JAM SESSIONS: Will future cities sprawl and choke under their own traffic?
Image: by Anna and Andy, courtesy Flickr
Imagine the commute of the future: "The Jetsons," or more "Blade Runner"?
Will family sedans crisscross in blue skies, or will machines crawl past craggy skylines in perpetual night?
Such visions are staples of the entertainment business but deservedly scarce in universities, government and industry. None have the crystal ball that shows which future technologies and behaviors -- some of which would surely astonish today's city slicker -- have become routine.
In the climate world, such a crystal ball would be useful. Some transportation experts, looking at population and economic trends, see a grand collision course: Hundreds of millions of people, mainly in the developing world, are moving to cities. Their energy and resource demands -- and the way they will get to work -- represent a huge variable in global emissions.
These experts say that unless someone guides cities' development, they could lock in a high-carbon infrastructure that makes it far tougher to fight climate change.
Urban areas already account for about two-thirds of world energy use, and they'll hit 73 percent by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. The cities of the future will be bigger, and there will be more of them. According to the United Nations, there were 21 "megacities" in 2009 -- urban agglomerations whose population exceeds 10 million. By 2025, there will be 29 -- and they'll hold one-tenth of humanity.
And if fossil fuels do get locked in? According to Ivana Gazibara, senior adviser on "futures" at Forum for the Future, a British think tank, cities will still adjust to that reality. It just won't be pretty.
From 'Sprawlville' to 'Renewabad'
"There are going to be some pretty profound changes in the pipeline anyway that either force us to change in a kind of reactive way, or that we choose to anticipate today and pre-empt through innovation and solutions that we start thinking through now," she said.
Forum for the Future recently released "Megacities on the Move," a thought exercise about where the world's cities are headed -- toward infinite sprawl and traffic, or hyper-computerized commutes marching by each other in a synchronized flow? Will they adjust by cutting carbon and pollution, or could these become permanent scourges of urban life?
To get at these questions, the forum consulted researchers and city planners, but also companies like Vodafone, General Motors and Tata Motors. These companies are already strategizing for the cities of the future, because they want to make money there.
Depending on what happens, that money could come in very different ways. In the "Megacities" report, there are four possibilities for the city of the future, each with a basic organizing principle, each with its benefits and drawbacks.
"Sprawlville," for example, represents the ultimate triumph of the personal car: Cities widen and lengthen roads as quick as they can, but they still lose the battle to traffic jams, which crunch into a metropolitan heart attack.
In "Planned-opolis," by contrast, fossil fuels are too pricey to take for granted, so the government plans and computerizes its citizens' lives to make the city work. This allows many to work from home; others can call for a self-guided car that glides into a network of synchronized commutes.
Then there are two low-carbon scenarios, "Renewabad" and "Communi-city." In the first, megacities clean up by breaking free of national control and building dense development and public transit. In the second, power devolves even further: City centers disappear, and a person's entire life fits in a neighborhood. People build their own vehicles based on open-source technologies, such as electric cars, bikes and scooters. Some brew biofuel at home.
Can countries skip sprawl?
Forum for the Future doesn't predict which of these will take hold in tomorrow's megacities. But its report makes clear that these cities can take the low-carbon road or the high-carbon one.
The choice will be different in developed and developing countries. Consider Phoenix, one of the United States' fastest-growing metropolitan regions, and one of its most car-oriented. In 2005, 3.7 million called it home, but in 2030, 6 million will.
To cope, the region will spend $40 billion between now and 2030 to expand roads and add 89 new miles. It will also spend $16 billion on new transit, including a bus "supergrid"; much of that money comes from a decision seven years ago to devote more money to transit rather than roads.
That's not exactly Sprawl-ville, but transit is so late to the game that it won't be a major form of transport anytime soon. "Out here in the West, the orientation from the beginning has been to the auto," said Roger Herzog, senior project manager with the Maricopa Association of Governments, the group that put together the regional plan. He said when MAG made projections for the region, even with high investment in transit, it didn't expect transit to carry more than 5 percent of travel.
In Asia, the challenge is different: Much of the relevant infrastructure doesn't exist yet.
"The question is, how do you skip some of the rungs in that ladder that we climbed in the United States?" said Deron Lovaas, federal transportation policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "How do you skip Sprawl-ville?"
Cities face growing pains with cars as the 'variable'
Ahmedabad, India, is one city trying to answer that question. Under imperial Britain, its clutch of textile plants earned it the nickname "Manchester of the East." These plants never strayed too far from the city center, so development grew densely. Even today, the average Ahmedabadi still travels about 5 or 6 kilometers (3.1 to 3.7 miles) to work, said Madhav Pai, director of the India Program for EMBARQ, a transport project run by the World Resources Institute.
