The carless city

1903 - streets for people - photo by shopy

It felt strange looking at a faded, black and white wall photo of a downtown street from 1900. No expressways. No cars. Only horses, buggies and Victorian dressed pedestrians. The Model T Ford was eight years away.

I wonder if those pedestrians had the foggiest notion of the transport tsunami that would befall their children a few decades forward?

Expressways and cars changed everything. Horses and buggies vanished. Expressways depleted cities of the middle class and led to deserted high crime downtowns. They triggered sprawl and, along with vanishing streetcar lines, the decline of urban villages. In return cars offered individual freedom to roam and opportunity to escape congestion and crime in congested downtowns.

CARLESS CITIES

Last week another mobility tsunami emerged - car free cities! Norway announced that the central area of the capital city Oslo will be car-free in 4 years. The Oslo council plans to permanently ban vehicles from their central city.

It’s hard to argue the plan isn't futuristic. SafeGrowth blogs in the past describe similar visions, a theoretical design called The Venus Project and an urban experiment called Masdar City, currently under construction.

Oslo, however, is the first existing major city with over a half million residents to attempt it for real. It is unclear how 60 kilometers of new bike lanes will help residents navigate Oslo’s -5C, snowy winters. Horse buggies perhaps? Yet their plan to create a carless city heralds a truly visionary future.

A legend dies

Paulo Soleri died this week at 93. To students of the city he is legend.

Former student of Frank Lloyd Wright, featured in films and books, Soleri created "arcology" long before the eco-sensible married the environment with urban development. To Newsweek his laboratory-city-in-the-desert north of Phoenix - Arcosanti - is "the most important urban experiment undertaken in our lifetimes." Over 50,000 urban design and planning students visit it each year.

Twenty years ago I was one of them. I went to find out what he thought of cities and crime.

Soleri told me he worried about a lack of equity in cities and the social corrosion emerging from it,  a sentiment recently featured in Wilkinson and Pickett's bestseller The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.

Solari thought we need to remove cars from cities and we need more urban density (the basis of an arcology). Nowadays that's echoed everywhere in urban planning, such as MIT scholar/architect Kent Larson (check out his talk on TED.com)

"What about crime?" I asked him.

"There are very dense European cities with very low crime," he replied. "There are ways to do it right."

"What of policing an Arcology?" I asked.

He thought for a minute and smiled. "Well I guess the first thing would be to leave the guns at the door."

Paulo Soleri. Photo Arizona Daily Star

Oshawa and Whitby Part 2 - the Jekyll and Hyde story

Downtown Oshawa at Night

Oshawa and Whitby are by no means the only twin cities with Jekyll and Hyde personalities. Examples abound. The question is why?

Though the same police agency patrols both cities, they seem to have very different downtown crime profiles. Policing, though important, does not determine safety or crime. Same thing with population size - both cities have similar populations (though not demographics). Perhaps economics or jobs tells the story? After all, Whitby is just east of a burgeoning Metro Toronto and surely draws more commuters. Oshawa hosts a large GM plant and a blue collar workforce. Yet a countervailing example is found on Toronto's western boundary where a city of similar size, Oakville, also hosts a large automotive plant, yet looks nothing like Oshawa.

The deck of causation cards

Criminologists play with such theories like they are shuffling a deck of causation cards. Police tactics here, economics there. Urbanization here, population density there.

As Jane Jacobs told us, you don't really get a clear picture until you get out of theory-land and get onto the street for a closer look. That's where you begin to see how planning and development decisions make a big difference.

Look at social assistance facilities, or more importantly the density of those facilities in the downtown of both places. You'll see a difference right away. Ask a few land use questions and you'll see the picture come more into focus: What is the population diversity in each downtown? Can people of different incomes live comfortably downtown? What services are available for residents, for example can you buy milk? Where is the bakery? Is there a Laundromat? Are there coffee-shops, bookstores?

Here is what I saw: Little population diversity, no middle income residences, pawn shops and check cashing stores, vacant storefronts, no convenience stores or shops for locals, and a number of social assistance facilities. Guess which downtown I am describing?

Don't misunderstand - social assistance facilities like drug and alcohol rehab, welfare assistance, and halfway houses serve a vital role. Some locate downtown due to access to public transit. Others cluster downtown due to NIBMYism from ostrich suburbs.

Bad decisions = bad results

Whatever the case, bad decisions trigger bad results, like decisions in land use, planning and development. These decisions (and these decision-makers) bear the greatest culpability for the Hyde’s or praise for the Jekyll’s. Next time you see a Jekyll and Hyde story in your city, ask who makes these decisions:

* Decisions to help (or not) floundering downtown business.
* Decisions to build mixed use zoning with residential above storefront commercial.
* Decisions to give tax breaks and renovation stimulus funds to places that build community not tear it down.
* Decisions to help turn vacant buildings into artist’s lofts and historic properties into landmarks.
* Decisions to hold absentee landlords and slumlords accountable for their properties.

No doubt government programs, quality policing (or lack thereof) and big-E economics play a role. But don't look for Big Gov or Big Corps to turn communities around. We've done that far too long and look where it got us. The spark for positive change rests elsewhere.