Our Future Eco-Cities: Beyond Automobile Dependence
Cities are where two-thirds of the world’s population will live by 2050, but many cities are already straining at the seams with immense problems on every level. Housing, water, food, sanitation, energy, waste management, urban governance, and many more issues confront the world’s unprecedented rapid urban growth.
[Humans have gotten too big. Bill McKibben says we need to choose to be smaller.]
But perhaps one of the biggest problems is transport. Motor vehicles fill the streets of every city from Los Angeles to Lagos, from Beijing to Berlin, causing chronic congestion, chaotic parking, air pollution, noise, crippled bus systems, traffic deaths, and despoiled public environments, which make walking and cycling, the most sustainable modes, extremely difficult. How are cities going to cope with billions more people and vehicles competing for scarce urban space?
The automobile is one of the most useful and yet destructive inventions of the last 130 years. Every city, regardless of its level of development, is struggling with the vexed problems associated with mobility. When the local environmental, social, and economic problems of excessive car use (as in the US or Australia) or rapidly growing car use (as in emerging economies) are combined with regional and global scale problems, such as peak oil production and climate change, then how we build new cities and extend or modify existing ones becomes a question of survival.
The voracious appetite of cities for raw materials, food, energy, and water (their “ecological footprint,” which is many times greater than their physical area) is a major cause of declining natural habitats worldwide but also our greatest hope for reducing this impact through making better cities. The alarming destruction of terrestrial and aquatic natural systems, which form Earth’s life support system, is the reason why some say we are now living through the planet’s sixth major extinction event.
But is it all doom and gloom? No, for we have all the knowledge we need to build better cities, and most of the strategies depend on getting our urban transport systems right.
Cities up to 1850 were all walking cities and were small, very dense places, and many still exist on every continent. After that came transit systems (trams, trains, buses), which produced transit cities. These were still very compact and sustainable and, just like walking cities, were surrounded by or infused with nature and local food growing. The industrial food system did not exist, and urban inhabitants still had strong contact with nature. Cities were rather self-sufficient locally for their energy, water, food, and other needs.
Starting before World War II in the United States, but increasing dramatically afterward, the automobile, through mass production and highway construction, became a key consumer item in the developed world. Cities sprawled outward at very low densities and everything became separated or zoned. This necessitated vast travel distances, which could only be conveniently accomplished in a car. The automobile city was born, and with it came an exponential escalation in problems as more land and energy were consumed and more pollution was produced.
Since then, the automobile has spread across the globe, but its use has already reached breaking points in many areas (e.g., São Paulo, Beijing, Bangkok). We are now seeing a slowing-down in this growth in automobile dependence as such cities are unable to accommodate more traffic and are changing their form. They are rapidly developing urban rail transit and returning to bicycles, especially e-bikes.
So, while cities in the developed world have long been attempting to minimize cars by building new and restoring old walking and transit city fabrics, cities in the emerging economies have been embracing the car. However, they have reached limits very rapidly. Their dense urban forms and limited space have proven unable to handle increased traffic. Their car use is now plateauing, and their wealth creation has decoupled from car use, as it has in developed cities. Chinese cities such as Shanghai and Beijing are becoming transit metropolises, with the biggest (in length) metro systems in the world. Mumbai, a megalopolis of 21 million people, is still a walking city, with 60 percent of all daily trips by nonmotorized modes, 32 percent by transit, and only 8 percent by private motorized modes (compared with 9 percent in 1996).
[Earth is facing tremendous pressures, Elizabeth H. Blackburn says. But science can give us hope.]
So, what are the key pillars of future cities that will enable people to live both sustainably and with a higher quality of life?
- (1) Cities will become denser, with more mixed land use. Using land efficiently will protect the natural environment, biodiversity, and food-producing areas.
- (2) The city and its hinterland will provide a good proportion of food needs. Cities will have large areas of urban agriculture, such as urban farming and community gardens.
- (3) Freeways will be reduced, while transit (especially rail) and nonmotorized modes (NMM) of transport (walking, cycling) will increase. Car and motorcycle use will decline, and “Mobility as a Service” using mobile apps will link all transport modes, allowing payment with a single card.
- (4) Environmental technologies for water, energy, and waste will be extensively used; cities will become closed-loop systems, reducing urban ecological footprints.
- (5) The city’s centers will become human-oriented, emphasizing non-automobile access, and will absorb most new employment and residential growth.
- (6) Cities will have beautiful, shared, green public areas expressing public culture, community, equity, and good governance.
- (7) The urban design of the city will be highly legible, permeable for using NMM, robust for changing needs, varied, rich, personalized, and satisfying of human needs.
- (8) Innovation, creativity, and the uniqueness and quality of local environments, culture, and history will drive the city economy. Smart City (advanced IT) processes will enhance urban governance.
- (9) Future city planning will be a visionary “debate and decide” process, relying on people setting a shared direction and vision, not a “predict and provide” process that creates more roads and more parking.
- (10) Decision-making will integrate social, economic, environmental, and cultural needs and will be hopeful, democratic, inclusive, and empowering.
Life after automobile dependence is entirely feasible and within reach. It is indeed beginning to happen in many cities, enabling them to evolve into more sustainable and livable forms.
This essay was originally published in 2018 in Encyclopædia Britannica Anniversary Edition: 250 Years of Excellence (1768–2018).