Transportation, Neighborhoods, and Sustainability - Essay Example

?Transportation, Neighourhoods and Sustainability: The Quintessential Post-Industrial Post-Growth Challenge [ID “We have reached the end of economic growth as we have known it” (Alter, 2010). What does this mean? Certainly growth is still continuing, and people will still build new factories, learn at schools and create new technology, right? Yes, but the model of perpetual growth that modern industrial capitalism and industrial societies in general have become dependent on and have assumed is unsustainable. By definition, an economy that can't stop growing is one that can't deal with finite resources. “Peak everything” is a phrase that Heinberg and other ecological advocates use to indicate that most finite resources are reaching or will reach exploitation limits and will thereafter only give less and less of the resource at higher and higher cost, but peak oil has achieved special attention. Since every element of the economy needs petrochemicals in production (and not just in factories but also in high-intensity Green Revolution agriculture), consumption, transportation and distribution, peak oil means the end of growth, since every element of the society becomes perpetually more expensive. The connection with transportation is obvious: Transportation must be sustainable if it is to be relevant. Hank Dittmar's Transport and Neighbourhoods (2008), and his earlier collaboration with Ditland (2004), emphasizes sustainability in its approach. Dittmar argues that sustainability will have to be part of a ground-up approach to design. It's meaningless, for example, to make it easier to navigate an inner city without a car if the people who work at the inner city commute from a suburb that is designed for urban sprawl. Dittmar argues for sustainable cities. These cities are characterized by a number of factors: 1. Sustainable transportation and sustainable city design being interlinked 2. Accessibility over mobility: Tradeoffs emphasize making things easy to access rather than strictly efficient (so more supermarkets because more people need to walk, bike or bus to the market) 3. GDP delinked to growth in personal vehicle travel: Policy makers can't rely on car makers as an economic engine 4. Walkable mixed-use: What Dittmar calls “the five minute pint”, or the five minute trip to a local pub; this means that it's not just walkability for access to essential institutions like groceries and schools, but also walkability to reasonable centers of entertainment and social interaction 5. Accessible public transportation: A subway is meaningless if it takes a car to get there 6. Market-based strategies 7. Scale of problem demands immediate and technological solutions Dittmar's position as a Prince Foundation urban design analyst does provide his claims with authority and plausibility, but I fear as I look at his analysis that perhaps there is the classic problem of an expert analyzing his own issue. First: Experts tend to reduce everything to their core issue. Second: Experts often can only see things within the theoretical blinders of their own profession. Urban planning and transportation are obviously connected, but it seems naive to think that it's just urban planning and its inaccessibility to non-commuting approaches causes driving issues. There are obviously numerous other factors. Gas and oil subsidies in the West, particularly in America, make it artificially easy to drive cars (Geiger and Hamburger, 2010). In general, public investment into research provides corporations with the means to produce antisocial institutions: Research in general should focus on other factors. There's also a culture of car ownership. Cars are signs of independence, prosperity and masculinity: The purr of a Lamborghini still has great pull even in this increasingly green age. It's possible to design a city where no one needs to drive a car, and people will still prefer to. And the problem is that mass transportation not being sexy means that less people ride, which reduces the number of stops the system makes and its long term viability and convenience, which in turn makes it less sexy. Market and corporate factors are also a key influence: They create a culture where individualistic approaches are valued and communal ones not valued, and corporations have a vested interest in consumers remaining atomistic and self-centered and in combating changes like mass transportation that might hurt their direct and indirect bottom line. Dittmar is honest about the fact that transportation and urban planning are no panacea, but he misses out by proposing market strategies and shows some of the weaknesses of his approach. It is true that market strategies do need to be incorporated into policy-making: It's utopian to imagine that essential stakeholders like business will come on board without this essential concession. Yet it is also problematic to engage in market-based strategies. Palast (2004) notes that the carbon-trading or pollution-trading schemes in Kyoto and elsewhere have a sharply mixed history. For example: There's a big “if” as regards whether market trading schemes actually take any pollution out of the air. In a deal selling Wisconsin pollution rights to Tennessee, the company in Wisconsin making the sale promised not to build a new plant (Palast, 