THE AUTOMOBILE, THE CITY, AND THE NEW URBAN MOBILITIES (2014)
Frederic Stout
Introduction Thinking about the “new urban mobilities,” – especially the interplay between the emerging technologies of transportation and communication within the larger contexts of globalism, environmental sustainability, and socio-economic dislocations – demands a new level of understanding, both practical and theoretical, of how urban communities change over time and how those changes in turn contribute to on-going personal, political, and cultural transformations. Keeping those simple human concerns primary in discussions of mobility infrastructure and policy is what Lewis Mumford meant when he insisted to an audience of urban planners in 1937 that the principal responsibility of their profession must always be to nurture, not frustrate, what he called the “urban drama” – the day-to-day life of individuals, families, and communities as they go about the diurnal tasks of living, working, raising families, and governing themselves in cities.
From the earliest times and increasingly, mobility has been an important urban value, no more so than in the 20th century when the affordable personal automobile became common. With astonishing rapidity, the automobile replaced horses with horseless carriages, competed with trolleys and horse-drawn omnibuses for the provision of mass transportation, and made residential suburbs so accessible to urban centers that a
2 fundamentally new kind of city – the inter-connected metropolitan region – came into existence as the dominant paradigm of modern human settlement. It seems fitting, therefore, that an examination of the history of the automobile’s impact on cities in the 20th century would be a convenient entryway into an understanding of the new forms of urban mobility that will characterize the 21st.
Today, most urban planners favor walking, cycling, and an intensified commitment to mass transit solutions to the problems of urban mobility. This movement is not sui generis but imbedded within a changing historical and developmental context that provides both the motivation and the direction of an emerging new paradigm of human social existence. A new global economy and a global urban network are taking over from earlier urban-rural and nation-state models of hegemony. Digital communications and “information-age” values have come to dominate global flows of money, people, and ideas. Millions of rural migrants are flowing into the burgeoning mega-cities of Asia and Latin America, and a new generation of educated middle-class young people stands ready to inherit a new urban planet with all its problems and all its promises. Who will not agree that we are at an important transition point leading to a new urban paradigm?
The conversation about emergent urban mobilities will inevitably be dominated by specialists in transportation technology, by urban transportation planners, and by public policy experts. What an urban studies generalist can contribute is an inter-disciplinary perspective on the larger contexts that surround and encompass the machines, the plans, and the policies. And if looking at the past impact of the private automobile on cities of
3 the 20th century is a useful way of approaching the issue of what the future impacts of new forms of urban mobility might be, we will need to conduct our inquiry along three dimensions of analysis:
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first, the effects of mobility technologies on the essential functions of urban life itself – the citadel functions of law and governance, the market functions of economic production and commerce, and the community functions of individuals, families, neighborhoods, and local cultures;
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second, the influence of urban globalization on the mobility aspirations of two key constituencies who will be the consumers of the policies and technologies of the future – the emerging urban middle class in the formerly under-developed regions of the world and the new “Millennial Generation” – those born in the 1980s and 90s – in the developed world;
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and third, the ways in which both the new digital communications technologies and the urbanization process itself can – and likely will, over time – respond to many of the challenges of sustainability, population growth, and social equity posed by the current shift to a new urban-historical paradigm.
This last point is especially important because the distinction between transportation and communication may be in the process of disappearing. In The City in History (1961), Mumford identified “the dialogue” as “one of the ultimate expressions” of the urban
4 drama – “the delicate flower of its long vegetative growth.” But for dialogue of any kind to take place, participants in the social drama of the city need to move into or about shared urban space. In the Athens of Plato and Aristotle, that meant ascending the Acropolis for public rituals, gathering at Pnyx for the frequent assemblies, walking in small groups along the city walls, or merely loitering about the Agora. Mobility and communication were intimately connected, and the density of walkable urban space was the enabler of both. Kurt W. Marek – famous for his popular histories of archaeology under the pseudonym C, W. Ceram – once observed that it was not until the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century that communication and transportation were “for the first time . . . understood to be two different things.” Today, however, we need to question that insight and think about the changing meaning of the ultimate mobility word, the verb “to go.” We still want to go to the party, and we probably need to go to the gym, but we no longer need to go to the store or go to the library. Much to the dismay of brick-andmortar retailers and librarians everywhere, we now have the new mobility option of shopping for products and accessing information online through our computers and cellphones. These developments tend toward re-integrating the disconnect between communication and transportation that Marek identified as a conceptual phenomenon of the 19th century. Perhaps even the way young people use the phrase “I go” when they mean “I say” is a sign of the times!
