For many environmentalists, Walmart is the epitome of how a retailer can take low-density sprawl, accelerate it, and cause havoc by magnifying the trend towards increasingly car-dependent cities. Just for fun, here's a visual representation of how Walmart took over America between 1961 and 2007.
With the UK government planning a series of eco-towns to act as models for zero-carbon urban development, there are a few objections. The Campaign to Protect Rural England says that the towns shouldn't be on greenfield sites. They could rather be "eco-extenstions", or other forms of development that are potentially less damaging to the environment by avoiding sprawl and improving existing urban areas. The CPRE suggests a number of tests by which the eco-towns should be judged before their plans are finalised.
Urban planner Nicholas Falk adds that some of the eco-towns are on sites that were previously rejected as locations for new towns on other grounds, suggesting that criteria for sustainability aren't being applied properly. The objections don't seem to be over the concept of eco-towns, but over appropriate locations for development.
But a DCLG spokeswoman said the policy would encourage “well planned sustainable growth” on brownfield and greenfield land.
“The statutory planning process will ensure that areas will be protected from inappropriate development,” she added. “These settlements will be designed to the highest standards, make the most efficient use of land, and be designed sustainably and to zero-carbon objectives.”
For anyone interested in current discourse around developing green cities, last month's EcoEdge 2 Conference in Australia provided wide-ranging debate on a number of related topics. Part of the motivation for this event was to generate ideas from academics, architects, planners and others facing the challenge of planning and building sustainable cities, under the four main themes of urbanism, government, buildings and housing. There were also workshops to deliver practical approaches to improving urban sustainability performance.
Presenters attended from China, India, USA, Holland, Denmark, Colombia and other countries, and their presentations are available on the CityEdge web site. A number deal with the challenges of slums and other concerns in developing countries.
Eskom has tried several tactics to force big electricity users to reduce demand, in a last-ditch attempt to minimize the need for load shedding. Some industries have had an understanding for some time that they would be called upon to partially shut down their operations; more recently the mines were forced to drastically scale back; and the latest strategy - a step too far, in the ANC's view - has been to refuse to issue permits for large new developments for a few months. Without the permits, the developments can't proceed.
The ANC is outraged, no doubt, because they see this as applying the brakes to economic growth. The government may be right - but only because it hasn't bothered to develop a strategy to encourage developers who could (with a little nudge) make do with reduced dependence on the national electricity grid.
I find it curious that the backlash from government has been more vociferous in the case of the permit delay tactic than in the case of shutting down mine operations. Given time and carefully applied political pressure, the mines could probably find alternative power sources to supplement their main supply, but in the short term there is little they can do but comply with restrictions, and this clearly has an economic impact. New developments, on the other hand, could be configured to have greater flexibility in their mix of power supplies from the start. Government and Eskom should be working together with developers to find ways to encourage a new wave of thinking - particularly with new developments. In industries where the market calls for it, this is already being done. The planned expansion of the Cape Town International Convention Centre is a good example.
There are tools for measuring your personal carbon footprint, tools for determining the embodied energy in construction materials, tools for designing low-carbon buildings, and tools for getting developments accredited for various measures of sustainability. The choice is growing every month, and therein lies a challenge: how to standardise what we mean by "sustainable". As international agreements evolve through processes such as the current negotiations around the next phase of the Kyoto Protocol, we will be forced to converge on an agreed standard - at least as it pertains to carbon emissions. (Though George Bush seems set on developing his own carbon market in parallel, reminding me of the old Betamax vs. VHS battle for ascendancy in video technology, or the current Blu-ray vs HD DVD war.) In the meantime, we will be faced with a growing number of disputes over developments like this one in Maine, USA.
There are a number of plans, in various states of preparation and implementation, for new cities to be developed on principles that establish new levels of sustainability performance. Just as important is how to improve the performance of existing cities.
