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Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy |
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PROMOTING SUSTAINABLE URBAN CHANGEBY PETER
NEWMAN
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The Modernism of the Corbusier with its dehumanised urban landscape is easily rejected now.
However, today the modernist ideals are just as mechanistic in our Auto City building. Thus when modernism is in full flight each new suburb is rolled out as though it came from a factory, no matter what the ecology of the area happens to be and with little consideration or concession to human creativity and community. Nature is kept to a bit of required open space and is usually a degraded piece of leftover land which soon needs cleaning up with lawns and disciplined trees. The human side of the city is left to the individual to create in private spaces but this has little potential for any expression in the public spaces of our planned cities.
These identical, mechanical, suburbs are now becoming universal - once you could only find them in the so-called New World, i.e. North America and Australasia - now they appear in Europe and Asia, Latin America and Africa.
Despite each new suburb claiming to offer "a unique lifestyle" or "fresh, country living", they are all absorbed into a monotonous megalopolis that sprawls in every direction, devouring natural bush and farmland, and filling the air with automobile emissions.
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The Freeway is a symbol of 'modernist' town planning practice
There is a need to dissect the ideas that have led us to this form of city building if we are to find ways of overcoming their power to shape our cities. Such mechanistic thinking derives from applying technological thinking to all areas of life (Ellul, 1964). It is an approach which had great potency at the time, but it is no longer seen as having the ability to deliver on the 'human' or the 'ecological' imperatives shaping the next century of city building. To say something is "modernist" in popular culture is to suggest that the life has been beaten out of it.
The modernist, mechanistic era appears to be ending in most areas of human endeavour as post-modern critiques destroy the assumptions that it is built on:
• that all human beings are the same and can be programmed into lifestyles just as a machine can be driven or programmed;
• that nature is not important in itself but can be modified to suit our needs; and
• that efficiency is achieved through large scale mass processes, whether they be industrial production, urban infrastructure or governance (Cook, 1990).
The questioning of modernism began in the creative community (art, literature, architecture...), but in the past 20 years it has been picked up by the environmental movement who have seen the impact of the industrial/mechanised mindset on forests, rivers, soils - anything natural and diverse. The creative and the environmental objections to modernism are inseparable parts of the one critique of this force, as the human and the natural cannot be mechanised without both losing their core character. But what comes next? And what does it mean for cities?
Modernism as a philosophy is dying and its demise is impacting on every aspect of life in the last years of the 20th century. The death of modernism is due to a combination of factors:
• the artistic community can no longer accept modernism's denial of human diversity;
• the environmental community can no longer accept modernism's denial of biological diversity and they are more aware now of the darker side to much modern technology;
• the women's movement and other 'rights' movements can no longer accept the simple solutions of modernism which have shut them out;
• concerned people across the world can no longer accept that indigenous cultures should be absorbed into a single consumer capitalism culture; and
• everyone is made acutely aware through TV and the increasingly multicultural nature of cities in most Western industrial countries, that the world is full of cultural difference.
The decline of modernism has led to the rise of post-modernism - a movement that is defined mostly by what it is not - it has no simple solutions. Post-modernism delights in uncertainty, it thrives on the lack of absolutes. It is a celebration of difference, but it is cynical about the future, it suggests progress is unlikely (Cook, 1990).
Post-modernism is expressed in art, music and literature, but what does it mean for professional praxis in cities, particularly in the context of sustainability?
Many people now share the post-modern feeling of uncertainty about the future and in urban matters they now see that:
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At the same time we must live somewhere, use
transport and infrastructure and try to improve the world, but the ease
with which progress used to be defined is no longer there.
So what can be done? In many cities
professionals are |
caught between those who are pushing for a ‘last gasp’ in the old modernist paradigm and those trying to find their way to a different paradigm for doing things.
The challenge is to find a new basis for planning and managing cities that accepts the reasons for post-modern uncertainty but tries to find how we can go forward. As E.F. Schumacher said:
"progress... is an essential feature of all life. The whole point is to determine what constitutes progress... Hence the call for taking stock and finding a new orientation. The stock taking indicates that we are destroying our very basis of existence, and the reorientation is based on remembering what human life is really about." (Schumacher, 1973, p131).
In other words, we must try to redefine progress in the post-modern era and now it must be firmly embedded in the reality of sustainability. It will not be enough just to accept post-modern uncertainty as a total approach to defining urban life - little can be expected from that (eg Post Modern Cities Conference, 1993). However, in this chapter we want to try to find some useful approaches which emerge out of post-modernism, particularly within the context of the need for sustainability.
We also want to try and build on another urban tradition which has existed much longer than modernism and which many people are trying to rediscover as the basis for some of the necessary approach to sustainability and professional praxis. This movement we have called the “organic city movement” as it combines many aspects of the human and ecological which we discussed above.
When any of us travel to Europe or the Middle East or anywhere that there are settlements which are pre-modern, there are certain important qualities which become immediately obvious to us. These qualities are often summarised by the word 'organic' which brings together not only the settlement’s human and green texture, but also the processes which allowed this to happen from within the community, rather than through an imposed process. These qualities are:
• The buildings are non-uniform but part of a pattern; they appear to grow out of the landscape and in many places are hard to distinguish from it. Nature is not lost in this city. Water and trees can be central to its streets and public spaces. Waste is recycled. Resources are used frugally. And most of all, there are strong rural productive land uses immediately adjacent to the city that are integrated closely into the functioning of the city.
• The streets are filled with people walking and all major local destinations are accessibly a short walk. The key to this is the kind of density and mixed land use which has grown from the need to have sufficient people living nearby and sufficient work, shops, schools and so on within walking distance. Each combination of land use is organic to the city's peculiar history and culture, but all have the qualities of a 'pedestrian' place. They are also often described as very 'urban' and the two qualities are obviously linked. As Kostoff (1991) says: " Urbanism....is precisely the science of relationships. And these relationships must be determined according to how much a person walking through the city can take in at a glance." (p.83).
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These are the 'urban villages' of history and although some characteristics can be found in modern cities, mostly they have been obliterated. It is romantic to suggest that they can be just copied to replace our modern suburbs, but perhaps we can learn from the principles that lie behind their design and then maybe we can see how our technology and urban processes could relate to this organic city tradition. This is the approach taken by the new urbanism (Katz, 1994; Calthorpe, 1993; Duany and Platter-Zyberk, 1991) and many in the urban ecology movement.
