Carbon Copy

cultural heritage and transportation

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:

• more polarised (greater disparity between rich and poor);
• more dispersed (more suburban sprawl);
• more anonymous and less convivial (fewer people will know their neighbours);
• less child-friendly (children's freedoms will be further curtailed by parental fears);
• less culturally distinctive (the McCulture will be further advanced);
• more dangerous for those not in cars (more metal in motion);
• fatter and less fit (less exercise built into daily routines);
• more crime ridden (less social cohesion and more fear of crime);
• subject to a more Orwellian style of policing (more CCTV surveillance); and
• less democratic (the majority will have less influence over the decisions that govern their lives)."

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.

film festival in Cape Town

The architect africa film festival is still on in Cape Town, with screenings until Thursday 6 September. Fascinating stuff not only on architecture, but also planning and community issues. From the 1927 science fiction Metropolis to the 2004 End of Suburbia and more recent documentaries from Nigeria, Venezuela and Tanzania, the festival is a smorgasbord of commentary on the relationship between society and the infrastructure that supports it. At Cinema Nouveau in Cavendish Square.

u-life in a u-city

Not to be outdone by China's Dongtan Eco-city, South Korea is now building the New Songdo City International Business District as a pilot project for the US Green Building Council's LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND). By 2014, Songdo will be home to 65,000 residents and 300,000 workers - the first new city in the world designed and planned as an international business district.

With its emphasis on international business, Songdo is being branded as a ubiquitous city (as in ubiquitous computing) "where all major information systems (residential, medical, business, governmental and the like) share data, and computers are built into the houses, streets and office buildings".

It's also an entirely for-profit undertaking. Cape Town's Century City on green steroids. Which raises the question posed in an op-ed from The Next American City: Will New Songdo have room for the unexpected?

The designers of New Songdo have made an admirable effort to look at the world’s great cities and incorporate their best qualities–qualities that have emerged after hundreds of years of change. New Songdo’s studiously non-dogmatic approach to planning may do the trick of simulating the effects of history, but it risks becoming a new dogma all its own, ready to be overrun by organic growth.

This is a risk faced by all masterplanned cities (and with current efforts to develop sustainable cities from the ground up, there is a growing number of these), but with its emphasis on attracting multinational corporations to establish their Northeast Asian head offices here, Songdo faces greater risks than most. Like Century City, the space will need to be heavily mediated to provide an environment attractive to big business. So how will it relate to the real world outside? Will it be a western-style enclave?

And what about the one unplanned and ubiquitous element of every city the world over: the poor? Or even the semi-poor? A city this big must, somehow, consider how to accommodate the u-cleaners, the u-cooks, the u-plumbers and the u-bus drivers. U-life for the masses.

one planet city

Not quite there yet, but Vancouver - already labelled by some as North America's most livable city - is trying hard to reduce its ecological footprint. When planners say things like "the city has shown that density buys a lot of cool stuff," then you know that they've figured out not only how to make density work, but more crucially, how to increase density without a public backlash.

The "cool stuff" is the public amenities, infrastructure, and mixed use that density brings. [Retired city planning director] Beasley and his team used a powerful discretionary zoning system and flexible density bonuses to persuade developers to pay for parks, child care, cultural facilities, community centers, and social housing, all ingredients necessary to building complete and vibrant neighborhoods.

"We realized that unless we brought a high quality urban design and community development into the exercise, consumers were not going to buy it," Beasley says. New downtown development included town houses for families with children and others who wanted to live close to the ground. The inclusion of town houses at the base of apartment towers became a signature of downtown Vancouver.

Vancouver has figured out that "[i]f you can associate density with something good like a better environment, better ecology, then that sells." But it's not only a sales job. In addition to selectively locating denser developments where they have less impact, they have been adding density in ways that are hardly visible. The city's new planning director sees urban design, expanded choice in housing, and creativity as keys to taking an already successful city to a whole new level.

it's not going to be easy

Dongtan is not the only planned sustainable urban area planned for China. Another one is the village of Huangbaiyu, but this one is puzzling. The rendering of the original scheme shows an interesting concept, but this photo of built houses makes it look more like a standard subdivision. Some aspects of the design may indeed reduce ecological impact, but it's no model development.