This is not new, but new to me: an archived post on WorldChanging brought to my attention by a colleague, about RUrbanism. This essay about the Goa 2100 Project suggests a way for existing cities - particularly, but not exclusively in developing countries - to transform themselves to perform more sustainably. This planning project for the capital city of Panjim, in the Indian state of Goa, addresses the relationship between growing urban centres and their rural hinterland.
RUrbanism is a design framework that offers a new way to look at "everything from urban form, to resource flows, to the mix of paid work and unpaid community engagement that comprise a vital community. It also offers powerful, quantitative methods for planning that transition, from finding the optimal size and shape of built infrastructure to financing the process of rebuilding over several decades."
The project looked at things like optimum densities, principles for infrastructure design, use of local materials, and design that is adaptable (and ultimately recyclable). After extensive modelling, the project concluded that the city of Panjim could be sustainably transitioned - affordably - within a period of 30 years. No mean feat, considering the lifecycle of urban infrastructure.
But perhaps the most important challenge that Goa 2100 identified was the transformation of current institutions and systems of governance. The sustainability transition clearly new values and ethics: sufficiency, equity, and the ethic of using a minimal throughput of matter, energy and information with the least impact on nature society and future generations. These were identified as key goals for the project, and they require changes in how a society like Goa governs itself.
We usually think of roads, railways and even waterways within cities as infrastructure that connects different parts of the urban area. But if poorly planned, they can divide communities and actually reduce accessibility to some parts. There have been plenty of examples of negative impacts on a grand scale, such as elevated waterfront freeways in Boston, Toronto and Cape Town; or more localised community divisions from widening of small roads to get more traffic past a bottleneck, making it harder to walk or cycle to shops, schools and other local destinations.
This can have a serious impact on sustainability by reducing the viability of local businesses, destroying social cohesion and stability, and resulting in decline in areas that are isolated. The 3 November edition of NewScientist [sub req'd] reports on a study that has confirmed that "geographical isolation is a prime cause of social deprivation, economic inactivity and crime, but can be hard to quantify." The study's authors, Dimitry Volchenkov and Philippe Blanchard, have come up with a mathematical model of neighbourhood accessibility [link to technical paper], which is a key first step in preventing new ghettos from emerging out of bad planning:
Random walks defined on undirected graphs assign the absolute scores to all nodes based on the quality of path they provide for random walkers. In city space syntax, the notion of segregation acquires a statistical interpretation with respect to random walks. We analyze the spatial network of Venetian canals and detect its most segregated part which can be identified with canals adjacent to the Ghetto of Venice.
Riebeek Kasteel has been getting a bit of press coverage over the past few months, with a volley of letters to the editor last week. The small farming town, about an hour outside of Cape Town, is witnessing a court battle between a farmer and the residents living next to his vineyards.
Residents are claiming that the farmer is not following health and safety requirements when he sprays his crops, and are experiencing health problems from pesticides drifting in the wind. The farmer says he's following prescribed procedures.
The issue is not as straightforward as that, but it's a classic case of conflict between urban and rural land uses. The town's main attraction is its location: nestled in a valley filled with vineyards and olive groves, away from bigger urban areas. This has fuelled expansion of the town into agriculturual land at the same time as the farmers are experiencing a boom in demand for their olives and grapes.
On the face of it, Riebeek Kasteel presents a model of the ideal relationship between town and country. Physical expansion of the town onto productive farmland clearly has negative impacts, but what interests me here is the interaction and symbiosis between the two.
The biggest sign of the town's tourist boom is the annual olive festival, but there are smaller markets throughout the year, a steady escalation of property prices, and new businesses opening all the time that are not aiming at the traditional small-town market. Farmers are taking advantage of this new market for agricultural products by opening retail outlets and selling products at weekend markets. Townspeople benefit - in theory, at least - with more jobs.
There is no clear urban edge - either in planning or on the ground - and many vacant plots within the town are used to grow crops, adding to the sense that the town is integrated with the farmland. (The irony, in light of the current controversy, is that there was a time when farmers would spray the entire town with pesticides, believing they were doing everyone a favour.)