The process which has substantially obliterated this 'organic' form of city is largely due to the Industrial Revolution, as described in this chapter. It is an incorporation of the mechanistic, scientific approach to all aspects of life. It is the problem now recognised by ecological economists who see how mechanistic economics destroys the human and the ecological (Daly and Cobb, 1989). However, the specific problems created by the Industrial Revolution in cities have been addressed before in history and there is no need to rehearse them here.
The Industrial Revolution brought about a rapid growth in cities as economics changed from rural production to industrial production. As more people and industrial processes filled the old 'walking cities' of Europe they became impossible to live in. As discussed in the case study on water, the wastes in the streets and the pressure for more and more housing in a confined walking diameter of 5 km or so, created a major ecological and human crisis.
The cities did change. There was a new kind of city invented - the Transit City. The new transport technologies of trams and trains meant that urban villages could be linked together like pearls along a string. This solution meant that walking scale areas could be retained within the villages once a new form of linkage between them was created and natural areas could be retained in the corridors between development, ie the city did change to being more sensitive to nature and to human community needs. North American and Australian cities were built in this form in the late 19th and early 20th century and many European cities such as Stockholm and Zurich have retained this basic urban form.
The process by which city governments came to build this type of city was quite chaotic and clearly involved a change in professional praxis. It involved technology but it was propelled by major social movements associated with public health, social reform, ecology and spirituality (see Hall, 1987 and Girouard, 1985). The town planning profession that emerged and the other associated urban management professions were not just technical but had a strong ethical framework that used ideas from the organic city tradition.
Thus the Transit City solution, although it was a part of early modernism, was also responding to more ancient values about the human and the ecological from this organic city tradition. The cities that emerged were forged as a combination of human/ecological values and a new kind of technology. Many cities benefited from this solution, but all had to battle through the painful changes associated with moving from one way of city building to another.
A new professional praxis was born which acted to manage the new kind of city, to integrate and provide the guiding ideas for a city in its layout and daily activities. Any history of these urban changes will show that the struggles to provide an answer to the challenge of building cities involved one group of reformers who stressed the need for organic values in the city. Now, as then, we find these ideas hard to locate as bureaucratic processes take over and squeeze out the organic life forces. We need to rediscover the origins and basic concepts of the organic city and recognise that modern day environmentalists who are committed to winning back a more human and ecological city, are not people with horns who can’t understand modern needs and wants. They are in fact part of a long and important tradition in city building that is neglected at the peril of the city.
The lineage of those who have contributed to ideas on cities can go back into deep traditions of Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian theology. The polis of the Greeks was a place for people to meet together and provide a community that would be more diverse and enriching than separated and self-sufficient individual families. The Jewish city had organic principles at its heart, as will be discussed in the case study on theology.
But the lineage of importance to this case study is the one that has fought for the organic city in modern times, i.e. those who opposed mechanical values, who saw the human and ecological city as being squeezed out and replaced by dehumanised and artificial city values. This lineage can be traced through a number of writers and activists, for example, through the following people.
John Ruskin (1819-1900)
William Morris (1834-1896)
Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928)
Patrick Geddes (1854-1932)
Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)
There are many contributors in each generation - in our own it includes Jacobs (1961), McHarg (1969), Schneider (1979), Alexander (1979), Hough (1984) and Gratz (1989). The literature from these people contains a common thread of organic thinking stressing diversity, human scale, heritage, nature, community and artistic expression.
Today the organic city movement is alive again and has a new sense of vision. It is timely because as we have shown, the Auto City has lost its organic values. Auto cities continue to grow and sprawl devouring farm and forest land, filling the sky with automobile emissions and creating suburbs which engender considerable ambivalence.
It is also timely as the whole mechanical vision of how we should function is being questioned and torn down by popular culture. However, without an alternative vision the power of the mechanistic spirit to dominate and control our society will continue to fill the vacuum. The organic solutions are nevertheless being rediscovered. The urban sustainability movement is networked across the world and is struggling to:
a) Stop freeways and provide a new vision for transit-oriented urban villages, pedestrian scale developments, traffic calming, bicycle facilities....(eg STPP, 1994 and Urban Ecology newsletter).
b) Provide neo-traditional planning that emphasises real streets where people can meet and children can play, which provide short distances to shops and schools and other activities (eg the new urbanism).
Signs of the Sustainable Cities Movement:
But the battle for the city is just as fierce as it was in the 1890's when an urban paradigm shift occurred of a similar nature to the one we are facing now. Thus at every level these changes are opposed:
a) There is suddenly a freeway building frenzy across the world almost as though the engineers are having a last desperate push of the old paradigm before they have to admit defeat (Newman, 1994a).
b) There is enormous cynicism amongst many town planners about neo-traditionalists, urban ecology and urban village concepts and often 'ecological' reasons are used to justify some of the worst low density urban sprawl.
c) There is constant bickering, if not war, between EPA's and planning authorities over who looks after the environment in cities - whilst the mechanical suburbs keep rolling out.
d) Infrastructure agencies such as water authorities, electricity commissions and transport agencies are rarely able to let go of their central powers in favour of localised technologies and management; they seem ready to fight it to the end.
But small victories are also achieved and they begin to form a pattern that gives heart to the new generation of organic city thinkers. Now the world community is confronting this through their sustainable city programmes. The processes of change are gaining momentum at every level but in the end they will be profoundly affected by what is decided is necessary for professional praxis.
The kind of problems being found above with traffic engineers wanting to continue building freeways, town planners who want to keep rolling out low density, car dependent suburbs, environmental scientists who keep doing defacto town planning through air quality regulations, water engineers who want to keep building more big pipes.... all these are part of the same problem: they were trained that way and their manuals and codes still say they should do it that way.
The world however is changing. Cities are no longer responding to the old techniques, political reality is changing, in short the paradigm is changing - but educational institutions and professional manuals take a lot longer to change.
So, what can professionals do in such a time of uncertainty?
First, professionals can try to understand the nature of the change which is going on. This case study will try to dissect some of these changes. We will try to suggest some principles that underlie the new paradigm.