The deeper conversation about urban mobilities today, however, is driven not just by exciting new developments in technologies, nor even by cultural changes in the way we think about urban space, but by the astonishing rapidity with which the demographics of
5 global urbanization have transformed, and continue to transform, human history. For the past 200 years, the percentage of the human population categorized as urban has skyrocketed: the United Kingdom reached the milestone of 50% urbanization sometime in the mid-19th century, the United States reached that point by 1920, and according to the United Nations the planet as a whole became majority-urban sometime in 2009-10. And in anticipation of what some have called humankind’s “next great migration,” current projections suggest that the world may become 70% or even 80% urban by the end of present century. Absent these facts, speculations about new urban mobilities would be of limited interest or relevance. And surprisingly, there is some reason to believe that the current urbanization trends themselves – the collective arc of humanity’s long urban narrative – will help to solve many of our current economic, social, and environmental challenges. It is in this larger context that reassessing the historical relationship between the automobile and the city in the 20th century will hopefully enlarge our understanding of the importance of all forms of urban mobility today and help us formulate the necessary policies and designs that the urban future demands.
Re-thinking the Common Wisdom about the Automobile and the City In recent years the relationship between the automobile and the city has become highly problematical. The common wisdom seems to be that automobiles were one of those technological mistakes of modernism that have had an overwhelmingly negative effect on the course of human development. According to this view, cars have been responsible for untold deaths from accidents and chronic diseases caused or exacerbated by tailpipe exhaust. Worse, the widespread adoption of the private automobile is said to have
6 destroyed sensible, efficient transit systems and created an auto-centric civilization characterized by unbearable congestion in the central cities and life-wasting social anomie in the sprawling suburbs. And within academia and the larger world of intellectual discourse, arguments like these were are regularly advanced that automobiles, buses, and the corporations that make them have destroyed the very fabric of our urban civilization – single-handedly creating poverty, social class divisions, racism, ill health, premature death, and almost certain ecological collapse in the near future.
Of course, it is undoubtedly true that automobile accidents do account for some 4050,000 deaths yearly in the United States alone. Gridlock caused by automobile commuting and traffic congestion have indeed become significant time-wasters and sources of pollution. And, increasingly, cars are indeed a major element of the carbonbased economy that contributes to climate change and that promoters of sustainable urban development hope to replace with alternative sources of energy and new approaches to planning that valorize urban densities, mass-transit, and walking-city values over suburban sprawl and automobile dependency. This is why more and more cities and regional planning agencies have been adopting transit-first and bicycle-friendly policies. But the implementation of these policies has unfortunately sometimes led to situations where many drivers feel that they have become victims of a virtual “war against the automobile.” With popular anger running high among the motoring citizenry, perhaps it may well be time to call a truce in this “war” and attempt to achieve a more balanced understanding of the present and future role of cars, trucks, and buses in the urban environment worldwide.
