Creating Humane and Sustainable Cities
April 2007
Banner photo: Lawrence Worcester/Getty Images
Cities for People
As I was being driven through Tel Aviv a few years ago, I could not help but note the overwhelming presence of cars and parking lots. Tel Aviv, expanding from a small settlement a half-century ago to a city of some 3 million today, evolved during the automobile era. It occurred to me that the ratio of parks to parking lots may be the best single indicator of the livability of a city--an indication of whether the city is designed for people or for cars.
In Mexico City, Tehran, Bangkok, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities, the quality of daily life is deteriorating. Breathing the air in some cities is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day. In the United States, the number of hours commuters spend going nowhere sitting in traffic-congested streets and highways climbs higher each year, raising frustration levels.
In response to these conditions, we are seeing the emergence of a new urbanism. One of the most remarkable modern urban transformations has occurred in Bogotá, Colombia, where Enrique Peñalosa served as mayor for three years, beginning in 1998. When he took office, he did not ask how life could be improved for the 30 percent who owned cars; he wanted to know what could be done for the 70 percent--the majority--who did not own cars.
Peñalosa realized that a city that is a pleasant environment for children and the elderly would work for everyone. Under his leadership, the city banned the parking of cars on sidewalks, created or renovated 1,200 parks, introduced a highly successful bus-based rapid transit system, built hundreds of kilometers of bicycle paths and pedestrian streets, reduced rush hour traffic by 40 percent, planted 100,000 trees, and involved local citizens directly in the improvement of their neighborhoods. In doing this, he created a sense of civic pride among the city's 8 million residents, making the streets of Bogotá in this strife-torn country safer than those in Washington, D.C.
Public Spaces
Enrique Peñalosa observes that "Parks and public space are . . . important to a democratic society because they are the only places where people meet as equals . . . . In a city, parks are as essential to the physical and emotional health of a city as the water supply." He notes this is not obvious from most city budgets, where parks are deemed a luxury. By contrast, "roads, the public space for cars, receive infinitely more resources and less budget cuts than parks, the public space for children. Why," he asks, "are the public spaces for cars deemed more important than the public spaces for children?"
Now government planners everywhere are experimenting, seeking ways to design cities for people, not for cars. Cars promise mobility, and they provide it in a largely rural setting. But in an urbanizing world there is an inherent conflict between the automobile and the city. After a point, as their numbers multiply, automobiles provide not mobility but immobility.
Active citizenship and vibrant urban life are essential components of a good city and of civic identity. To restore these where they are lacking, citizens must be involved in the evolution of their cities. They must feel that the public space is their communal ownership and responsibility. From the modest back street to the grand civic square these spaces belong to the citizen and make up the totality of the public domain, a public institution in its own right which, like any other, can embrace or frustrate our urban existence. The public domain is the theater of an urban culture. It is where citizenship is enacted, it is the glue that can bind an urban society.
Some cities in industrialized and developing countries alike are dramatically increasing urban mobility by moving away from the car. Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, was one of the first to design and adopt an alternative transportation system, one that does not mimic those in the West but that is inexpensive and commuter-friendly. Since 1974 Curitiba's transportation system has been totally restructured. Busing, biking and walking totally dominate, with two thirds of all trips in the city by bus. The city's population has doubled since 1974, but its car traffic has declined by a remarkable 30 percent.
Richard Register, author of Ecocities: Building Cities in Balance with Nature, says it is time to fundamentally rethink the design of cities. He agrees with Peñalosa that cities should be designed for people, not for cars. He goes even further, talking about pedestrian cities--communities designed so that people do not need cars because they can walk to most of the places they need to go or take public transportation.
Register makes a convincing case that cities should be integrated into local ecosystems rather than imposed on them.
He describes with pride an after-the-fact integration into the local ecosystem of San Luis Obispo, a California town of 50,000 north of Los Angeles: "[It] has a beautiful creek restoration project with several streets and through-building passageways lined with shops that connect to the town's main commercial street, and people love it. Before . . . restoring the creek and making the main street easily accessible to the 'nature' corridor, that is, the creek, the downtown had a 40-percent vacancy rate in the storefronts; and now it has zero. Of course it's popular. You sit at your restaurant by the creek . . . where fresh breezes rustle the trees in a world undisturbed by car noise and blazing exhaust."
Farming in the City
In June 2005, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported that urban and peri-urban farms--those within or immediately adjacent to a city--supply food to some 700 million urban residents worldwide. These are mostly small plots--vacant lots, yards, even rooftops.
