I have picked “Street Competition” as the name for my series of newsletters about community and urban design challenges. The struggle over the allocation of public spaces helps me make sense of the numerous complex issues impacting the places we live and work.
City building is a messy business. Most started as a collection of self-sufficient, mixed-use neighbourhoods. People lived close to their workplaces and could walk to the shops. Public plazas and streets were designed for people. Public transit systems developed to manage people movement from one neighbourhood to the other.
I always think of London, England when I consider cities as a collection of neighbourhoods. From 2018 to 2020, we spent about two months in Greater London. Our guidebooks:
Navigating from one village to the next by public transit or on foot in the largest city in Western Europe became a lesson in the evolution of a metropolis.
In 1950, only one person in 48 owned a car. Now, there is about one car per person in the United States. Australians and Canadians own almost as many automobiles per capita.
Increased car ownership created the drive-to city and accelerated its segmentation into suburbs, industrial areas, shopping centres, and business districts. Street space reserved for sidewalks, public amenities, news agents, and other users disappeared. The space was taken from people and given over to cars. Governments took money away from mass-transit and spent billions on expressways designed to feed the drive-to locations. Cities set minimum parking requirements for new developments.
Cars have not improved urban mobility, Most cities now have intolerable congestion issues and there isn’t room for more automobile infrastructure. Global warming issues aside, cars pollute city air. Polluted air kills people. There are studies that demonstrate that urban air pollution may make COVID-19 more deadly. Shop and restaurant owners often complain that the loss of parking and vehicle access to pedestrians and other forms of active transportation hurts business. There is a mountain of data that demonstrates the opposite. Cars and parking kill street life.
Covid-19 has been the most disruptive health event that communities have had to manage since 1918. Indeed, it has caused many prognosticators to foresee the demise of the city. I disagree. Cities continued to grow and flourish in 1920 after the Spanish Flu outbreak. The future shape of cities may be unknown but their survival and growth is a certainty. Some interesting facts:
In addition to issues caused by population growth and pandemic PTSD, planners have to consider climate change resilience and environmental considerations. There are:
Cities will respond to meet community and urban design challenges. While nobody can predict the future shape of any city with any accuracy, there is a sense that there are lessons to be learnt from the past:
I know! I am going to sound like a grumpy old man. Maybe that is because I am. I have been scratching my head in wonderment at the Taylor Swift phenomena. Is she an Incredible song writer, composer, and performer? I really don’t know! A discussion for another time? But probably not. At my age […]
Don’t build it! At least, Not In My Back Yard ! I acted as an advisor in the sale of a beautifully natural, 14-acre urban waterfront estate. Existing zoning allowed for the development of 30 to 35 single-family homes, which after road dedication would leave very little green space. I did not think that was […]
We were visiting Glasgow (literally that Dear Green Place in Gaelic) to see where my father was born, grew up, and went to University. Fortunately for me, my cousin John from Australia had just visited and had met with historians, Bruce Downie and Norry Wilson. So, we too arranged to meet them in the Govanhill […]
Vienna on top again. This week both Monocle Magazine and The Economist unveiled their quality of life / most liveable city indexes. There are differences in the way each publication sets its index. So it is even more impressive that once again, Vienna tops both lists. I am a bit lazy today so rather than […]
Many Viennese went from hot bedding to superblocks overnight. Could they even imagine an apartment complex 1000 metres long built along two streets with even more massive landscaped courtyards? Could they conceive of 1400 apartment units built to house 5000 people on 56,000 square metres or 38 acres of land. Or a vertical build-out that […]
Vienna had been a poor city even before the First World War. “Normal” housing arrangements meant six to eight people sharing one room and a kitchen. Then, in early 1919, just after the Armistice, the cost of living tripled in two months. Bed lodgers could no longer afford their 8-hours a day in a shared […]