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Urban mobility by way of private automobiles – once cars stopped being extravagant toys of the super-rich and became essential tools for all but the very poor – accounted for an extraordinary advance in the ability of city-dwellers of the modern industrial nations to navigate their own immediate neighborhoods, access all corners of their metropolitan regions, and engage in complex economic activities leading to unprecedented and widespread prosperity. But although automobiles did indeed eliminate some of the social and recreational aspects of city streets, that in turn encouraged the construction of urban parks and playgrounds. The interstate highway system in the United States – inspired by the autostrade and autobahnen of Europe – may have cost billions of dollars in public outlays, but it led to a new stage of economic integration and opened up the entire North American continent to the national distribution of commodities and manufactured goods by trucks as well as middle-class family vacations in station wagons and SUVs. The personal mobility provided by automobiles played an important and liberating role for women and youth as both the “flappers” of the 1920s and the young Baby Boomers of the 1950s used cars to escape the confines of patriarchal domesticity. Trucks, tractors, and automobiles transformed agriculture and eliminated much of the isolation of rural life. And in the urban centers themselves, city taxicabs became an accessible form of spontaneous, unscheduled transportation for millions and provided an entry-level occupation for thousands of immigrants and otherwise unemployed workers.
Today, a combination of social and technological advances are making cars safer, cleaner, more energy-efficient, and more accessible than every before. And at the same time an
8 emerging global economy is spreading middle-class aspirations, and the promise of middle-class comforts, to tens of millions of new urbanites in the burgeoning mega-cities and urban regions of Asia and Latin America. All reliable projections indicate that globally the foreseeable future will require more cars – along with more walking, biking, and mass transit options – not fewer.
In the end, an intelligent re-assessment of the relationship between the automobile and the city must be based on two fundamental propositions: first, that many of the perceived short-comings of the automobile as a form of urban transportation – however exaggerated and ideologically agendized the critique – are fundamentally accurate and need to be seriously addressed; but second, that the automobile confers many social and economic benefits and is likely to be around for some time – not any longer as the single dominant element of a mobility monoculture but certainly as one useful part of the multimodal transportation mix of the urban future.
From Auto-Utopia to Auto-Dystopia Historically, the automobile was one of a handful of technical inventions that together had a transformational effect on the modern industrial city. Electric lighting, the telephone, and the elevator – all increased humankind’s reach and abolished old spatial and temporal tyrannies. In particular, the automobile helped to bring unprecedented mobility, prosperity, and suburban comfort to millions. It opened entire metropolitan regions – not just those areas served by mass transit lines – to commercial and residential development by the middle class and profoundly influenced the popular culture as a
9 symbol of freedom and personal identity. With the introduction of Henry Ford’s “Universal Car” – the Model-T – manufacturing, maintaining, and fueling cars and trucks became the driving forces behind an enormously successful consumer-based industrial economy. Indeed, “Fordism” – the practice of mass-producing inexpensive, well-built products while paying the workers living-wage salaries that permitted them to aspire to middle-class status – became a norm in modern industrial practice worldwide and was even admired by Lenin’s economic planners in the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Volkswagen project in Germany.
Almost from the first, however, the relationship between the automobile and the modern city has been at the very least uncomfortable and sometimes even openly hostile. It may well be said that automobility helped to create what many regarded as a utopia of prosperity, independence, and spatial freedom in the first half of the 20th century . . . and then descended into auto-dystopia during the second half.
Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of 1898 and Arturo Soria y Mata’s Ciudad Lineal of ca.1892 were, of course, proposed before the widespread popularity of the automobile. Nevertheless, both of those late 19th-century urban visions emphasized technologies of mobility as integral features of their respective plans: railways and canals in Howard’s case, a potentially endless trolley line in Soria’s. Later, the two most influential urban utopias of the 20th century – Le Corbusier’s techno-elite skyscraper cities of the 1920s and 30s and Frank Lloyd Wright’s radically decentralized Broadacre City proposal of 1935 – relied heavily on privately owned automobiles as the basic form of transportation.