Second, professionals can look at some new guidelines and codes that are emerging. The urban ecologists, new urbanists, sustainable transport reformers etc, are pioneers who are experimenting with how the planning professions can now be expressed. The demonstration projects are being completed however - the urban ecology experiments are gradually working their way into new manuals, the new urbanists have a new set of codes that is available for professionals wanting to make a Kentlands rather than a Levittown, and new ways of undertaking traffic calming and making quality transit systems are being professionalised as well.
In order to respond to the new post-modern agenda and to rediscover the principles of the organic city as we move into a new millennium, there are four important ideas that seem to be needed as an underlying basis for sustainable urban professional praxis:
• Recognising values
• Maximising diversity
• Crossing boundaries
• Facilitating organic processes
Each will be elaborated to provide perspective on the Future City and
the important role of professional praxis.
Much of the professional praxis born 100 years ago was rooted in values. It was expressed in a set of technical approaches which slowly came to be seen as being substantially value free. Thus modernism could operate its mechanical city building without the need for further ethical questioning or discussion.
Post-modernism can see through the mechanical processes and recognise that something is very wrong, but it is not strong on suggesting other values. It is a movement away from modernistic thinking due to its over-simplistic technical approaches, but it has not wanted to move towards any community values, other than those values associated with the diversity of global individuals. It is therefore an age characterised by uncertainty.
However, those committed to the sustainability agenda and active in its associated social movements, are much more keen to express a set of community values. They are unashamedly saying it is no longer possible for urban professionals in planning, transport, water engineering and other areas to see their work as purely technical processes.
The importance of values is highlighted by the unprecedented demand for public consultation. In a world where planning was meeting all our demands this wouldn't be needed, but the post-modern world no longer trusts the technocrat.
Three case studies of this change, from our experience, highlight the increasing role of values in matters of professional praxis for city sustainability.
Case Study (a): Ocean Discharge.
In 1995 an Australian process for assessing urban water management futures was run with much public consultation. At all their public meetings and seminars the point was made over and over by the urban water professionals that ocean discharge of sewage did not harm the marine environment. Despite this, at every meeting the public wanted it recorded that they did not want ocean discharge to be continued. The professionals were forced to make their final recommendation: 'that despite minimal impacts there should be a phasing out of ocean discharge'.
This simple policy change is of course a major change for how water is managed in the city as it must now be brought back onto the land and reused in a multiple series of different options in different places. It means that far more local management will be needed and hence for the professionals involved in the public consultations it will not only be a challenge to long standing professional praxis, it probably to will mean a loss in their own power. The case of Sydney's ocean outfalls became a major political issue and has been documented by Beeder (1992).
A similar process occurred in the Southern region of Western Australia about 10 years before in response to plans for a new ocean outfall for sewage. The public had rejected the option and had forced the professionals to come up with land based recycling of sewage. The professionals reluctantly agreed to develop a series of irrigated tree plantations but said they would have to increase water charges by four times. The plantations have been highly successful (though with a steep learning curve for the professionals involved) and the charges did not need to go up as predicted.
Case study (b): Suburban road design
Andres Duany describes many examples from his New Urbanist developments where he has had to watch carefully how traffic engineers design subdivisions and how he has had to intervene to ensure his values could be expressed instead. These values are just common sense organic planning, such as how to make streets safer, more sociable and how to preserve trees on the site.
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Kentlands Shots:
1 Andres Duany Points out
How planners should not let traffic engineers design
towns. |
2 & 3 Street scenes show smaller, more winding streets and more compact development to the edge of the street.
One such case was when engineers were designing roads that crossed at right angles and one road was on a slope. In order to meet the Institute of Traffic Engineers regulation, the road must be flattened out sometime before the intersection. This meant considerable reshaping of the contours was needed and before it could be stopped the hill had virtually been obliterated, trees removed and drainage patterns altered, thus threatening all the adjacent trees.
Most new residents wanted to know why more trees couldn't be saved and a more natural setting retained.
Duany then discussed how a more organic approach, which respected the integrity of the area, could be implemented instead. Why not have the intersection alone flat? It was tried and it worked.
The approach was extended all around the site, instead of designing the streets to enable easy access for cars, the streets were allowed to follow contours and the needs of the community. The result was a much more haphazard set of roads with more sharp turns and hills than if they had followed the rules. But it worked much better because the trees could all be saved, it was more natural looking, and traffic automatically went slower because the roads demanded more attention. In standard subdivisions engineers were putting in speed bumps to slow down cars as the roads too easily induced speed!
Another example was with fire engine access. Roads seemed too wide when using the set regulations designed primarily for such service access. As a result, cars went too fast in residential streets and thus did not respect pedestrians. The sense of fear on the streets meant that parents would not allow children to walk, so they would drive them. Traffic breeds traffic. People asked (especially women) why do cars go so fast, couldn't the street be safer for pedestrians?
A narrower road was designed as a new standard and the fire service asked to come and try it out. They were able to fit and so a new more organic design was feasible where children felt safe in the streets. Now it is found that people walk much more in these areas and the degree of community interaction is greatly increased. The reduced space for roads means less land is lost, more viability for transit, and more permeable surface for stormwater retention.
Almost every aspect of street design and parking can be challenged by these organic values and be shown to work better for the community and for the ecology of an area.
Case study (c): Freeways, fuel savings and emissions.
One of the key justifications for building faster, bigger roads over the past forty years, is the notion that they help motorists save fuel and reduce emissions. The rationale is based on work first conducted by General Motors which found that engines work more efficiently if the vehicle is driven evenly and at an average speed approaching 60 kph. Major automotive emissions such as carbon monoxide (CO) and unburnt petrol (HC) were found to follow a similar pattern, with emissions per kilometre dropping as average speed improved (Newman and Kenworthy, 1984). It was easy therefore for engineers to calculate how much faster cars would go if a particular road was built and they could even put a dollar value on the fuel saved and time saved, as well as calculate how much less air pollution would be created.
Governments were easily pursuaded to pour money into such projects as they always showed such huge benefits over costs. Whenever these large road projects were presented to the public there were always some who were directly impacted and objected, but they were labelled NIMBY's and told to see the bigger picture which had so many public benefits. Then there were also some who felt there was something intrinsically wrong with a rationale that suggested building big roads was good for saving fuel and emissions when traffic kept filling the roads provided and air quality kept declining rather than improving. The issue became a fight between the 'experts' with their computer models and the public whose intuition and values suggested something was wrong.
