Janine M. Benyus, author of Biomimicry.

During the symposium the idea of including potential consumers of urban design came forth. It was noted that social justice required that the least heard, most impacted, and least powerful should be given a voice to articulate their needs and their reactions to our work. Only when they are invited to take their seat, as equals, at our collective table will there be the full mind and heart power required to address these crucial challenges and perhaps answer the question of urban design after the age of oil.