10 The influence of the two starkly contrasting visions – Corbusier’s glorifying the central city, Wright’s emphasizing rural values – were intended to lead to very different results. But as history actually unfolded, cities in Europe and America adopted both mass transit solutions (buses, subways, and trolleys) and automobiles (private cars and taxis) to satisfy their complex urban transportation needs in both high-rise urban centers and outlying suburban communities. In Europe, mass transit systems like the London’s Underground or the Paris Metro, led the way. In the United States, automobiles predominated even in dense cities like New York and Chicago. Indeed, if “mass transit” means moving masses of people, then in America the automobile became the most popular and most successful form of mass transportation. To this day, all forms of scheduled, fixed-route mass transit account for less that 8% of American vehicle miles travelled.
Simply put, the automobile revolutionized America and the world. In center cities, the high-rise apartment, the taxi, and the subway or bus line became almost essential elements of urban life. In suburbia, the detached home and the private car became a social norm deeply imbedded in the larger culture. The spirit of the historical moment was perhaps best captured in the carefully considered assessment offered by John B. Rae in his 1971 study, The Road and the Car in American Life. The automobile, Rae wrote, was “an instrument of social revolution” that “can and does provide mass transportation for people and bulk transportation for goods; if these were its sole functions, it would be an invaluable supplement to other forms of transportation. But these are the lesser part of what the motor vehicle has to contribute. The major part is that it offers individual,
11 personal, flexible mobility as nothing before it has ever done and as nothing else now available now can do.”
The Intellectuals Versus the Suburbs The auto-utopia visions of the early 20th century may have been glowing, but soon there developed a very contrary vision: the auto-centric city as a social and environmental catastrophe. Questions of safety and tailpipe exhaust pollution played a part in the perceptual change, but only a part, since seat belts and airbags actually solved many of the safety problems associated with automobiles in relatively short order. Similarly, cleaner fuel formulations and catalytic converters addressed pollution problems with great success beginning in the 1970s.
The larger, deeper cause of the changed perception of the automobile involved the conceptual history of suburbia and the suburban way of life – what Robert Fishman called the “Bourgeois Utopia.” In the auto-utopia phase of the relationship between the automobile and the city, visions of a new, cleaner, more commodious metropolitan region comprised of gleaming, high-rise downtowns and comfortable, leafy suburbs promised the elimination of slums and a better life for all. In the auto-dystopia phase, however, suburbia, for the intellectuals at least, became a kind of social prison based on inequality and fear of the lower classes, mired in wasteful, unsustainable extravagance on the one hand and social irresponsibility on the other.
12 The intellectuals’ distaste for the automobile was closely tied to the private car’s role in fostering the development of suburbs at the expense of the inner city. Many popular books and respected academic studies have blamed automobiles for formless urban sprawl, social anomie, and the decline of community and civic engagement. And as urban globalizaton in the form of the rapid emergence of new mega-cities in formerly underdeveloped regions of the world became the new focus of urban thinking, many environmental critics of the automobile-suburbia nexus raised public alarms about the prospect of a growing demand for cars and suburban housing by millions of new consumers in Asia.
In the final chapters of The City in History, Mumford decried places like Los Angeles as “obsolete anti-cities” built solely “for the convenience of the private motor car,” and other critics, especially environmentalists, turned up the rhetorical heat. In the 1993, radical social critic James Howard Kunstler published The Geography of Nowhere, a stinging critique of modern suburbia, and titled his chapter on the automobile “The Evil Empire.” Jane Holtz Kay subtitled her popular Asphalt Nation “How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back.” And The Automobile and the Environment, a book for school children, assured its young readers that “making and using cars may be one of humankind’s most polluting activities.” Thus, a widespread anti-automobile consensus was constructed in the public mind and laid the groundwork for urban transportation planners to escalate initially benign “transit first” policies into a kind of planners’ crusade to eliminate, as rapidly as possible, automobile dominance of the urban mobility network.
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Now, however, as new mobility technologies and a new kind of urban world emerge, some may wonder if the planners’ crusade is, if not misguided, at least short-sighted. As one historian observed, the automobile was originally a “historically specific form of transportation, one appropriate to a particular stage in capitalist development.” If so, auto-suburbia may also have been a historically specific form in the development of urban settlement patterns, one just as appropriate to the historical moment and one that provided important benefits to humanity at a time when city-versus-country perceptions were rapidly giving way to more spatially integrated, rural-urban middle-landscape ways of life.
