Last month I published a short article on what we learned --and didn't learn-- from the oil crises of the 1970s. We flirted with conservation and renewable energy, but quickly turned back to our squandering ways when a glut of cheap oil flooded world markets in the 1980s.

We also tried a few urban revitalization solution that ultimately proved poorly thought-through, or simply naïve. For example, we imported European-style pedestrian malls without the context of European densities, and pushed a new generation of heavy-handed planning and design solutions that wiped out human-scale streets and neighborhoods. Case in point: New London (Connecticut) recently decided to overhaul its historic Parade plaza, which was mangled by bad design in the 1970s.

The story of the Parade is an example not just of our earlier half-baked search for urban improvements, but of the value of pre-modern ways of organizing our communities. The Parade worked well in earlier times because it was designed with the same millennia-old, human-scale principles behind great public squares all over the world -- as opposed to, say, more modern and abstract ideas of architecture-as-sculpture, where urban areas are either conduits to pass through quickly or distinct "destinations" with no real relation to their context.

A lot of how we did things in the pre-oil era makes good sense for the post-carbon 21st century. Without oil to skew our sense of distance and place, we developed cities, provisioning systems and even cultural and social norms suitable to a lower-energy world. It's this way of doing things that we at Post Carbon Institute refer to with the term 'relocalization'. Relocalization doesn't mean reverting to some 19th century anti-technology past, but rather rediscovering those ways of running a society and an economy at the scale of humans, not petroleum-powered engines.

New London's redesign of its Parade may well prove to be just one of many new redesigns of our city infrastructure as the post-carbon future becomes a reality.