The real question though, is why existing villagers are being asked to abandon their existing houses to move into new "sustainable" ones. The linked article points out that the existing villagers live scattered among their agricultural fields. Conventional wisdom may suggest that such low densities are bad as an urban model, but I would have thought that there is some wisdom in living where you work. Improving efficiencies by corralling the villagers and knocking down functional houses will only alienate them from the land. If this approach is more efficient, it is only because the fields will be consolidated and farmed by a bigger enterprise, and the villagers will have to start travelling to jobs elsewhere.

Maybe the mistakes with this village are just a bad pixel on a widescreen TV - though the villagers may have a different view - as the general approach sounds positive.

Update on 30 July 2007: I've just discovered another plan for a zero-carbon, zero-waste city, this one in Abu Dhabi. There's a curious rendering of a "solar tree" something like the fake trees that double as relay stations for cellular networks in South Africa, but this one has solar panels.

city vs farm

In the battle to prevent urban development from continuing its relentless consumption of valuable farmland, planners often rely on establishing a legally defined urban edge and hoping like hell that developers don't jump the fence. Knowing that pressure for urban growth will need an outlet, some delve deeper into strategies to increase densities or allow growth to take place in a few discrete locations outside the main town, or along transport routes or in some other well-defined pattern.

Stellenbosch in South Africa and Cambridge in the UK have taken similar approaches to testing alternatives to see what might be the most sustainable approach in their respective circumstances. Their spatial planning studies are a step in the right direction, because they recognise first that there are a range of options for accommodating growth and second that by considering urban development, transportation and other municipal services together, they can explore the overall impact on sustainability of different growth patterns.

But a limitation of most exercises in limiting sprawl is that they treat urban and rural areas as completely separate, unrelated entities. New Ruralism takes the view that there is a functional relationship between the two, and that this relationship is growing stronger, thanks to a number of converging trends. Increasing demands for fresh, seasonal, organically grown food, as well as recognition of the need to reduce energy inputs for growing and transporting agricultural produce, have resulted in new opportunities for farms on the urban fringes.

It used to be that farmers sold all their produce via central wholesale markets, and their only interaction with consumers was at farm stalls catering to city dwellers on Sunday outings or at a few farmers' markets in the city. Now, with growing demand for food from trusted sources, farmers are increasingly selling direct to the public via weekly boxed deliveries or special retail outlets. (In South Africa, check out urban sprout's ubergreen organic eco directory, listing more than 50 organic farmers, growers and producers in the Western Cape.) This means that smaller, labour-intensive farms can remain viable in areas where they might previously have been forced to close shop in the face of development pressure.

The farm is coming to the city, and the opportunity for planners is that the relationship between town and country can be nurtured so that agriculture is supported. The urban boundary shouldn't be ignored, but rather than thinking of it as a dam wall to keep the flood of humanity off productive land, think of it as an interface: a place for economic and social exchange, for sharing knowledge and raising awareness of interdependencies. Cuba learnt some valuable lessons about this relationship when their oil supply dried up, and perhaps our chance is now.

inconvenient realities

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

1. Building a new "green" house has a bigger (negative) impact than making an existing house more energy-efficient.
2. CFL lightbulbs use less energy than incandescents, but as a product they pollute more (they contain mercury). LEDs are better, but too expensive and difficult to find.
3. In some places you can get a rebate for installing energy-efficient appliances, but this encourages us to send old appliances to landfills.
4. The carbon impact of manufacturing new triple-glazed windows can be bigger than the benefit in heat savings.

This does not mean we shouldn't make low-carbon choices. It does mean that every decision involves a tradeoff. This applies not only to individual householders, but also to city planning processes. One reason why planning needs to be integrated across government departments (and various other stakeholders) is that sometimes, the best plan overall will require some aspects of the plan to be suboptimal.