Perhaps the attraction of the suburban model lies in a profound longing for the integration of urban and rural values in the intellectual life of the 19th century, when rapid urbanization was beginning to transform the world. Howard, of course, based his Garden City vision on the idea of three “magnets” – the country magnet, the city magnet, and a city-country magnet that would combine the best features of both – but the idea had been percolating even earlier. In 1893, a radical populist from Kansas published a visionary tract entitled A City-less and Country-less World. A year later, in William Dean Howells’s A Traveler from Altruria by, the wise Altrurian explains, “. . . we have neither city nor country in your sense, and so we are neither so isolated nor so crowded together.” Both writers, of course, may have been responding to the famous formulations of Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto of 1848 – that the bourgeoisie had “created enormous cities” and that the proletariat, in their turn, would carry out a “gradual
14 abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population.” But even earlier than that, in 1844, the deep intellectual desire for what would eventually manifest itself as suburbia was expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson who confided to his journal an observation that still resonates with many today: “I wish to have rural strength and religion for my children, and I wish city facility and polish. I find with chagrin that I cannot have both.”
Thus, if the desire for suburbia – even sprawling auto-suburbia – can be understood not as a tragic mistake but merely as an artifact of a particular moment in the urban history of the 20th century and the fulfillment of a deeply held desire of a society transitioning from rural to urban, then the conceptual groundwork is laid for understanding the new social and spatial accommodations that are likely to be developed as new urban patterns, with new kinds of mobility options, emerge in an age experiencing its own transitional moment – the movement from cities imbedded within a framework of industrial-era nationalism to the new “meta-geography” of urban globalization.
Mobility Technologies and Urban Globalization Despite the widespread popularity of automobile-as-dystopia thinking today, automobiles are still the major form of personal transportation, suburbs continue to attract many young families, Car Talk remains the most popular show on National Public Radio, and automobile manufacture and maintenance remain mainstays of our national/international economy. Indeed, although the rising global demand for cars remains a cause for real environmental concern, that demand is increasingly seen as a legitimate, indeed
15 irresistible, aspiration of the newly emerging global middle class. In India and China, this means a rapid expansion of automobile sales as economies once mired in poverty become at least marginally middle-class, sometimes even affluent.
In her pioneering work on global cities, Saskia Sassen noted that urban globalization has created enormous wealth but that the wealth is very unevenly distributed with huge gaps between the super-rich and the super-poor. But the rich and powerful firms that have established operations in the global cities need service workers of all kinds, and a lowlevel service job, however ill-paid, may often be the first step toward middle-class status for millions of urban in-migrants worldwide. For such new city residents, mobility is an immediate necessity upon arrival and one that continues as incomes slowly increase and as small-scale businesses grow. For many, this translates, at some point, into the desire to own an automobile or small truck.
Consider the production figures. In 2010, there were an estimated 40 million passenger vehicles in use in India, and the local automotive industry was producing some 3.7 million units per year. In China, now the world’s largest producer of automobiles, more than 18 million cars, buses, vans, and trucks were produced in 2010, and there are currently more than 62 million vehicles already on the road in China, a number that is expected to increase tenfold by 2030. These are explosive levels of growth, and the statistics speak to both the success of the economic reforms of the 1980s and 90s and to the mobility aspirations of millions of Chinese, many of whom have experienced
16 unprecedented economic success over a relatively short period of time despite strong traditional and policy impediments to upward mobility.
In the already advanced economies of Europe and North America, on the other hand, young members of the Millennial Generation seem to be taking a very different path. As one Stanford student recently put it, “We will be the first generation in automotive history to drive less than our parents. Our issues with cars and with urban mobility in general will be different from the past.” And as another commented, “At the end of the 20th century, sprawling suburban environments only accessible by automobiles dominated the metropolitan region. This is the environment inherited by the Millennial Generation; this is the environment Millennials do not want.”