Congested traffic is very inefficient on vehicles & hence fuel is wasted & more emissions created. But is free Flowing traffic more efficient if people travel much further? How can this be Resolved?
We were drawn into this debate and for five years did very detailed research in the Perth metropolitan region involving an instrumented car equipped with accurate speed and fuel measuring devices driving under different conditions in different parts of the city and then relating these results to the wider “urban ecological” picture of what freeing-up traffic flows does to the city (Kenworthy, Newman and Lyons, 1992; Newman, Kenworthy and Lyons, 1992).
We found that the benefits of faster flowing traffic were illusory. These new freer traffic situations just induce more traffic as they favour cars over other modes and they extend the city further out, progressively lowering its density as it expands. As a consequence, longer travel distances are generated, cars become essential for more trips, transit, walking and cycling become increasingly inconvenient and marginalised, and per capita fuel use and emissions production go up, despite gains in the fuel and emissions efficiency of the individual vehicles undertaking the travel. Conversely, those congested conditions deemed poorer for the efficiency of individual vehicles in the traffic stream, are associated with broader urban patterns such as more compact, mixed land use, shorter travel distances and better transit and non-motorised mode use. These conditions greatly reduce the total amount of car travel by residents and hence lower the total amount of fuel and emissions in the city, despite the poorer efficiency of vehicles in the traffic stream.
Our detailed assessment thus showed that through a series of critical feedback mechanisms at work within the urban system, increasing traffic speeds actually causes more fuel use and emissions overall, and this is confirmed in all our global cities data.
The original research work by traffic engineers, which formed the basis for the idea of saving fuel and reducing emissions through improved traffic flow, was essentially shown to be reductionist in its formulation and treatment of the problem, because it failed to take account of the more complex processes at work within the urban system.
The trade offs when you alter traffic congestion.
Traffic engineers don't see the whole-of-city picture.
Our conclusion was that there is a trade-off between fuel-efficient traffic and a fuel-efficient city, which we also showed extended to the idea of time savings (Kenworthy, Newman and Lyons, 1989). That is, there are no apparent savings in the total time expended by residents for travel in cities such as Houston with very high traffic speeds, compared to cities with much lower travel speeds, such as in Europe. Annual travel times work out roughly similar because higher traffic speeds are not used to save time, they are used to travel further.
Perth and New York both show the tradeoff- Congested city driving is not inefficient as the dense areas use less fuel overall.
The tradeoff reassured: the per-capita use of fuel goes up more than the saving created by more efficient vehicles.
Publishing such data is one thing (Newman and Kenworthy, 1988; Newman, Kenworthy and Lyons, 1988), but changing professional praxis is another. Whenever we discussed this matter in public or made submissions to transport agencies, the research was rejected out of hand. It was never analysed, it was just rejected, as it not only challenged professional praxis (surely the manuals can’t be wrong), it took out a key rationale for the road construction industry's access to funds. New roads are justified principally on the economic savings that will result from lower overall travel costs, and time and fuel savings are crucial in these estimates. Our research was undermining the very basis of the time-honoured benefit-cost ratios used to justify freeway construction.
We had a number of painful experiences as a result of these challenges to orthodox engineering practice. The road construction agency in Sydney twisted our research to say the exact opposite and used it to try and quell an organised, vociferous and sophisticated civil society implacably opposed to their proposal to put a freeway through one of the last pieces of original bush. This abuse of scientific research required a public rebuttal from us which eventually appeared in an article about the freeway issue on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, casting doubt on the integrity of the road agency.
A judicial inquiry eventually found the road agency’s rationale to be without foundation and the road proposal was abandoned.
In a similar incident in Perth, a prominent traffic engineer attempted to completely reverse the nature of our findings in a conference paper he presented and which was eventually published in a journal. The approach taken here was to leave out significant sections of a quotation about the urban system feedback effects of free-flowing traffic, leaving the reader to believe we were saying that free-flowing traffic does reduce fuel and emissions overall in a city.
A letter to the engineer from us was required pointing out the problem of using quotes in this way and a public correction/apology from him was reluctantly printed in a subsequent issue of the journal.
Meanwhile, the fight continues to have professional praxis on freeways, fuel use and emissions fall in line with research findings. In a similar way to the judicial ruling against a freeway in Sydney mentioned above, a court ruling was needed supporting the USEPA before road construction agencies were forced to stop justifying major road proposals on the basis that they reduced fuel use and emissions. The ruling insisted that projects must demonstrate reductions in travel (VKT) before they can claim such savings.
Finally, in 1994 the UK SACTRA report, through a retrospective analysis of major road projects, was able to put the ghost to rest when it proved unquestionably that highways do induce more traffic, and this “induced traffic” seriously undermines or eliminates the original benefits projected for the new road. A US report from TRB (1996) grudgingly does the same, though the approach taken here and subsequently by other road agencies, is to say that ‘induced traffic’ only occurs if there is pent up demand. However, how a road can ever be built unless there is demand for it is never explained. No data are ever presented supporting the notion that bypasses (which are meant to shift traffic from A to B) do not induce traffic, whereas SACTRA shows they do. The mechanism is simple: if time is saved this will be translated into extra traffic.
Throughout this era of academic and political dispute over professional praxis, the general public could see as plain as day that roads create traffic. It was obvious, they saw it everywhere.
There are many more roads now that are given a lot more scrutiny than before. Many are stopped. Though in places this just means that the designs go back into the drawer and are retrieved when the professionals see a more conducive political environment. Curry (1994) found in his investigation of road planning processes in Vancouver that although a freeway and major road widening in an inner city area had been rejected, the road construction agency had continued to furtively plan and partly construct their concept anyway. He found a secret plan on the wall of the road agency with the real priorities for road works which was different to the publicly approved plan.
This can only happen if the engineers involved fail to listen to the values being expressed through the community which are saying, in essence, that slower traffic is preferred. It is essential for professional praxis that they do listen, despite the idea of slower traffic being the opposite of what they have been trained to think and do.
Consultation must therefore seek not just to develop a process in which people can feel good that they were asked their opinions, but that the full range of values on various issues are properly outlined and seen in context. Then alternative professional praxis can examine how to meet those values.
But what are the values which are important in the organic urbanism we are seeking to pursue? Despite the shift towards greater uncertainty, we believe there are still and always have been important general values which need to be sought in any urban professional praxis. These overall organic values are at the heart of sustainability and need to feed our professional praxis in cities facing an uncertain future.