2004, Chapter 5). Yet Wisconsin policy leaders would never have allowed the new plant to be built anyways! Tennessee bought more pollution that would never have happened without the market-based approach. Similarly, Russia only joined Kyoto because their industrial collapse was so complete that they were unable to build new factories anyways. While this did get Russia onto the treaty and make it viable, it was still problematic because Russia, again, wouldn't have polluted anyways Kyoto or not, so the impact of Kyoto here was to increase carbon production. The risk, then, is that market-based systems can lead to more problems and have a mixed record of success for sustainability. There's a broader problem, too. Market-based approaches are an essential compromise, but they can sell out other stakeholders like communities. The market caused the problem of pollution: Relying on it to fix the problem is questionable. And if enshrining market-based solutions prevents real innovation that could lead to new institutional change, that's counter-productive. We need to begin experiment now with post-market and non-market solutions as well. Dittmar in his work with Ohland recommends a new transit town as a sustainable solution: Centrally located rail and bus stations, high-density commercial and residential development, New Urbanist and smart growth theory, etc. This approach is a good one, and certainly makes sense in London, but some elements threaten its universality. Dittmar seems to have taken a Eurocentric approach as his starting point. First: Countries like America and Canada, which are large and currently based largely on car transportation, find it much harder to facilitate traffic between cites using a highly centralised model. America and Canada's geographic sizes are tremendous. It's much harder to imagine making sustainable communities that make just as much sense for California and New York. Dittmar's general proposals in Transport and Neighbourhoods and his speech at SFU Surrey Centre City (Rees, 2008) emphasize more universal approaches. Second: While Dittmar and other New Urbanism theorists are right to approach the issue from a desire to end suburbia and urban sprawl, as it were, the problem is always implementation. Urban planning isn't the issue, it's urban replanning. In America in particular but certainly elsewhere, inner city areas like New York and San Francisco are fed in no small part by suburban areas elsewhere. In particular, Los Angeles is a perfect example of a decentralised urban structure and approach. The problem is that LA's entire inner city area would have to be restructured from the ground up, with new positioning of buildings, higher development density, different roads, etc. The freeway system itself would need to be thought out as well: Would it be sustainable to fund at a national level both an interstate freeway system and a sufficiently convenient interstate bus and train system, two parallel transportation systems? If not, how much sense does it make to just let the existing freeway go to waste? Implementation of new urban planning requires coordination with policy-makers and citizens. Citizens have to begin moving into urban areas, abandoning suburban real estate. Time needs to be introduced: People need to be adjust to selling cars or using them less, adjusting for gas shocks, etc. Urban planning itself can't do anything and could be counter-productive if it occurs in a vacuum. In particular, Third World design will be an especial challenge. It's hard to build huge cities with Third World budgets, and the consequence has been pollution. It makes no sense to increase consolidation when highly polluting industries are the background. Dittmar's proposals are well-thought out, highly progressive and totally reasonable. But he only represents one voice. Technocratic professionals like Dittmar have to be complemented with community leaders, progressive social critics, ecological activists, and other movement leaders to form a comprehensive social approach to transportation. References DCLG (2006). “Barker review of Land Use Planning”. Access at: http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/planningandbuilding/pdf/154265.pdf Defra (2009). What is sustainable development?. Access at: http://www.defra.gov.uk/sustainable/government/what/index.htm Greg Palast (2004). The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Kim Geiger and Tom Hamburger (2010). Oil companies have a rich history of U.S. Subsidies. Los Angeles Times. May 25 Hank Dittmar (2008). Transport and Neighbourhoods. Black dog publishing, London. Hank Dittmar and Gloria Ohland (2004). The new transit town: best practices in transit-oriented development. Island Press. Lloyd Alter (2010). Richard Heinberg on Life After Growth. TreeHugger. Rees, S. (2008). Public Transport and Neighbourhoods. Access at: http://stephenrees.wordpress.com/2008/11/04/public-transport-and-neighbourhoods/ Rpmedia (2007). Map. access at: http://rpmedia.ask.com/ts?u=/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/07/High_Speed_Railroad_ Map_Europe_2008.gif/360px-High_Speed_Railroad_Map_Europe_2008.gif W.M. Adams (2006). The Future of Sustainability: Re-thinking Environment and Development in the Twenty-first Century. Access at: http://cmsdata.iucn.org/downloads/iucn_future_ofsustanability.pdf Read More