The literature on the Millennial Generation is still developing. Much of what exists is popular, anecdotal, and surprisingly political, with both free-market libertarians and Obama-era social liberals claiming the Millennials as their own. To date, much of the best information comes from the Pew Research Center and its series of reports exploring the new generation’s behaviors, values, and opinions. On the one hand, the Millennials are called “confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to change” – the very picture of what Richard Florida calls “the Creative Class.” But the whole picture is not so rosy. Good full-time jobs are scarce in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse, underemployment is rampant, and more than a third of the entire generation still lives with their parents. Many recent graduates are burdened with heavy college debt, in some cases as much as $40-50,000, and the tendency to share crowded apartments – and to spend
17 more of their income on cell-phone service than on private cars – seems to be driven as much by hard economic necessity as by the desire to live frugally and sustainably. Increasingly, the hope is not to own a car but merely to have access to one, when necessary, through some form of car sharing or short-term rental. And it often seems that the Millennial vision of the good life is not to settle into a comfortable middle-class suburb but rather to move to a bustling city where rents may be high and streets congested, but neighborhoods are vibrant, free Wi-Fi is available in the nearest coffee shop, and prospects of a better future are at least possible, even in a down economy.
The values and aspirations of these two emerging mobility constituencies – the new urban middle class in the developing world and the creative-class Millennials in the West – follow very different paths indeed. In many respects, the arcs of their generational urban narratives could not be more different. And yet in both the advanced and the emerging economies, the social and cultural effects of multi-modal urban mobility seem to have increased apace with the new technologies of communication and online social interaction, developing the possibility of new kinds of “communities of mobility” to replace the locationally centered cultures of the past. Interestingly, major social and technological developments are just emerging, or already in place, that will almost certainly affect urban automobile use worldwide. Small cars, electric cars, hybrids, and cars powered by natural gas or hydrogen fuel cells; self-driving “autonomous cars” that can be summoned by cell-phone and that communicate with each another; both commercial and informal car-sharing services that disjoin the convenience of car-use from the burden of car-ownership – all these innovations are rapidly emerging as auto-
18 mobility options at precisely the same time that digital telecommunications are revolutionizing the way urban dwellers interact, recreate, and conduct business.
As cellphones and tablets reduce the need for the personalized physical mobility provided in the past by automobiles and transit in order to engage in some common social and economic activities, new forms of “virtual community” not tied to geography in the traditional sense have emerged to take their place. Manuel Castells has famously called this the distinction between the electronic “space of flows” and the physical “space of places,” and this new dual urban geography is nothing less than a revolutionary development in the history of humanity, one that members of the new Millennial Generation, having grown up with computers, take for granted. They navigate the digital flows and the physical places – and code-switch between the two – with ease. Indeed, the need for the “personal and flexible” type of mobility that Rae identified as the automobile’s great gift to urban civilization in the 20th century may be greater than ever before, but now that need for mobility may be satisfied by technologies other than automotive. The networked cities of the future that are emerging within the contexts of globalism will require a totally new range of mobility options. Cyber-cities may never completely replace traditional physical urban space, but many citadel functions, market functions, even community functions are already being performed through informational websites, internet shopping, and social media. Cars, taxis, transit systems, walking, cycling – and hand-held mobile devices as well – will all be among the mobility options of the future and will very likely interact in ways yet to be imagined.
19 The Future of the New Urban Mobilities In this new historical moment, urban planning theory and practice needs to adapt to the changing conditions of urban life. In a world where the far-flung ring of what were once bedroom suburbs have been transformed into what Joel Garreau calls “Edge City,” the daily commute has been radically reorganized, and the urban-suburban dichotomy has been replaced by a more seamless spatial pattern of metropolitan inter-connections. Now more than ever, new conceptual tools need to be developed to re-imagine not only the modalities of transportation but, indeed, the very purpose of urban mobility itself.