Professional praxis values in an age of uncertainty
• The environment matters
The environment still provides cities with sustenance even if we may not recognise it. And it has limits on how much it can be burdened with pollution and bulldozed to create new suburbs. No matter how much we may assert our post-modern individualism and lack of absolute values, the ozone hole will still burn our heads if we stay outside in the spring and summer (especially in the Southern hemisphere). Post-modernism can be no excuse for avoiding responsibility for the environment (Houghton and Hunter, 1994).
The environment in cities now matters - an urban creek is restored from an industrial drain in East Perth.
• Social justice matters
Nor can post-modernism be a way of avoiding the need to consider the underprivileged, children, the elderly and those with disabilities. A focus on social justice tends to remove a lot of uncertainty (Harvey, 1989).
• Heritage matters
The importance of heritage was discounted in modernism as it was so sure of its own way that it needed no sense of the past. Post-modern uncertainty makes us more aware of our links to the past in providing a more organic base for the future. We are building on a past which has significance because it involved people like us trying to resolve the complexities of their lives. This means we need an approach more like the "urban husbandry" of Roberta Grandes Bratz (1993) or Jane Jacobs (see case study on ethics).
• The public realm matters
The streets, parks, meeting areas, public transport and all other parts of the city not fenced off for private use, are also vital for us to value. When we do not value them and they begin to collapse as a place for social interchange, then we really notice it. The Detroit and Los Angeles syndrome is not something we can afford. Post-modern uncertainty cannot be an excuse for abandoning the public realm to economic rationalists who see only individual consumption as what really counts (Vintila, Phillimore and Newman, 1992).
• The urban economy matters
Post-modern values easily assume the economy but planners cannot. There is a growing awareness that the local urban economy must be the focus of how we develop in cities, particularly in the centres and sub-centres of our cities. Writers such as Jacobs (1984) provide a theoretical framework of how to maintain the urban fabric with the local economy mixed in to where we live and recreate. So much of the growth in jobs today is in small businesses based on information processing and they can be assisted in their activities by being part of a cohesive local area with a lot of face-to-face contact and not pushed into a CBD tower or a single-zoned, sterile commercial or industrial area.
Frost (1991) has also shown that we can drain our cities of their wealth by developing at too low a density, with the emphasis on greenfields development rather than reurbanisation. Limited capital is important to direct into innovation rather than non-productive suburban infrastructure.
• The community matters
As broader certainties diminish, the need for local communities grows. Surveys of what people want for the future inevitably involve a greater role for the community - people want to live in "villages" again, even in cities (Community and Family Commission, 1992). Yet this sentiment is occurring just as we have created car-based communities with little that draws them together. Nevertheless, the desire for greater community involvement in the future of local areas is a strong part of the new agenda (Center for Livable Communities, 1997). As well, there is a much stronger sense of the need for a global community and that we cannot survive without greater commitment to that (UN Commission on Environment and Development, 1987).
These six values form the basis for urban professional praxis in our post-modern age of uncertainty. That they relate closely to the values of the organic city proponents is not a coincidence. The other key principles set out below for professional praxis build on these values and provide a basis for sustainable urban policies and decision making.
Probably the most significant principle that comes out of post-modernism and is consistent with organic city insights, is the necessity to try and maximise diversity. Simplistic, mechanical solution which provide 'the one best way' as Ellul (1964) characterised it, invariably erase diversity. This can be applied to many aspects of cities, but in terms of sustainability we relate it to: housing types, transport types, fuels and even the provision of infrastructure, as well as cultural diversity.
• Housing diversity
Not only is there a wide diversity of tastes in different cultural groups but there are very different requirements in the life cycle/demographic stage of households. All OECD countries have passed the baby boom and its echo and are now moving toward an absolute decline in the number of young couples seeking family housing, whilst there is a growing demand for housing suitable for the elderly. This is associated with an unprecedented increase in the number of single person households.
The trade-off in house types has always been with location - the lower the density the poorer the location in terms of accessibility. This trade-off and the relative importance given to location is a very cultural matter. Non Anglo-Saxon cultures have tended to opt for location as a priority much higher than in Anglo-Saxon traditions. The growth in elderly and single person households is now tending to increase the demand for location and hence the importance of increased densities.
This is a challenge not fully accepted by all local governments yet, but clearly it has been put on the agenda of most national governments. It is part of the basis for our growing belief in the need for reurbanisation and for urban villages in the suburbs as a central part of urban diversity. These options are just not available to more than a few wealthy people at present.
Urban development needs to find all kinds of creative ways to build more diversity into the housing stock. The new urbanists are allowing very small pieces of land to remain that are normally added into other blocks, thus creating the chance to build an affordable house on the 'sliver'; they are also deliberately creating 'out buildings' such as small 'granny flats' or 'student homes' above garages. All these new suburbs have strict codes controlling their appearance and hence the quality of the urban environment is improved by the diversity as it is within a broad context. The mix that results is better for the community and is a much better use of land. Some of these guidelines are provided by the New Urbanists for creating a more diverse urban environment.
Opportunities for diversity in reurbanisation abound, but are often thwarted by regulations designed for uniformity not diversity. It is time to see some more professional praxis changes to help build on the organic qualities of the inner city and not to impose Auto City values on it.
• Transportation and urban form diversity
The uniformity of automobile dependence dominates our cities. The list of problems associated with auto dependence is substantial, and we showed how closely the land use patterns of cities follow its transportation priorities.
The need for greater diversity in our transportation and in the land use that follows it, can be expressed in terms of the Sustainable Future City. The Sustainable Future City is not one of banishing cars but one with much less car dependence. This is achieved by creating much greater diversity in how people can live without needing a car. All kinds of transit options meeting the need for criss-crossing the suburbs can be achieved when there is a range of sub-centres of various types and sizes, all providing links in the transit chain. These dense, mixed use sub-centres would incorporate quality local services and links to global information networks. Unlike the modernist city with its single CBD, the Future City is likely to have a diversity of smaller CBDs throughout the city each with its own specific emphasis and set of economic and social priorities.
The Sustainable Future City provides for increased opportunities to walk, cycle or use public transport as well as use cars. Fundamental to this increased diversity is the transit infrastructure which is required to link its sub-centres (with heavy or light rail), as well transit to provide local services such as demand responsive bus services. The Sustainable Future City provides far more options in travel and lifestyle than the monocultural car-dependent suburb of modernist cities.