In Caracas, Venezuela, a government-sponsored FAO-assisted project has created 4,000 microgardens of one square meter each in the city's barrios, many of them located within a few steps of family kitchens. Each square meter, continuously cropped, can produce 330 heads of lettuce, 18 kilograms of tomatoes or 16 kilograms of cabbage per year.
Curitiba's commuter-friendly transportation system
[Paulo Fridman/Getty Images]
Venezuela's goal is to have 100,000 microgardens in the country's urban areas. Leonardo Gil Mora, vice minister of integrated rural development, points out that "in the barrios as in Venezuela in general, people are the most important thing we have. Through urban agriculture, we hope to increase the poor's self-confidence, and so increase their participation in society."
Urban gardens are social gathering places that engender a sense of community. In some countries, such as the United States, there is a huge unrealized potential for urban gardening. A survey indicated that Chicago has 70,000 vacant lots, and Philadelphia, 31,000.
Reducing Urban Water Use
The one-time use of water to disperse human and industrial wastes is an outmoded practice, made obsolete by new technologies and water shortages. Water enters the city, is contaminated with human and industrial wastes, and leaves the city dangerously polluted.
As water scarcity spreads, the viability of water-based sewage systems will diminish. Water-based sewage systems take nutrients originating in the soil and typically dump them into rivers, lakes or the sea. Not only are the nutrients lost from agriculture, but the nutrient overload has led to the death of many rivers and to the formation of dead zones in ocean coastal regions.
Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment in India argues convincingly that a water-based disposal system with sewage treatment facilities is neither environmentally nor economically viable for India. As currently designed, India's sewer system is actually a pathogen-dispersal system. It takes a small quantity of contaminated material and uses it to make vast quantities of water unfit for human use.
Fortunately, there is a low-cost alternative: the composting toilet. This is a simple, waterless, odorless toilet linked to a small compost facility. The dry composting converts human fecal material into a soil-like humus, which is essentially odorless and is scarcely ten percent of the original volume. These compost facilities need to be emptied every year or so, depending on design and size.
Pioneered in Sweden, these toilets work well under the widely varying conditions where they are now used, including Swedish apartment buildings, U.S. private residences and Chinese villages.
For cities, the most effective single step to raise water productivity is to adopt a comprehensive water treatment/recycling system, reusing the same water continuously. Given the technologies that are available today, it is quite possible to recycle urban water supplies comprehensively, largely removing cities as a claimant on scarce water resources.
The Challenge of Urban Slums
Nearly all of the projected world population growth of some 3 billion people by 2050 will be added to the cities of developing countries, much of it in squatter settlements.
Squatter settlements--whether they are favelas in Brazil, barriadas in Peru or gecekondu in Turkey--typically consist of an urban residential area inhabited by very poor people who do not have any land. They simply "squat" on vacant land, either private or public.
As Hari Srinivas, coordinator of the Global Development Research Center, writes, these rural-urban migrants undertake the "drastic option of illegally occupying a vacant piece of land to build a rudimentary shelter" simply because it is their only option. They are often treated if not with apathy then with antipathy by government agencies, who view them as invaders and trouble. Some see squatter settlements as a social "evil," something that needs to be eradicated.
The evolution of cities in developing countries is often shaped by the unplanned nature of squatter settlements. Letting squatters settle wherever they can--on steep slopes, on river floodplains or in other high-risk areas--makes it difficult to provide basic services such as transport, water and sewerage. Curitiba, on the cutting edge of the new urbanism, has designated tracts of land for squatter settlements. By setting aside these planned tracts, the process can at least be structured in a way that is consistent with the official development plan of the city.
Among the simplest services that can be provided in a squatter settlement are community composting toilets. Beyond these, taps that provide safe running water at intervals throughout the squatter settlement can go a long way to controlling the spread of disease in overcrowded settlements.
Some political elites simply want to bulldoze squatter settlements away, but this treats the symptoms of urban poverty, not the cause. The preferred option by far is in situ upgrading of housing. The key to this is providing security of tenure to the squatters and small loans, enabling them to make incremental improvements over time.
Upgrading slums depends on local governments that respond to them rather than ignoring them. Although political leaders might hope that these settlements will be driven away or demolished, the reality is that they will likely expand over the next several decades. The challenge is to integrate them into urban life in a humane way that provides hope through the potential for upgrading.
Lester Brown is founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute and founder and former president of Worldwatch Institute. This article is excerpted from his book Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble. Visit: www.earthpolicy.org