Urban sprawl is often facilitated by an economic weakening of farms on the urban fringe. In the case of Riebeek Kasteel, both the town and surrounding farms are thriving, producing a strong dynamic between them. On the fringes of larger urban areas, this strong relationship might create a useful check on sprawl, more effectively than a tightly controlled urban edge.
It will be interesting to see how land development plays out in the Riebeek Valley. Most recent growth in Riebeek Kasteel has been outward, rather than on vacant plots within the town. In the neighbouring town of Riebeek West, there has been a stronger focus on infilling rather than outward sprawl, and some of the recent housing projects have been at densities higher than one might expect in a rural town. This may have more to do with the intentions of the owners of surrounding farms than with strong planning, but as land values increase within the towns, the farmers may feel the urge to sell. Let's hope that a healthy urban-rural symbiosis will keep temptation at bay.
Cities exist to provide opportunities for interaction: working, shopping, playing, socialising, and so on. If all the opportunities we needed to reach were within walking distance of where we lived, then we could, well, walk to them. But mostly they aren't, so we don't. And that's no accident or quirk of fate, it's a logical outcome of city and transport planning, in response to evolving technologies.
Since cities started to be planned to make travel easy by car, transportation challenges have spun out of control. Cars have allowed cities to take shape in ways that make it harder to travel by any other means, with opportunities becoming farther apart and nonmotorised travel becoming more difficult not only because of the distances involved but also because roads and traffic are harder to navigate on foot or bike. And the traffic just keeps on growing, often at rates faster than the city's population.
It has become a losing battle to keep cities livable and sustainable when they are planned for the dominance of motorised transport, so some planners are starting to try and turn things around.
The transportation systems we see now in cities are a result of particular combinations of vehicle technologies, energy sources and spatial development patterns, which in turn influence travel patterns and the planners' responses with new infrastructure and services. That's a bit of a simplification, as each factor influences the other, and there are other considerations too, but the important thing is that transportation demand - the need to move - is a derived demand. We don't travel for the sake of it, we travel to gain access to opportunities, so any attempt to resolve transport challenges will require strategies that change where those opportunities are, and how we access them.
The negative impacts of transportation on the environment are a direct outcome of the combinations of technology, energy source and urban form prevalent in each city. My suggestion, then, is that green transport is some new combination of these factors that will result in reduced environmental impact. Exactly what that combination should be, and how it will be achieved, is open to debate.
Until recently, vehicle technology and fuel have not changed since crude oil first became available in cheap abundance. Only spatial form changed, generally in ways that supported - and were supported by - the private automobile. Now, in response to the twin challenges of climate change and looming fuel shortages, industry has put more effort into evolving towards cleaner technologies.
Unfortunately, these technologies won't be enough to qualify for my definition of green transport. For one thing, it will take decades to replace the existing world fleet of private vehicles, and the current crop of replacement vehicles (hybrids being the only serious contenders) only marginally reduce crude oil consumption and carbon emissions. Biofuel raises its own challenges, and only recycles carbon rather than reducing emissions. If the IPCC scientists and other analysts are to be believed, this is a case of too little, too late.
We need to focus just as strongly on ways to influence travel demand. This may be a combination of changing the design of roads and other public spaces to make nonmotorised transport easier, updating zoning practices to encourage greater mixing of land uses, increasing urban densities to make public transport more viable, reducing parking supply, establishing developments that are supportive of public transport (TOD, or transit-oriented development), encouraging green travel plans for ridesharing, and numerous other strategies.
Many governments are leaning towards the increased density approach, with improved public transport as their star strategy. They are generally not very successful in changing urban form, but a few have developed showcase mass transit systems, and others are trying to emulate them. If they were able to influence land use patterns to a greater extent, there would still be a challenge that few have grasped.
Mass transit is suitable for corridors of heavy travel demand, but not much else. Heavy demand happens where a large, dense residential area is linked by a transport corridor to a large area of employment, such as a city central business district. The millions of other trips that are dispersed throughout the city are very difficult to serve by any form of public transport, but particularly by rail or BRT (bus rapid transit). It will be very difficult to reduce the use of cars for those trips, unless a system is developed that is at least as good as in Toronto or London.
