Cities for People not Cars
Green Cities and the End of the Age of Oil
by Richard Register
http://www.commongroundmag.com/2005/cg3206/greencities3206.html
Over the past century, our cities have been shaped - literally
- for the benefit of the automobile and oil industries. Today, with
global oil reserves headed toward irreversible decline, we need
to face the challenges of the imminent post-oil reality. Seizing
foreign oil fields (then "spinning" the story to make
a prophet of Orwell) will not solve our environmental problems.
Building Green Cities for people, not cars, will.
In their controversial essay, "The Death of Environmentalism,"
Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus claim that the environmental
movement has worked its way into historical irrelevance. These writers
suggest that "the greatest tragedy of the 1990s is that, in
the end, the environmental community had still not come up with
an inspiring vision, much less a legislative proposal, that the
majority of Americans could get excited about."
I disagree, not only with these two green movement morticians but
also with some of their critics. Carl Pope, executive director of
the Sierra Club, has rightly scolded Shellenberger and Nordhaus
for "failing to offer their own ideas," a lapse that "rendered
their report nihilistic - able to destroy but not create."
But what does Pope offer? The environmental movement, he says, "needs
deeper, more robust, more sustained collaborations" and "a
new economic order." His action plan is focused on renewable
energy. Does he see any alternative to tacking solar panels onto
the past century's exoskeleton of freeways, automobiles and sprawl?
Not in his response. "As early as the Carter Administration,"
Pope writes, "the Sierra Club sought an alliance with the United
Auto Workers… to preserve and enhance the U.S. auto industry."
In their desire to deliver "what Mainstream America wants,"
environmentalists discovered that people wanted cars. So the Sierra
Club's response has been to try and convince the auto industry that
the environmental situation could be improved if Detroit simply
built a "better" automobile. This won't work and here's
why.
The 'Green Car' Myth
Consider the energy required to move a 130-pound human body
by foot as compared to moving that same body the same distance seated
behind the wheel of a 4,000-pound SUV. The average human can hit
about 5 miles-per-hour in a brisk walk while the typical car averages
40 mph (city and freeway). While it is true that you can move eight
times faster inside a two-ton vehicle, accomplishing this feat requires
burning around 1,900 times as much energy (and that's not factoring
in friction, which increases with speed). This should tell you something
about the fundamental insanity of depending on gas-fueled cars in
an oil-starved future.
And, it's not just the oil. Even if powered by biodiesel, hydrogen
or sunbeams, the private automobile is still part of an unsustainable
urban system that requires massive networks of streets, freeways,
and parking structures to serve congested cities and far-flung suburbs.
Driving a Prius hybrid simply makes it easier for people to live
farther from the rest of their lives (while seducing them into thinking
that they are "doing something for the environment").
We don't want to face this truth because it implies too much change.
Autoworkers want to keep their jobs and Sierra Clubers want to be
free to drive 40 miles to experience nature whenever they feel like
it.
Raised in a car-worshiping culture, we tend to assume that everyone
lives in a world of breezy trips through city streets and top-down
forays deep into the country. It's hard to believe there are worlds
without cars. But the startling fact is that, far from being a majority,
only one of thirteen people on Earth actually owns a car. Consider
this: 92 percent of the world's people do not own cars - and the
8 percent who do are directly responsible for climate change and
the alarming collapse of biodiversity on planet Earth.
If the auto industry is to have any future in a post-oil world,
it may have to retrain its workers to build the efficient mass-transit
systems that will serve the new ecologically healthy Green Cities,
towns and villages of the 21st century. Environmentalists and autoworkers
should begin thinking hard about how to rebuild low-energy, car-free
cities. Autoworkers should be studying renewable energy systems
and lobbying for massive federal investments in those technologies.
We need to rebuild our entire civilization (towns and villages,
too) on this basis. A proper accounting of the auto-urban paradigm
would include the energy needed to draw the oil, cook the asphalt,
erect the freeways, mine and mill the steel used to manufacture
the cars and, of course, deploy the troops and weaponry to secure
America's access to foreign oil. Add it all up and you begin to
get a sense of the enormity of the problem.
Of course, it's a hard assignment. How could solving a problem as
large as preventing the collapse of planetary biodiversity and inventing
a new civilization in balance with nature be an easy task?
How Cars Shape Cities
The oil-burning, fume-spewing private automobile is only part
of a larger environmentally damaging system - the energy-intensive
spawling infrastructure of our cities. When small buildings are
scattered over large areas, more energy is required for heating
and cooling as well as for transportation. Pedestrian-friendly Green
Cities - built for people, bicycles, mass transit and renewable
energy - would not only cut air pollution, they also would promote
the rebuilding of essential soil and water resources while increasing
plant and animal biodiversity.
Knowledgeable environmentalists extol the Leadership in Energy and
Environmental Design (LEED) standards for buildings, but they seldom
apply similar standards to cities. Last summer, I was a speaker
at a Sustainable Communities Conference in Vermont. The organizers
took two busloads of participants to admire a beautiful new LEED
platinum-rated factory that produces towers for wind electric generators.
Hard to get greener that that.
But there was a problem: it took us 20 minutes on the highway to
get there. And, when we arrived, there was no other building in
sight on the rolling landscape of broad agricultural fields.
"Wouldn't it be more fun," I asked the company tour guide,
"if instead of driving way out to this splendid isolation and
back every day, you could just walk out the factory door and bike
over to a class or back to your residence?" Here was a beautifully
designed solar building with state-of-the-art natural lighting and
insulation, constructed so the residents would consume almost no
energy - except for the hundreds of gallons of gasoline they burned
in their cars every day to get there!