Professional praxis needs to reflect the need for greater diversity in urban lifestyles based on the diversity of transport options that are now available.
• Fuel Diversity
One of the great certainties of our age is that we are reaching a critical point in the Golden Age of Oil. As discussed, we are approaching the production peak of world oil.
Transportation in modernist cities is dominated by a dependence. What happens as this begins to decline? We believe this will mean that, whereas the Golden Age of Oil was represented by new suburbs increasingly scattered from the city and its centres due to cheap, easy car travel, the new age of increasingly difficult and more expensive oil will mean reurbanisation of the city in the inner area and in new sub-centres to minimise travel needs.
Not only will we need to ensure there are many more options for reducing auto-dependent lifestyles, but all vehicles will need to reassess their fuels to use a diversity of sources. Electricity will be the important fuel of the future as renewable sources such as the sun and the wind can be tapped in many different ways. But we will also need to convert in the early stages of this transition, to the use of natural gas in vehicles and perhaps eventually to hydrogen.
Professional praxis needs to ensure that cities can be assisted through this period. It is likely that there will be a number of further oil crises, but each one will just confirm an upward trend in fuel prices.
• Infrastructure diversity
The simple approach that came to us from nineteenth century cities was that infrastructure was provided by experts in a centralised authority and was provided in big pipes, or big rail or road systems that fed down into smaller and smaller units.
As outlined in chapter 5, there is an assessment going on of this approach at the institutional level as well as at the technological level in most developed countries. The possibility of localisation as the basis for infrastructure is gaining momentum and needs to be considered in the spectrum of options for infrastructure provision.
Localisation is where the scale of the technology used provides an infrastructure oriented to a local area. It cannot stand alone, but its focus is nevertheless on a local solution rather than on a citywide one. The momentum for this is coming from agencies who are looking at the enormous cost of rebuilding or expanding main sewers or building new dams or even just extending the big pipes out to new areas. Thus the old nineteenth century approach is giving way to a new set of urban technologies and a new set of urban management processes that are local in their orientation and fundamentally more diverse.
The main step remaining before further advancement in localisation is the development of professional praxis that ensures adequate standards and good networking, but which encourages rather than discourages, local community-scale solutions to infrastructure.
Case study: Malang, Indonesia.
In Indonesian cities, as in many third world cities, there is no real sewerage system. Septic tanks take wastes for a short period before they enter groundwater, surface drains or rivers. Major studies by groups such as the World Bank, are suggesting the standard 'big-pipes' solutions. These become impossibly expensive to contemplate and very difficult to implement as the very dense cities would need to be severely disrupted to put in the pipes.
PHOTO - MALANG - 6.2
A research project in which we are involved is demonstrating a localisation solution. It is providing several kampungs in Malang, a regional town, with small-scale treatment plants that do not need big pipes for them to work. The 500 household scale means that pipes (where needed) can be placed into the stormwater drains thus not disturbing the kampung. Final effluent can pass through a banana tree garden. Furthermore the management structure is already firmly in place at this scale and so the system has some chance of succeeding on this cultural level as well. If successful a new approach to third world city water and waste management praxis will have been forged.
• Cultural diversity
Behind all of this desire for greater diversity is the recognition that there are different cultural values. The importance of multiculturalism in cities is that this diversity can be the basis of providing solutions which would not have been seen if monocultures existed. The importance of cultural diversity ought to be reflected in every aspect of urban professional praxis. Cities that can develop a policy to adequately facilitate cultural diversity whether it be from ethnic backgrounds or not, will be more able to bridge the age of uncertainty in their planning. This is expanded later.
The kind of diversity being required for our future requires urban professional praxis to become much more a boundary-crossing exercise. This needs to occur in terms of physical boundaries and disciplinary boundaries, as well as cultural boundaries.
Crossing physical boundaries
The new demands of sustainability require consideration of new physical boundaries to manage the environment, community needs and infrastructure requirements.
(i) Environmental boundaries
In New Zealand local government boundaries have been redrawn to coincide with bio-regions i.e. natural catchment boundaries that define the soil and water interactions and management needs of that area. This is a good option for cities as there will be increasing pressures to focus on these environmental issues and the boundaries often shape responses to such matters.
It is not necessary to formally change boundaries if urban professionals (especially in local government) can group and regroup around the particular environmental need. In Australia, Landcare Groups have been established on catchment boundaries without these lines having any special legal status. In many places they have become defacto local governments for anything of an environmental nature.
Other environmental issues like air quality require “whole of city” management and hence local authorities need to join together to participate in the many transport, industry and land use inputs to this issue. In the USA the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 now require city-wide land use solutions to be developed that minimise vehicle use. This has meant that city regional plans must now be developed, forcing new boundaries to be created around the airshed of the city. Water pollution from stormwater is similarly pushing cities toward defining new catchment boundaries in their cities.
Of course, when dealing with the sustainability agenda it is important for professionals to see that the boundaries of significance include global boundaries.
Professional praxis needs to encourage people to move easily across a range of physical boundaries to find solutions for local, regional and global sustainability issues.
(ii) Community Boundaries
Communities are as real and important in their diversity as the bio-regional natural diversity into which we are considering boundary definitions. The public realm of a neighbourhood, precinct or community may be hard to define too precisely, but if we are to provide ways of facilitating communities, then we need to try and define some smaller scale community boundaries.[1]
The readjustment of local government wards to more precisely represent particular types of communities could be an exercise with significance that goes beyond the obvious democratic benefits, as shown below.
(iii) Infrastructure Boundaries
The big-pipes approach to water infrastructure is beginning to be localised, i.e. a new scale of community technology is being addressed. Water and sewerage are the first areas to come back to a more localised approach after it was lost in the "modern" era, but it is not the only one. Power is already going this way in many parts of the world, especially wherever renewable options exist, because by their nature they are small and dispersed. Transit and communication are also localising to different degrees.
While the technology for infrastructure may be moving to a smaller scale, localised system, it will still need a heavy degree of city-wide co-ordination. Localising does not mean cutting off from the city or region. Sustainability requires all levels to work closer together.
