Coming down the Kingstanding Road
Cycling down the Kingstanding Road, Birmingham city centre in the distance. This road is an example of an older idea of suburban development. A dual carriageway which with several others heading out of the city on the main compass points carries mainly buses and - in the central reservation - trams. Well spaced houses with large gardens once backed on to countryside between radial roads which head out of the city like a spider's legs joining outlying villages to create local shopping centres usually with the third public transport element, railway stations - also linked to buses and trams. How did this seemingly sensible concept of suburban development turn into what is now denigrated as urban sprawl?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_sprawl
The concept of radial ribbon development foundered with the growth of car ownership. Cars, being more versatile at going door to door, could access places between the radials more efficiently than buses, trams or trains. As a result the countryside between the radials became ripe for housing development, leaving the houses on the original radial carriageway with a noisy motorised frontage and no more countryside behind as new-build filled all the spaces between the legs of the 'spider'. The acceleration of this process has been referred to as 'garden grabbing', as householders seeking profit start to sell off even their garden for further house building.
In the process the sense of place associated with the railway stations in what had once been detached villages disappeared as all merged into the general suburban sprawl that prompted a series of Town and Country Planning laws which included the idea of a 'green belt' around cities to inhibit building on what remained of their surrounding countryside.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_and_country_planning_in_the_Un...
This process has been well documented by Peter Newman and Jeffery Kenworthy in their book 'Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence'. In her book "The Life and Death of Great American Cities" written in the 1960s Jane Jacobs embraced complexity as a goal in itself. "How" she asked "can cities generate enough mixture among uses, enough diversity throughout enough of their territories, to sustain their own civilisation?" For Newman and Kenworthy the key idea is "sustainability" - "one of the most diversely applied concepts among academics and professionals discussing the future" that "has cut across all disciplines and professions and has developed many complexities." The car enters Newman and Kenworthy's consideration as a technology of widening individual choice, so what paradoxical consequence has meant that its proliferation has blighted what it might have been expected to nurture?
books.google.co.uk/books?id=pjatbiavDZYC&printsec=fro...
Newman and Kenworthy argue that the car, unlike public transport, offered people who could afford it freedom to live anywhere in a city and get quickly to any other part of it. It appeared to remove the need to plan land-use. Anything could be built just about anywhere with drivers determining their own routes to and from home to work, shops, schools and entertainment. In the "car-city" - which Newman & Kenworthy distinguish from the "pedestrian" and the "transit" city - it is possible to develop in any direction and not just along rivers, tramlines or railways. Dispersed low density housing becomes accessible and popular. Town planners can separate residential from industrial zones accelerating decentralisation. In spaces teeming with DIY transport connections, developers needed only to provide power and water and car owners would embrace responsibility for deciding for themselves how to move between the services they felt they needed. Public and commercial buildings no longer needed to cluster together as a product of the convergence of private and public investment in a particular place. Public transport constricted by timetables and fixed routes became a second class mode of travel. Such freedom as it might have offered was limited even further by its growing subordination - economic and infrastructural - to the needs of road circulation. The problems appeared slowly as governments built and planned urban environments in which car reliance was a desired norm and car ownership the focus of popular aspiration and expectation.
The realisation that this alliance of car travel and government action in support of road traffic circulation might lead to less freedom and massive costs to business has been a long time coming. Where the car city has been taken to extremes as in Newman and Kenworthy's intellectual territory - America and Australia - there is growing awareness that driving people off streets, creating boundaries round or overrunning large acreages within towns of those places - parks, squares, promenades, pavements - which had served as milieus for human interaction, is a recipe for urban blight. To achieve sustainability a wedge of new economic logic is being driven between the car and its enduring connection with wealth, prosperity and the good life.
The car especially once it ceased to be an indulgence of the rich, always represented a fine balance between liberation and dependency. Today, the choices promised by cars are linked with increasing transparency to those they take away. Everyone knows about exhaust emissions and most drivers, outside of advertisements, experience worsening road conditions. There is growing despondency among those who would like to use their cars less. They realise alternatives won't work unless people switch in large numbers to other ways of getting around. But the public space needed to take to the streets to walk or cycle and take trains and buses is not available. Many see public space as hazardous for themselves, and perilous for their children. Those with a choice are reluctant to enter it except to take the few paces between car, home, school and shopping centre. Deprivations long imposed on people without cars apply, with increasing force, to people with them. New technology may reduce vehicle emissions, but it cannot recover the enormous interaction space that has been taken out of circulation by road traffic. Yet before that lost social space can become available for people outside cars, a legal and moral space has still to be reclaimed.
This is why the idea of sustainability is slowly turning into a value. It is the big idea that government and business needs, which legitimates regulation and induces compliance. It offers space for the entrepreneurs of the future, exciting third world urban planners who want to leap a stage in the longer industrial revolutions of richer nations. It is an idea around which people are ready to form alliances that go beyond their own interests; a concept which "did not come so much from academic discussion as from a global political process." Newman and Kenworthy speak of their book being "many years in preparation", a book that is a "combination of text book and life story" deriving from work with city government's and voluntary groups around the world attempting to address a major global and local issue of how people "can simultaneously reduce their impact on earth while improving their quality of life".
This books aims to show how a city's use of land determines and is determined by its dominant forms of transport. Its authors describe in rich detail how policies aimed at creating sustainable relationships between humans and their environment necessarily revolve around a city's land-use-transport formula.
