Fewer cars and more tomatoes — Improving access with resilient cities
When we imagine future cities, we tend to conjure up visions of drone highways, robot coworkers and autonomous vehicles. We jump to the all too familiar CGI videos of autonomous pods transporting a suavely dressed man, tapping away on a virtual keyboard projected into the cabin on his way home from work. We picture the AI voice asking him if he’d like to pick up his dry cleaning on route before collecting his troop of equally well coiffed children from football. Impressive, but thoroughly unimaginative.
Since the first cities, how we move around, or, mobility, has been pivotal in driving how and why cities evolve. Transportation is an enabler to access — both in terms of cost and proximity. Before mainstream adoption of the car, a city’s size was limited by how far one could reasonably walk to gain affordable access to people, goods, services and work. Cars stretched this distance, allowing cities to grow, commutes to get longer and as a consequence forced edge cities, housing, transportation and infrastructure to keep up.
Today, car dependence means that an eye watering volume of land is dedicated to vehicles. In Los Angeles, for instance, land for parking exceeds the entire land area of Manhattan, enough space to house almost a million more people at Los Angeles’s current density.
Cars have long been a symbol of freedom and prosperity. However today their prevailing presence is arguably damaging many quality of life dimensions including safety, time and convenience, health, environmental quality, social connectedness and the cost of living. Pre-covid traffic in New York averaged at 7mph, many commutes exceed 60 minutes across the globe, traffic accidents kill 1.35 million annually and urban sprawl drives disparity in house prices and cost of living.
Cars make every other form of transportation a little bit terrible. The absence of cars, then, exerts its own kind of magic — take private cars away, and every other way of getting around gets much better.
Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times
MaaS (mobility as a service) allows us to optimise multi-nodal journeys, shaving precious minutes off our daily commutes. But visibility afforded by MaaS shouldn’t be conflated with efficiency. Next time you use Waze to navigate the traffic, remember you aren’t stuck in traffic — you are part of the traffic.
So in 2020, we are at an inflection point where access is no longer dependent on mobility. We don’t need physical speed to change the perception of distance. Digital networks are far more powerful enablers to access than mobility; with inconvenient Time Zones and dodgy WiFi becoming the only limitation to defining new convergences of time, space and distance.
If this is the case, future city development need not be shaped by transportation but by the fundamental way people want to and could live; forcing mobility to adapt to those needs instead. During the Covid-19 lockdown, 76% of Londoners were able to work from home highlighting the possibility of life choices that can be uninhibited by the prospect of an inconvenient commute.
However, thinking about designing for cities around people requires a shift in mindset away from optimising efficiency and towards creating resilience.
“Think of efficiency as a high-performance engine. Under perfect conditions, it delivers maximum power and minimum waste. However, that very efficiency makes it less robust. Highly efficient systems have no slack, no redundancy, and therefore no resilience and no spare capacity.”
Helen Lewis, The Atlantic, March 2020
Open, distributed, decentralised, networked, diversity over density, purposeful redundancy, all pivoting around the social and natural life of small urban spaces, could generate a far more resilient pattern for city life and urban growth. This implies a quite different form of city-making, enabled by:
- Convergence of contemporary construction technologies such as building fabrication, robotics for maintenance and construction
- On-demand and autonomous mobility and logistics systems
- Off-grid utility infrastructure
- Advanced manufacturing
- Shared amenities and space
- Super-local decision-making platforms
All of which would be underpinned by digital services and real-time data.
This is not a new concept, but one that has continually raised its head by various urbanists — Its most recent manifestation in 15 minute city proposals.
Covid-19 has forced both individuals and businesses to reconsider why we travel to dense urban centres. However it’s also exposed the potential to reduce pollution, reintroduce biodiversity into cities and the value of green space for personal health.
In this moment of re-evaluation perhaps it would be prescient to think of how we must accommodate the natural elements that need to “socialise” in our cities and the wide reaching benefits that consideration could generate. Distributed, decentralised networks could extend to agriculture by interweaving it into the city with tiny patchworks of food production linked by corridors of biodiversity. Local, regenerative food production would increase biodiversity and allow wider ecosystems to recover, whilst also reducing threats of future pandemics.
This may all sound terribly idealistic and fictional. However the difference between a reasonable hypothesis and science fiction is the level of assumed behavioural change to make it a reality. On a fundamental level, we are biological creatures who crave human connection, are adaptable, often irrational and this will forever be reflected in the community structures that grow from the bottom up. A refusal to address necessary behaviour changes to ensure the long term prosperity of our environment will only land on short-sighted and unsustainable interpretations of what’s possible — accessorised by Lidar and a more sophisticated Siri.
In my mind this mindset could realise true “Smart cities” where “Smartness” is not just installing digital interfaces in traditional infrastructure or streamlining city operations. Rather it is using technology and data purposefully to make better decisions and deliver a better quality of life.