The question of how much a city can localise its infrastructure is actually like a question of technology choice or technology assessment. There are technologies which work well at the local scale for most areas of urban professional praxis. However, they basically depend on what kind of city is being built and the basic values that lie behind it. As set out in Table 1, the different kinds of infrastructure can be assembled into two groups:
• the first works best at a local scale because the city is oriented towards local communities; thus both technology and professional praxis will want to be oriented to them.
• the second works best at a large scale level because the city is oriented only towards individual households and does not take seriously the community scale of operation.
Although the second level works better at the bigger scale, it means a significant shifting in power towards centralised bureaucracies and professional praxis and is likely to only accept that many of today’s problems are insoluble.[2]
Table 1 New and developing technologies and how they shape urban form (after Cervero, 1992).
|
OPTION A
SPRAWL CITY |
OPTION B
COMPACT
CITY | |
|
FACILITATES CONTINUED DISPERSAL AND SPRAWL
LINKED BY CARS |
FACILITATES NODAL CENTRES OR URBAN VILLAGES
LINKED BY QUALITY TRANSIT | |
|
- Individual Household
Based |
- Community Based | |
|
TRANSPORTATION |
||
|
• Cleaner cars |
• Electric heavy rail (spinal
connections) | |
|
• Electric cars |
• Electric light rail (sub-centre
connections) | |
|
• Electronic guidance on freeways |
• Bicycles and community-based bicycle
infrastructure | |
|
• O-Bahn buses |
• Community-based car rental systems
| |
|
• Flexible buses as main transit supplementing
car system. |
• Demand-responsive local buses (satellite
communications, smart cards) as supplement to main transit
system. | |
|
TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND
COMPUTERS |
||
|
• Household-based office technology
(fax/computer/video and phone) |
• Telecottages (community-based
fax/computer/video and phone centres) | |
|
•Sub-centre-based 'smart' office buildings
(equivalent to CBDs) | ||
|
OTHER
TECHNOLOGY |
||
|
• Large scale industry (prevents
re-integration) |
• Clean production systems and small scale
industry (reintegrates industry) | |
|
• Large scale water management systems |
• Community-based water management
systems | |
|
• Household-based permaculture |
• Community-based permaculture | |
|
• Household-based solid waste
management |
• Community-based solid waste
management | |
The next stage of infrastructure management at this smaller community scale will require as already stated, different management structures - in particular, new boundaries at the local level will be required. These could be associated with communities, as set out in the Sustainable Future City vision. The benefits to local communities of becoming more involved in an integrated approach to local infrastructure management are multiple. Not only could the benefits be very tangible in lower rates and taxes, but the responsibilities become key reasons for the community to work more as a community. It also creates local employment, not only in managing the technology, but in utilising the resources - the water and waste, the community telecottage, the community bus services etc.
The other aspect of physical boundaries apart from the need for creating smaller units and of course a whole of city boundary, is the need for local authorities to link into national and international goals. Local Agenda 21 plans or Sustainability Plans are becoming the basic strategic planning tool for local authorities. The need for national and international groupings of local authorities to ensure the global agenda is being covered, becomes ever more obvious and apparent.
Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries
The new responsibilities for localisation under the sustainability agenda, will require new disciplines being brought into local government. The integrative, synthesising qualities of local authority professionals will be extremely important. They will need to incorporate at various times environmental scientists, water and wastewater engineers, communications and power system engineers, public transport planners, sociologists with community boundary expertise, heritage experts, local job creation experts, artists and grass roots community activists who can articulate local visions... The list goes on. There are indeed few disciplines that can be left out of the post-modern local authority with a commitment to sustainability.
Sustainability will require local authority professional praxis to be characterised by openness, flexibility and self-confidence, with a low threshold for jargon and an eye for the genuine contributor to the local sense.
Crossing Cultural Boundaries
As well as crossing the artificial boundaries on maps and the artificial lines drawn up by universities to define professions, we need to cross the real boundaries between cultures. This is one of the great values of post-modernism, that it has allowed the importance of difference to be recognised. But it can only be a useful matter that assists us in our professional praxis, if we can learn to cross cultural boundaries.
This is illustrated in a case study from an experience as a Councillor in the City of Fremantle.
Case study: Fremantle alfresco dining
The Fremantle council were approached in the late 1970's by several Italian restaurant owners, to see if they could put tables and chairs outside on the sidewalk for alfresco dining. There was immediate opposition from the Council professional staff based on the health and building regulations which made it illegal, eg 'people will get flies in their coffee', 'cars will crash into you', or 'it’s just not right'. In reality it was a purely cultural reaction, as Italians have eaten alfresco for thousands of years, but the cultural tradition of Anglo-Saxons is that it is not appropriate to be so public about eating habits. Fortunately, some planners listened to the social policy staff who could see it from the inside of the Italian culture and the regulation was changed.
PHOTO HERE - ALFRESCO FREO - 6.3
Alfresco dining became a significant contribution to the revival of Fremantle's economy and planning now facilitates it by widening sidewalks and providing street furniture as it is recognised as a part of the whole urban culture that we all enjoy. Its implications for sustainability are that a reurbanisation process was greatly facilitated and the pedestrian culture of the city was further enhanced. We can only wonder why it took so long for the Italian cultural sensibilities to be allowed to be expressed.
The same case study could have examined regulations on markets as opposed to large shopping centres, the presence of buskers in the street, the value of mixed land use such as housing above shops, and the whole question of density which is highly cultural. Anglo-Saxon regulations on all these matters are essentially anti-urban - they discourage the coming together of people in public places.
In recent trips to Canadian cities we have become increasingly aware of the reason they have more than half their new housing in the form of transit-oriented high density apartments and medium density town houses - it is a response to a more culturally-sensitive urban market place. The planners and developers have listened to this demand from the Asian immigrants (eg from Hong Kong), whilst also hearing the more obvious and strident demand from the Anglo-Saxon culture that this is not a "legitimate" demand. In the process of accepting the development of high density housing around transit stops (an obvious way to make money for someone from Hong Kong), it has created a legitimacy for the whole culture to accept greater diversity in housing and lifestyle. Its positive implications for sustainability are now obvious.
This is the paradigm shift through which we are moving.
The concentration on cultural diversity as the basis of a new kind of professional praxis mentality, is the approach being adopted by many cities that have had a lot of immigration in recent years. It is often difficult and always politically risky, but it is the social heart of the sustainability agenda.
