Redesigning Cities for Humans
searchforzero
Table of Contents
CLOSED:
I've been thinking a lot about how we should organize ourselves for a few years now. Specifically, how we should design cities to be more traversable, energy efficient, and catalyze a sense of community.
We've had the power to make civilization-changing infrastructural overhauls very quickly for a long while, but of course we're human and we get things horribly wrong from time to time. A particularly bad example of this tendency to err presents itself in the post World War II "urban sprawl" phenomenon. Urban sprawl, as the name suggests, is the spreading and flattening of city design characterized by suburbs that are so far away from any job, school or marketplace that owning a car–or, in most cases, many cars–is necessary for day-to-day activities. These environments typically have little to no verticality, famously bad transit systems, huge parking lots, and an ever-increasing amount of road infrastructure which chokes out any developments for pedestrian traffic. In fact, road infrastructure leads to a regression in existing pedestrian infrastructure: sidewalks get narrower or disappear, crosswalks and pedestrian lights become so infrequent that people are tempted to cross multi-lane streets on their own terms, and so on. I myself live a ten minute walk from the nearest sidewalk, it's so absurd that it's hilarious. The urban sprawl development paradigm just doesn't sit right with me, but since I live in North America there's so much space that the temptation is just to keep building outwards.
If I think about what makes a city great to live in, I think of not having to travel far to get anywhere. I think of the infusion of nature and beautiful public spaces everywhere. I think of my friends living just a few transit stops away. I think of taking a short walk to pick up some groceries from the local market. I think of kids roaming, playing, and going to school in their own neighbourhood without their parents having to drive them anywhere. This does not happen with the presence of flat, segmented, homogeneous, gray–dare I say it–desolate urban sprawl.
I'm fairly confident no one is really going to disagree that urban sprawl is a problem that needs fixing, but if you do, you can easily find testimony of how bad urban sprawl environments are to live in from others. A man from Los Angeles who has been living abroad in various countries for decades mentioned that he couldn't quite put his finger on why he was scared to move back to the USA until he heard people talk about urban sprawl, then it suddenly clicked. By his account, the countries he had learned to call home fostered a sense of community. He knew his neighbours, he could walk to get groceries, there was a healthy presence of nature and recreational areas, and this was no accident–the cities he was living in didn't have a fractured, hyper-segregated design. I think this is a hint as to what the first step to building cities that truly work for humans is: we need to recognize that urban sprawl is at the heart of the issue. So, where do we go from here? I believe the answer can be found in the "New Urbanism" movement1.
New Urbanism
I stumbled upon New Urbanism recently, which attempts to address the issues caused by urban sprawl. For years I had been pondering what ideas to take from different cities, what works and what doesn't, but I have no formal understanding of how cities work, I was just using my intuition. As it turns out, I had been unknowingly parroting some of the conclusions of experts at the helm of the New Urbanism movement. Here are the things I could deduce myself:
- Make cities walkable and bikeable
- Create an incredible transit system
- Build denser cities, take advantage of height
- Beautify the city with nature and human-centric design (why does everything revolve around cars???)
- Make cars unnecessary or even insensible to own
- Eliminate homogeneity by making every area diverse (i.e. have shops, housing, recreation, and other services). No more copy and pasted suburban developments.
- Build smaller city blocks
Intuition can be a very powerful tool and the fact that it brought me to a New Urbanism is testament to how unintuitive–and frankly, un-human–suburbs and sprawled out city designs are. However, the New Urbanism advocates have also come up with some counter-intuitive principles that I wouldn't have thought of myself. For example, conveniently, designing for narrower roads actually decreases traffic congestion. This is because "desiging for narrower roads" includes some of the above points that make it easier to commute live closer to where you need to be. Contrapositively, more lanes and wider roads make traffic worse… More people move farther away or get work in the city when they live elsewhere but those cars all have to end up in the city somehow.
With regards to the question of energy efficiency I think it's quite clear that density is a big winner. We consume less energy with our water systems, when transporting goods, commuting, and pretty much everything else when we live closer together. Just think of the energy consumption difference between heating a hundred separate houses and heating one tall apartment building.
Considering finances, a large portion of tax spending goes towards road infrastructure, we could essentially eliminate that sinkhole with a New Urbanism approach. And no, it would not be opening up an equivalent sinkhole somewhere else. Building pedestrian infrastructure is simply a smaller project, less material and time is needed. Bikes and feet cause essentially zero damage to pathways and non-car traffic is almost impossible to congest so you won't be fighting the unwinnable car traffic war.
Possibly my favourite reason to move towards a more dense and connected society is not that it's more practical in just about every way, but that it's healthier for us as humans. I know it's an overused cliché, but I think that the phrase "money can't buy happiness" is applicable for debunking urban sprawl. A lot of people think that with a big enough house far enough from everything else (and a handful of nice cars) they'll be happy, but that's simply not true. What they find is isolation and inconvenience, with the former being a large coefficient for depression. We are social beings and being part of a community is far more important than I think most people give it credit.
After seeing some of my thoughts on this subject improved upon, formalized, and even applied in places like Copenhagen, I have a newfound optimism for the future and I'm excited to see just how optimal human life can be!
Video References
Check out this amazing video by Oscar Boyson related to the topic, it's so well done you wouldn't expect to be getting educated while watching it. {{< youtube xOOWk5yCMMs >}} For a more expert take and the TED talk style of presention, have a look at these two talks by Peter Calthorpe and Jeff Speck.