The Eco-City Vision
"No wonder the public doesn't want to hear the truth about
global warming," former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach
laments, "Nobody's offering them a vision for the future that
matches the magnitude of the problem."
Excuse me? Dozens of environmental thinkers have been offering such
a vision for 30 years. I've co-produced five international Eco-City
conferences on five continents, written three books and been invited
to speak on every continent.
Like Pope, Werbach calls for renewable energy. Good idea, but not
enough. The renewable energy regime needs a physical infrastructure
in which to operate - i.e., a city to match. If you install a fleet
of clean, solar-powered buses in a typical sprawling low-density
city, those "eco-buses" are still going to run practically
empty. Rebuilding cities for pedestrians will reverse sprawl by
bringing departure points and destinations closer together. City
planners call this "mixed use" and "balanced development."
Freeways could slowly be torn down as pedestrian-friendly cities
are efficiently - and affordably - connected by train. That's a
vision worth adopting. But, in order for this to happen, environmentalists
and developers need to work together.
How to Build Eco-Cities
The first step toward turning today's Gridlocked Cities into
Green Cities is to identify the major commercial and neighborhood
centers and map them for higher density. Re-zoning to facilitate
higher-density pedestrian transit centers will promote "access
by proximity - instead of transportation." As these centralized
pedestrian/transit centers grow in density and diversity, outlying
areas would be replaced by natural areas, open spaces, and small
farms.
Metropolitan areas now spread over (hundreds of) thousands of acres
need to break up into discrete communities - forming archipelagos
of smaller, compact Green Cities around what are today's downtowns.
Ecovillages would arise where today's neighborhood centers now exist.
In his classic book, Ecotopia, Berkeley author Ernest Callenbach
envisioned the Bay Area metropolis (which includes Oakland, San
Jose, Berkeley, Palo Alto and Richmond) transforming into a necklace
of separate towns linked by high-speed public transportation - each
with its own particular economy, products and character (and all
surrounded by resurgent green and edged by the shimmering waters
of San Francisco Bay).
A Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) offers one promising tool
for facilitating the transitions required by ecological city design.
A developer can use a TDR to purchase and remove a building whose
crumbling foundation sits atop a buried creek. In return, the developer
wins the privilege of erecting a larger building in a pedestrian/transit
center. The developer gets a "density bonus" and the city
gains new open space for a community garden, public park, or sports
field and more housing in transit/pedestrian centers.
But won't it be oppressive to live in more densely settled core
cities? Not if you build them with lots of sun pouring into the
interiors, heating and refreshing the air without the use of fossil
fuels or nuclear fission. Build rooftop gardens, cafes, promenades,
mini-parks, entertainment enclaves and recreation outposts high
in the buildings to provide spectacular views overlooking the city's
reviving bioregion. Solar collectors and windmills would glint in
the sun. The ecological Green City would be alive with bicycles,
solar greenhouses, creeks, plants, animals, and people.
Builders of the new housing units in these evolving Green Cities
would recruit renters and condo owners who wished to free themselves
from cars. Contrary to legend, there are many such people out there.
Businesses would grant hiring preference to people living nearby.
Given sufficient diversity, you don't need to travel far for life's
basics: shelter, job, school, food. Green City buildings could be
interlinked by high bridges so that clusters of structures become
easily available to pedestrians on many levels. Terraces with communal
gardens would provide fresh produce and rooftop parks would provide
recreation - all accessible by glass elevators gliding over the
outsides of buildings offering stunning views of the new vertical
Green City environment.
Facilities needing little natural light (theaters, photolabs, warehouses)
would be located in the lower stories, lifting other downtown activities
higher into the sun. Covered streets would have the grandeur of
cathedrals (, with beams of light falling into quiet interiors bustling
with pedestrians). Downtown buildings would provide workplaces for
residents. The hundreds of thousands who once poured into the city
over miles of freeways, would now quietly zip to work on foot or
bicycle leaving a minority of outside workers to arrive by bus and
rail.
First we'd create car-free streets, then larger, car-free zones.
As any tourist returning from a European vacation can testify, car-free
streets and plazas are extremely pleasant community enclaves that
bristle with life and are economically self-sustaining.
Eco Cities would promote the restoration of ancient creeks buried
under pavement and concrete. Living streams, shorefronts, wetlands,
and ridgelines would once again become signature landmarks for Green
City residents. Restored urban creeks and wooded groves would provide
natural habitat for birds and animals and become beautiful and educational
local resources for Green City children who would no longer need
to climb into a car and drive 40 miles to "experience nature."
With sufficient care, restored creeks magically reawaken with populations
of dragonflies, butterflies, hummingbirds, fish, and crawdads. In
California, native salmon and large wading birds like egrets and
herons have already returned to some of these reborn watersheds.
Rebuilding our cities to serve people, not cars, will take decades,
but the transformation offers lasting solutions for most of our
most pressing environmental problems. These solutions will start
to appear immediately. They will multiply rapidly as the transformation
proceeds.
Richard Register is President of Ecocity Builders in Oakland,
California. He is author of Ecocities: Building Cities in Balance
with Nature and Ecocity Berkeley. Ecocity Builders hosted the Green
Cities Conference in Oakland on May 31 as part of the World Environment
Day activities hosted by San Francisco. www.ecocitybuilders.org.
Related Articles:
Losing
the World, One Environmental Victory at a Time – And the Way to
Solve that Problem, by Richard Register
Ecological
Cities "Yes"; Electric Cars "No" by Richard Register
BUILDING
ECOCITIES: An Interview with Richard Register
World Car Free Network
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