Faced with these new realities, new planning traditions rooted in environmentalism make reducing our reliance on the private automobile one of their central goals. What the Smart Growth movement and the New Urbanism propose is that future urban development, especially in the suburbs, be in the form of denser, multi-story, pedestrian-friendly communities built around transit (usually light-rail) hubs – achieving a combination of private comforts and social amenities that recall the small towns and “classic suburbs” of the railroad and streetcar era before the dominance of the automobile that most of the major historians of American suburbia identify as the high-water mark of suburban living. Many transportation needs will be met by walking, cycling, and efficient mass transit. And automobiles will remain, but used only for the kinds of trips for which walking, cycling, or fixed-rail-fixed-schedule transit is inappropriate: multi-stop errands, vacation trips, and the many other types of travel that together constitute inhabiting the whole metropolitan region.
20 Ironically, many early adherents of the environmental and sustainable planning movements were strongly influenced by intellectual traditions of bio-regionalism, administrative decentralization, small-is-beautiful economics, and even back-to-the-land, off-the-grid rejections of city life. Recently, however, there is a growing sense that urban life is in fact the greenest mode of human existence and that population density, not mass exodus from the polluting city, provides the smallest carbon footprint when compared to suburban, rural, or even wilderness-commune settlements. In Green Metropolis (2009), for example, journalist David Owen argues that dense urban economies of scale make city life greener, on a per capita basis, than any other option and serve to fulfill the promise of his subtitle: “Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability.”
The perception that dense urban life may actually be greener than other human settlement options is not entirely new. As long ago as 1985, architect Peter Calthorpe, one of the founders of the New Urbanism and a pioneer of the transit-oriented development (TOD) concept, wrote a short article for The Whole Earth Review entitled “Redefining Cities,” in which he argued that our “image of the city as a cancerous lesion oozing with pollution and destroying the environment as its relentless growth paves the Earth is born of nineteenth-century industry” and that today, in reality, “the city is the most environmentally benign form of human settlement.” More recently, in Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change (2011), Calthorpe argues that “compact and walkable development . . . can have a major impact in reducing carbon emissions and energy
21 demand” and that “urbanism is the most cost-effective solution to climate change, more so than most renewable technologies.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, the idea that the cities of the future will indeed be bigger, denser, greener, and more sustainable -- “more like Manhattan,” as Owen puts it – and that automobiles will soon share local streets with pedestrians, cyclists, and all manner of public transit is an idea that has captured the imaginations of many in the Millennial Generation as well of many practicing planners in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. If the logic of the “urbanization solution” takes hold as global urbanization rates swell toward 70-80%, humanity’s collective carbon footprint may well grow smaller, and the world will grow greener. And that is not all. People who live in cities have fewer children that rural people, so the pressures of a rapidly expanding global population will gradually ease. And if past history is any guide, levels of education, safety, and economic prosperity are also likely to increase.
This kind of urban triumphalism is pleasing to the egos of urbanists, of course, but a word of caution may well be in order. Like anything else, taking advantage of the clear tendencies of global urbanization – and the vast elaboration of mobilities thereby implied – can be done well or poorly. Advocates of urbanism cannot fall prey to complacency and self-satisfaction. The urbanization process all by itself will not cause everything to come out well in the end. Ever and always, we have work to do, and we must be diligent.
An Agenda for Study and Action
22 If the increasing demands for urban mobilities are likely to continue as essential elements of urban life, then a number of issues will need to be addressed. Many of these are technical questions that automotive engineers and transportation planners are already working on, for example:
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How can we make cars less polluting and less dangerous while making transportation of all kinds cleaner, faster, and more accessible for new generations of urban mobility consumers?
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What kinds of new vehicles, engines, and clean fuels will we need? And how will a new re-fueling infrastructure be put in place?