Without culturally-sensitive planning, cities find reurbanisation of the inner city very difficult and certainly in US cities the sprawl of their cities has been closely linked to the failure to overcome cultural prejudice (Shore, 1995; Massey and Denton, 1993).
This final organic element is more related to process. First, we need to recognise more obviously and clearly the role of natural processes in the city and second, we need to recognise how local community processes can be used to shape the city.
Natural processes such as water systems, soil and air, as well as flora and fauna are all part of the city. They provide all the free ecological services and when abused they tend to get back at us. As a result we now have attempts to turn drains back into creeks, to find ways to reuse nutrients and organic wastes in the urban system, rather than just allowing them to flow through it, to find out the limits to the air's natural assimilative and cleansing capacity, as well as the capacity of water bodies such as rivers, lakes and estuaries on which cities are built. By understanding better the local ecology and how the human ecology of the city interacts with it, a city is becoming more organic. Such processes are well underway, particularly when it comes to bringing water back into the city in a more natural way through systems for managing stormwater that are not completely functional but are also a celebration of water in the city.
Local community processes have always been seen as necessary for supporting local government functions, but not in any significant way for the important urban ecological functions of energy use, water supply, sewerage systems, recycling and transit. As suggested before, the development of community-based technology in recent decades has meant that smaller-scale provision of these services is now feasible. Local government used to manage most of these things 100 years ago when organic solutions in the transit city were being created. But most of this century has seen them centralised into larger and larger scale city-wide systems - usually justified by greater efficiency due to the scale and efficiency of large systems.
However, modern industry has discovered that such efficiencies are often lost because the human element is lost, thus Post-Fordism is showing us how to break up large systems into more easily managed, locally responsive units that can enable the total system to work better. Quality in management is now recognised by the business world to be associated with greater autonomy in local decision making. This is echoed in the appropriate technology literature by the recognition that quality can be associated with small scale, locally responsive systems rather than the gigantism fetish of our 20th century engineers.[3]
None of this will be done just for ecological purposes as a localised, organic approach is also better for social and economic reasons (Gratz, 1989). Jane Jacobs in her many books on cities says that grand economic schemes do little for cities but the real vitality comes from the intricate, diverse relationships that flourish in urban communities where people meet casually in streets and social gatherings. She concludes that the 'science of city planning and art of city design, in real life and in real cities, must become the science and art of catalysing and nourishing those close-grained working relationships' (Jacobs, 1961).
A first priority in such an exercise is that all major decisions are taken through community participation processes. Techniques for doing this are well advanced (Sarkissian and Walsh, 1996, Center for Livable Places, 1997).
The second step is to facilitate local experiments or demonstrations of localisation. There is much to gain from enlightened experiments in locally managed urban services that can help us to see whether such organic processes can work in the 21st century city. The shift in power structures, as with most areas of the city and its future, will not happen easily but the process is certainly worth fighting for.
But all local, organic processes can get lost if they are not being fed by some broader vision for change in our cities. Thus it is important for professionals to keep coming back to the overall goals of sustainability and the visions of what this can mean in our cities. As Brooks (1988: 246) suggests:
"The urban planning profession needs a new generation of visionaries, people who dream of a better world, and are capable of designing the means to attain it. That, after all, is the essence of planning: to visualise the ideal future community, and to work towards its realisation".
Realising this better world will only be achieved if the "designing" is a participative process, involving the community and all stakeholders in a way that takes the time to become informed about the issues and opportunities posed by integrated solutions, and if the designing is constantly opening up a process which ushers in a more, not less sustainable city.
If we are to have sustainable cities, the organic qualities of local variability and local knowledge need to be linked into what the global community is needing and dreaming. The ability for organic communities to network internationally means that this is not an impossible task. The global civil society is beginning to be a force for change on professional praxis as it collects information on the many successful experiments in city sustainability.
One of the key reasons for the post-modern age of uncertainty is the collapse of the Auto City as a paradigm for planning. Just as the Walking City began to collapse 100 years ago and the Transit City began to emerge as the solution to its demise, we are now entering a period where the Auto City is perceived to be unsustainable. It is perhaps not too much of a leap to suggest that the profound problems which faced the Walking City in the Industrial Revolution, are at least equalled by the plethora of factors which today challenge the viability of the Auto City.
The emerging city we are suggesting contains elements of all the three previous cities (with a greater emphasis on the pedestrian and transit qualities), and new emphasis on a multi-nodal series of sub-centres that are critical for transactions in the Information Age. A range of technologies that facilitate diverse communities and foster greater ecological sensitivity are also available for this Future City.
The post-modern response to the Auto City is to question its underlying mechanical and simplistic values, but post-modernism does not offer solutions to the sustainability issues confronting us. On the other hand, it is suggested here that the organic urbanism tradition can provide principles which can guide us, just as they were found to help cities through their ecological crises a century ago.
The key to all of this happening is the development of new professional praxis that is able to reflect the new values of sustainability and organic urbanism, in a world which has lost a lot of its old certainties. For this to occur the role and importance of communities go beyond simple democracy, because their values are the guide that professionals must seek as they attempt to forge new ways of building sustainability into our cities.
Just as "progress" became more certain with the emergence of the Transit City, but withered with the ascendency of the Auto City, we believe we will be able to again revive our belief in progress as we perceive the benefits and authenticity of this new professional praxis. This is the great hope of those involved in the sustainability movement.
Urban professional praxis in an age of uncertainty and sustainability, can be an exciting process. If we can genuinely seek community values, maximise diversity, establish new boundaries and move flexibly between them, incorporate a range of new disciplines, and facilitate organic processes...then we will probably recognise that the old urban regime with its simple, modernist goals and regulations, was not only inadequate, it wasn't nearly as interesting.
[1] Many local governments have now followed North Sydney, the first local area to create Precincts around which local transport and land use issues are discussed. The process has been extremely successful so far. In Portland (Oregon) local areas are used to facilitate their "Reclaim Your Streets" program.
[2] Any technology can be misdirected because when small scale, community-based technologies are used to create ‘gated communities’ it subverts the full meaning of community - see chapter 7.
[3] In order to have space for locally managed urban services, especially eco-services like water and waste management, there will need to be a trade-off with density increases for pedestrian village qualities, as outlined in chapter 5. It is not hard to see that densities should increase around transit lines and in centres of activity but adjacent to this there may be low density areas of parkland combined with community permaculture/water recycling and waste management.