For example, city planners may decide that they want to encourage high densities in residential areas in order to achieve economies of scale in the provision of bulk services (water, sewers, and so on) and to increase public transport ridership. But in some areas the targets may not be achievable because developers are not prepared to build to the target densities, or for some other reason. Then planners may need to work with lower densities, and focus instead on arranging the orientation of streets and buildings so that buildings can incorporate passive solar design and rooftop photovoltaic panels for micro generation of electricity - something that is harder to achieve in high-density areas.

This strategy would require, as a minimum, interaction between the spatial planners, urban designers, traffic engineers, land developers and the local power utility. If these players are working in isolation, as they so often are, then the strategy won't work. In planning a low-carbon world, as with so many other things, there is no universal strategy. There are, perhaps, general principles that can be used to guide decisions, but reaching appropriate decisions requires a coordinated approach.

places to grow

While I was living in Ontario a few years ago, the Province was developing a controversial plan to curb urban sprawl in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Last year they completed the Places to Grow plan, and recently it was recognised with the American Planning Association's Burnham Award. The plan identifies a number of urban centres that are to be revitalised with a greater mix of businesses, services and housing. There will be stronger public transport options and an emphasis on more liveable, intensified urban areas that will encourage more active lifestyles and reduced reliance on car-based travel.

The plan also sets targets for development densities within the existing urban areas of the GTA, with the intention of encouraging growth where existing infrastructure can support it. It's bold and far-reaching, and flies in the face of well-established development patterns. If you ask planners from the outlying municipalities of the GTA whether they think it will work, many would say no.

Groups like the Ontario Home Builders' Association claimed during the plan's consultation process that limiting growth areas would make housing less affordable by pushing up the cost of land. And developers in the outlying municipalities, like Pickering and Oshawa, said that there would be no market for new housing in those areas at the densities targeted in the plan. At the same time, environmental research organisations like the Pembina Institute felt that the controls over the urban boundary were too weak and that valuable agricultural land would be compromised.

The target densities are not actually any higher than those found in a lot of existing communities of Toronto, but the locations of proposed increases in density, and the perception of what this will do to local municipalities, have municipal politicians crying foul. They know that developers will keep on pushing the boundaries, quite literally, because they can. As Christopher Hume points out in the Toronto Star, the politicians are walking a fine line with this plan. Some of them are smart enough to know that business as usual is not a smart option, but if they resist development pressures too much, they'll be voted out.

carbon reduction of the future

Two mega-projects in planning stages. I've mentioned the Eco-City of Dongtan near Shanghai. Another exercise in zero-carbon, zero-waste city-building is the Masdar Initiative in Abu Dhabi. As with any attempt to significantly reduce carbon output, this one also places strong emphasis on transportation considerations:

With a maximum distance of 200m to the nearest transport link and amenities, the compact network of streets encourages walking and is complemented by a personalised rapid transport system. The shaded walkways and narrow streets will create a pedestrian-friendly environment in the context of Abu Dhabi’s extreme climate.

When it comes to low-carbon planning at this scale, some practitioners are starting to think that it won't be good enough to be zero-carbon. If climate science suggests that we need to be carbon neutral globally, then it follows that some areas will need to be carbon negative to make up for areas that are carbon positive.

This is the thinking in Arup's work on Dongtan. It is easy to criticise China for continuing its expansion of coal-fired power plants to feed its hungry economy, but they know that planning for the 600 million new Chinese urban dwellers in the next 45 years requires energy, and lots of it. It's also easy to criticise the building of Dongtan on a greenfields site, but those 600 million have to go somewhere, and they sure as hell aren't going to fit into existing cities. (To put this number into perspective, it's more than the combined existing populations of the US, Canada, Australia, France, Scandinavia and the UK.)

To compensate, Arup is planning the city so that the carbon footprint of Dongtan's residents will be less than what is needed, on average, to maintain the earth's ecosystem in balance. The official target is to achieve a carbon neutral city, but Arup is fine-tuning its planning in the hope that Dongtan will be carbon negative.

city-building 101

The city as ecosystem: decoupling economic development from environmental impact. Designing Dongtan from the ground up.