Ontario's Environmental Assessment (EA) process identifies the need to assess the impact of transportation systems on cultural heritage resources, which encompasses both "cultural landscape units" and "built heritage features" (see Hwy 407 EA Terms of Reference - February 2003 - for definitions). But there is no recognition of the impact that transportation systems have on current social interaction, in the sense that car travel affects the way we order the activity our lives.
What if we looked at the detrimental impacts of car travel and associated land use patterns on social cohesion? How would this affect planning if we took it seriously in evaluating "alternatives to the undertaking" in transportation EA studies? I have a feeling that this would radically change planning decisions.
While I'm on the topic of social patterns, I have to say that it fascinates me how makeshift but long-term settlements, such as Cape Town's Crossroads and other squatter camps, are completely ignored by urban and transport planners. They are not going away anytime soon, and have become an integral part of a growing number of cities in the developing world. In fact, they are more or less permanent, but planners don't know what to make of them. In Cape Town they are constantly changing, like the shifting sands they are built on, but they have structure: social conventions, an informal economy, and alternative political power structures. I don't want to romanticize the abject poverty that pervades these places, but they can't be made to go away by building conventional roads and matchbox houses in Khayelitsha. We need to work with them.