Like other Indian cities, Ahmedabad expects prodigious growth. Its population of 4.5 million would make it the second-largest U.S. city. By 2030, Pai said, it's on track to grow to 10 million -- megacity scale.
To prevent the crippling traffic and pollution seen in many other Indian cities, Pai said, Ahmedabad is building 50 kilometers of bus rapid transit, or BRT, an approach that mimics trains but costs far less. The city is also requiring new development to occur along these corridors, so future residents won't have to have a car.
In Bangalore, by contrast, Sprawlville may be on its way. Pai said the economy is largely driven by information technology parks at the city outskirts. Suburbs billow around these parks, making car trips of 12 to 15 kilometers (7.5 to 9.3 miles) typical. A March article in the Indian newspaper The Hindu called Bangalore's roads "some of the most chaotic in the country."
Pai believes sooner or later, Bangalore will have to make a painful transition away from personal cars.
"Eventually, all cities will have to do this, because you're just otherwise going to be gridlocked. ... I can foresee a city like Bangalore becoming a Bangkok," he said. "You'll grow, and you'll grow with all the pain of a city stuck in gridlock."
To Pai and other smart growth advocates, cars are the variable that determine how spread out or compact a city is. Sam Staley, director of urban and land-use policy at the Reason Foundation, disagrees: He thinks Asian cities can have their cars and cut carbon, too.
Staley is researching mobility in China, where he believes cars are a reality of the future; "personalized travel" is simply too quick and inexpensive for transit to dethrone it.
Trying to drive toward a cleaner future
But he also thinks this can be a sustainable future, if the cars can be rid of their carbon emissions. In the United States, he said, almost all car pollution except greenhouse gases has been eliminated by technological advances. Electric cars and hybrids now present a way to do this for greenhouse gases. "We can decarbonize without having to shift travel modes. It's technically feasible," he said.
Staley sees a future China that has to throw both solutions -- roads and transit -- at cities that are modernizing and hungering for mobility. He says this is evident in the many cities setting their goals for travel modes. In Beijing, for example, transit's target is 27 percent, walking 20 percent, biking 23 percent, and cars 29 percent.
Most cities have transit targets of 40 to 50 percent. But cities aren't trying to get these riders out of cars -- they're trying to get them off of bikes and sidewalks. They're trying to move people farther, more quickly. Indeed, the shift to transit may even cause a net growth in carbon emissions.
The "Megacities on the Move" report agrees that people seek more "mobility" in this sense, but it also proposes that in the future, mobility can take new forms. In the super-automated "Planned-opolis," for example, companies have developed ever-better ways to convey video, audio and other data, so telecommuting has actually become a major climate- and energy-saving strategy.
In a short cartoon portraying "Planned-opolis," a character named Vee explains that her husband works from home: He's a "virtual engineer" controlling robots at a desalination plant, but he uses a massive switchboard at his house.
Vee herself goes to work in a car that drives itself -- an idea that made an impression in the transportation world when it showed up in the 2002 movie "Minority Report."
"It makes so much sense, doesn't it?" Vee says. "Switch off brain, and go to work. With this many people around, I'm glad that a megacomputer's in charge."
But do we want to live there?
Here, Vee speaks to changes that go beyond commuting and carbon footprints. "Megacities" proposes that urban organization changes the very fabric of society. Do elites wield more power? Does religion gain popularity? Is government centralized or decentralized?
Will the city even be a worthwhile place to live? Gazibara, one of the report's authors, said "Planned-opolis," as an example, has its merits -- a hyper-efficient use of resources and energy.
But "if you overrely on technological solutions and you overrely on central command," she said, "you might end up with a world that works, but you're not necessarily going to end up in a world that's very pleasant."
In this sense, "Megacities on the Move" ponders more than the vehicles we'll ride in, or the appearance and layout of the metropolis. There's a common thread to its four visions: that there's no way for tomorrow's cities to resemble today's -- if only because they can't.
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500
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Add CommentOf all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisC. S. Lewis.
God forbid we let leftist environmentalist busybodies predict our future and dictate what will be.
In the last 50 years, I've seen a lot of these futurist confabs and I can't remember any that predicted anything correctly. Maybe the money for these things would be better spent on real scientist doing real research.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSince we are all into quotes today:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRight-Wing Anti-Environmentalist Science Deniers Go Out For a Drive One Day...
LIB: Isn't this wonderful? I have a desire to drive, and sufficient surplus income to purchase a vehicle, and the market and technology provide me with one. Praise Jesus! Praise Adam Smith!