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How can we go about re-inventing the city taxi, both as a technology and a social institution? What other approaches to “personalized mass transit” are viable? How can we apply computerized scheduling technologies – and perhaps the creative merging of private taxi companies with public transit services – to avoid rushhour shortages and make the delivery of mobility services more efficient and equitable across geographic and socio-economic divides.
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More generally, how can policy-makers re-imagine the automobile as a form of mass transit when both entrenched interest groups and established planning practice rigidly separates private cars from public buses and trains? How can we
23 prevent implementation issues from frustrating the achievement of real policy reform?
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How can we plan both our center-city and suburban communities to be more livable, more sustainable, and more open to cycling and walking? How can we design better streets and sidewalks to manage the many inevitable and potentially dangerous traffic interfaces between automobiles and pedestrians, automobiles and cyclists, and cyclists and pedestrians?
Other questions required a broader, more nuanced analysis:
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How will new multi-modal approaches to urban mobilities affect housing, work, social interactions, and the economic and governance functions of urban communities?
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How will space-of-flows mobilities interact with space-of-place mobilities when communication and transportation are re-integrated and no longer regarded as “different things”?
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And how can we re-think the way we plan our urban spaces to accommodate the full range of essential urban functions in an age when our cities are becoming seamless metropolitan regions . . . and our metropolitan regions are becoming
24 inter-connected nodes of a intensely networked but globally dispersed urban world?
Questions like these demand that we re-consider what exactly a city is . . . and what purpose urban mobility serves.
In response to the overwhelming bigness of our big cities, and to the global reach of our urban networks, many people already identify with their small neighborhood units instead of the larger municipality, leading perhaps to a simultaneous decrease and intensification of dialogue and civic engagement. If the cities of the world continue to grow and become globally inter-connected – and if real social networks increasingly span continents instead of just city blocks – there is a clear possibility that online mobility can just as easily lead to alienation and isolation, resulting in new personal vulnerabilities and social disconnects, as to that increased inclusiveness that global urbanism potentially offers. The cultural tension between connectedness and disconnectedness, both on the personal and social level, will be an on-going struggle for both the Millennial Generation and the rising urban middle classes of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
If the citadel, market, and community functions of cities are increasingly performed online – often spontaneously and on a 24-hour basis – there may be significant gains in terms of efficiency but also losses in terms of the daily social interactions. This is troubling, and more than ever we now need wise, nurturing plans and policies that keep human values primary. As more and more living functions become social and take place
25 in shared public space, the resultant loss of privacy may lead to push-back and the search for new ways to experience solitude. The danger will be a kind of systematic withdrawal from the physical and social space of the city, a process that may have already begun as evidenced by the way people talking on cellphones or listening to iPods walk the streets as if unaware of others around them.
In the end, the relationship between the city and the mobility technologies of the future will depend on how we respond to our understanding of our urban mobility history. Considering how the automobile in the 20th century responded to its historical moment as the modern city moved from a city-and-hinterland model to a system of spatially integrated metropolitan regions, we can better understand how automobility was an innovative technological response to deeply felt human needs not just about the practicalities of navigating the complex new cities but about apprehending the relationship between nature and civilization, between the individual and society. But now a very different historical moment is clearly emerging with its own challenges, hopes, and aspirations. Our task is to make sure that the full range of transportation options, connected by and to the other mobility technologies of digital communication, will be seen the way Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s saw the technologies of media – that is, as vital, evolutionary extensions of humanity itself.
To achieve that positive result, what we must do now is examine the history, policy issues, and possible impacts of all forms of urban mobility on both current and emerging cities of the world to develop new ways of thinking about urban mobility in an era of
26 global transformation. To fully understand the historical and cultural imperatives of the new urban mobilities, it will be necessary to engage in the widest possible range of interdisciplinary thinking and multi-disciplinary research. In the end, a re-assessment of urban mobilitiy may lead to a re-imagining of the very nature of the human community.
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