To make things worse, there is a contradiction in the planning approaches of many jurisdictions that are developing mass transit, in that promotion of mixed-use urban areas actually weakens the strong nodes that are the lifeblood of mass transit.
To be fair, the concept of mixed-use areas is intended to support short walking trips rather than public transport; but the application of mixed uses, increased densities, parking requirements and public transport are not always thought through in a coherent way at the metropolitan scale.
This presents a serious risk to the attainment of green transport. The greater risk, though, may be the inability of metropolitan authorities to exercise adequate control over all the factors that need to be brought together for a green transport strategy. Even in the context of strong policy, planning is often fragmented and stymied by political interference, uncooperative developers and unreliable funding.
Today is Heritage Day in South Africa. Most countries, whether or not they dedicate a public holiday to it, celebrate cultural heritage in one way or another. It might be poorly defined, subjected to endless arguments, considered differently by groups in society who feel they should be identified as different from others, and even co-opted to political ends. But most people seem to assume that it somehow defines who we are, and is therefore worth preserving. What is not fully recognized in the planning fraternity though, is the range of ways in which transportation and the built environment affect culture in its present incarnations.
Many countries, including South Africa, use environmental impact assessments - or some similar mechanism - to check that planned changes to transportation infrastructure don't adversely affect cultural heritage resources. This is usually considered to mean that built heritage features such as historically significant buildings or other human artifacts should not be compromised.
Transportation corridor design and construction can affect these resources in a number of ways. In the 2003 Draft Cultural Heritage Work Plan for the planned extension of Highway 407 in Ontario, it was noted that "[t]he effects may include displacement through removal or demolition and/or disruption by the introduction of physical, visual, audible or atmospheric elements that are not in keeping with the character of the cultural heritage resources, and/or their setting."
While it is notoriously difficult to quantify some of these impacts, they are at least reasonably tangible. Things start to get a little more interesting when we consider that "[a]ggregations of individual cultural features usually form areas of homogenous character such as a rural area, a village, a streetscape, etc. The attributes for built heritage features are derived from historical associations and/or architectural or engineering qualities." And it's even more challenging to incorporate the role of memory in cultural heritage, something that has recently entered the heritage debate in South Africa.
All of this is no doubt important, but it's missing a crucial element in the consideration of transportation's impact on cultural heritage: the present.
It is true that present lifesyle is partially considered in environmental assessments. Ontario's Environmental Assessment Act defines "environment" to include "...cultural conditions that influence the life of humans or a community." So, for example, if a new road will force relocation of households, or a new dam will wipe out the livelihoods of a community, these are registered as impacts that must be considered.
The cultural conditions of community life should, however, be defined more broadly than is generally done for environmental assessments. At a workshop of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Project on Environmentally Sustainable Transportation, held in Ottawa in 2000, John Adams noted in his paper "The Social Implications of Hypermobility":
It is transport - and communications - that connect everything in society to everything else. The length, strength, quality and complexity of the connecting strands, and the patterns into which they are woven, are the physical manifestation of the social fabric - a metaphor for the myriad ways in which people and institutions relate to each other.
The OECD project looked at two alternative scenarios that countries could aim for in their policies and planning practices: Business as Usual (BAU) and Environmentally Sustainable Transport (EST). As defined by OECD, BAU is simply an extrapolation of past trends, while EST is "transportation that does not endanger public health or ecosystems and that meets needs for access consistent with (a) use of renewable resources that are below their rates of regeneration, and (b) use of non-renewable resources below the rates of development of renewable substitutes." Adams suggested that the BAU scenario would make countries richer (measured by GDP), but poorer by most other social and environmental indicators. "BAU countries will be:
In other words, the way we approach transport planning has a significant impact on cultural heritage in the here and now. It's not something removed from present reality. Present reality is already evolving under the hands of planners, engineers, developers and politicians, so the question is not whether society should change the way it is culturally defined, but how.