More on carfree cities at: www.carfree.com/
More on automobile-dependency: www.worldchanging.com/archives/010821.html
Coming down the Kingstanding Road
Cycling down the Kingstanding Road, Birmingham city centre in the distance. This road is an example of an older idea of suburban development. A dual carriageway which with several others heading out of the city on the main compass points carries mainly buses and - in the central reservation - trams. Well spaced houses with large gardens once backed on to countryside between radial roads which head out of the city like a spider's legs joining outlying villages to create local shopping centres usually with the third public transport element, railway stations - also linked to buses and trams. How did this seemingly sensible concept of suburban development turn into what is now denigrated as urban sprawl?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_sprawl
The concept of radial ribbon development foundered with the growth of car ownership. Cars, being more versatile at going door to door, could access places between the radials more efficiently than buses, trams or trains. As a result the countryside between the radials became ripe for housing development, leaving the houses on the original radial carriageway with a noisy motorised frontage and no more countryside behind as new-build filled all the spaces between the legs of the 'spider'. The acceleration of this process has been referred to as 'garden grabbing', as householders seeking profit start to sell off even their garden for further house building.
In the process the sense of place associated with the railway stations in what had once been detached villages disappeared as all merged into the general suburban sprawl that prompted a series of Town and Country Planning laws which included the idea of a 'green belt' around cities to inhibit building on what remained of their surrounding countryside.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_and_country_planning_in_the_Un...
This process has been well documented by Peter Newman and Jeffery Kenworthy in their book 'Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence'. In her book "The Life and Death of Great American Cities" written in the 1960s Jane Jacobs embraced complexity as a goal in itself. "How" she asked "can cities generate enough mixture among uses, enough diversity throughout enough of their territories, to sustain their own civilisation?" For Newman and Kenworthy the key idea is "sustainability" - "one of the most diversely applied concepts among academics and professionals discussing the future" that "has cut across all disciplines and professions and has developed many complexities." The car enters Newman and Kenworthy's consideration as a technology of widening individual choice, so what paradoxical consequence has meant that its proliferation has blighted what it might have been expected to nurture?
books.google.co.uk/books?id=pjatbiavDZYC&printsec=fro...
Newman and Kenworthy argue that the car, unlike public transport, offered people who could afford it freedom to live anywhere in a city and get quickly to any other part of it. It appeared to remove the need to plan land-use. Anything could be built just about anywhere with drivers determining their own routes to and from home to work, shops, schools and entertainment. In the "car-city" - which Newman & Kenworthy distinguish from the "pedestrian" and the "transit" city - it is possible to develop in any direction and not just along rivers, tramlines or railways. Dispersed low density housing becomes accessible and popular. Town planners can separate residential from industrial zones accelerating decentralisation. In spaces teeming with DIY transport connections, developers needed only to provide power and water and car owners would embrace responsibility for deciding for themselves how to move between the services they felt they needed. Public and commercial buildings no longer needed to cluster together as a product of the convergence of private and public investment in a particular place. Public transport constricted by timetables and fixed routes became a second class mode of travel. Such freedom as it might have offered was limited even further by its growing subordination - economic and infrastructural - to the needs of road circulation. The problems appeared slowly as governments built and planned urban environments in which car reliance was a desired norm and car ownership the focus of popular aspiration and expectation.
The realisation that this alliance of car travel and government action in support of road traffic circulation might lead to less freedom and massive costs to business has been a long time coming. Where the car city has been taken to extremes as in Newman and Kenworthy's intellectual territory - America and Australia - there is growing awareness that driving people off streets, creating boundaries round or overrunning large acreages within towns of those places - parks, squares, promenades, pavements - which had served as milieus for human interaction, is a recipe for urban blight. To achieve sustainability a wedge of new economic logic is being driven between the car and its enduring connection with wealth, prosperity and the good life.
The car especially once it ceased to be an indulgence of the rich, always represented a fine balance between liberation and dependency. Today, the choices promised by cars are linked with increasing transparency to those they take away. Everyone knows about exhaust emissions and most drivers, outside of advertisements, experience worsening road conditions. There is growing despondency among those who would like to use their cars less. They realise alternatives won't work unless people switch in large numbers to other ways of getting around. But the public space needed to take to the streets to walk or cycle and take trains and buses is not available. Many see public space as hazardous for themselves, and perilous for their children. Those with a choice are reluctant to enter it except to take the few paces between car, home, school and shopping centre. Deprivations long imposed on people without cars apply, with increasing force, to people with them. New technology may reduce vehicle emissions, but it cannot recover the enormous interaction space that has been taken out of circulation by road traffic. Yet before that lost social space can become available for people outside cars, a legal and moral space has still to be reclaimed.
This is why the idea of sustainability is slowly turning into a value. It is the big idea that government and business needs, which legitimates regulation and induces compliance. It offers space for the entrepreneurs of the future, exciting third world urban planners who want to leap a stage in the longer industrial revolutions of richer nations. It is an idea around which people are ready to form alliances that go beyond their own interests; a concept which "did not come so much from academic discussion as from a global political process." Newman and Kenworthy speak of their book being "many years in preparation", a book that is a "combination of text book and life story" deriving from work with city government's and voluntary groups around the world attempting to address a major global and local issue of how people "can simultaneously reduce their impact on earth while improving their quality of life".
This books aims to show how a city's use of land determines and is determined by its dominant forms of transport. Its authors describe in rich detail how policies aimed at creating sustainable relationships between humans and their environment necessarily revolve around a city's land-use-transport formula.
More on carfree cities at: www.carfree.com/
More on automobile-dependency: www.worldchanging.com/archives/010821.html