SCI: Uh, yeah, OK...but you know, the way you're driving is neither safe nor economical. Could you maybe slow down a little?
LIB: I decide what is economical; I can afford the gas. As for safety, I have insurance, and the little whatchamacallit meter in front of me goes all the way up to 140. I haven't exceeded the limit yet.
SCI: What you can do and what is safe and reasonable to do are two different things. If you want to experience natural selection first hand, that would be OK with me, except for the fact that we're both in the same car. By the way, that's a lake a couple of miles ahead, and you're headed straight for it.
LIB: Lake? We haven't encountered any lakes in our travels so far. We don't have to worry about lakes. History is our guide, and it clearly says, "no lakes".
SCI: Well, yes, there's a lake right there in front of us. You can see it as well as I can, I hope. It's even marked right here on our map. I suggest you turn left just a little bit and steer clear of it.
LIB: Oh, you pessimistic doomsayers. You're always gloomily predicting our demise, and you're always wrong. We hit a mud puddle a few miles back, and see? No problems.
SCI: I'm only predicting doom if you keep driving as foolishly as you have so far. I suggest that we start on this alternate route now, so that we don't have to swerve too sharply at the last minute.
LIB: There is no lake. I like driving fast and straight. The last thing I want to do is turn left.
SCI: What do you mean, there is no lake? It's right there! And we are getting closer by the minute! Why are you accelerating?
LIB: That there is a lake is only your opinion. We need to study this, and get more input.
(LIB reaches down beneath the seat. His hand reemerges with a sock over it.)
SOCK: <in a squeaky voice> No lake!
LIB: Hmmm. We seem to have two opinions here. Since Mr Socky has taken economic considerations into account and you have not, I can judge which is the better and more informed. Sound science says there is no lake. Or if there is, we can accept the compromise solution that it will disappear before we reach it.
The play continues here:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/06/i_think_i_despise_antienvironm.php
Historically the creation of urban landscapes has been part luck and part adherence to some general grid-like plan to make service orderly and profitable. The luck part is that humans had no idea of the geophysical processes nor the scales on which they operate, so we built cities on sinking deltas, like New Orleans, or we build them on shorelines that were glacially rebounding and so what was originally a port becomes a backwater. If we mean to make a city a place where services and sustainability are balanced it would suggest that the very platform on which cities are built should be engineered to encorporate features that made those services economical and low maintenance using robots and well planned systems...and high quality. I imagine a city of the future to be like one big building miles on a side, designed to look a bit like a mountain with waterfalls and forests, a park like environment, reaching upward a couple of thousand feet, with trails and roads on the outside, and along which people live on the building's exterior in villages perched on hillsides, and with the interior mostly a place for commerce, transportation and business.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhere larger urban landscapes are planned multiple mega-cities should be under gigantic geodesic domes of the sort that R. Buckminster Fuller envisioned, so that people who live there would not be exposed to the extremes of weather wouldn't have to heat their homes, or pay for snow removal. It sounds utopian, but really, when our urban planners begin to plan for cities the way they will need to be if we are going to realistically and sustainably thrive in the future, the current historical framework in which cities are created will need to expand to meet the expectations we will be having for them.
Interesting projections of how future cities will look, but I agree with pteranodon that these kinds of predictions rarely turn out.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe current world population is nearing 7 billion and is predicted to grow to 8 to 10.5 billion before it declines. If we suppose most of those people will settle in cities, that means an average population growth of anywhere from 16% to 52%. Do cities need to change that drastically to accommodate this kind of growth? Even more interestingly, what happens to expensive taxpayer-supported infrastructure when population declines as it's predicted to do within a century? What happens to economies?
Since Israel is in the process of designing and developing a real flying electric car with autopilot, geocompass navigation of 360 degrees, and with a 10,000 foot ceiling throughout the world, there will be little need for landlocked cars. You will not even need to know how to fly the car, the autopilot can take you right to the door or garage of your destination. This will be great for seniors wanting to go to their bingo at church. Do not worry about your children being alone in the quadcar at 10,000 feet on their way to school because they will no longer be going to school...maybe to soccer practice, but not to school. This is not a prediction, this is happening now.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"By the way, that's a lake a couple of miles ahead, and you're headed straight for it."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe lake is not a fact just because YOU say so, or even because YOU tell me that EVERYONE agrees there's a lake. However, There WILL be the perpetual PROMISE of a lake; a giant, horrific, terrifying body of water from which no one will escape alive.
To be sure; it's always at least ten, but no more than say, 70 miles away. This gives you enough time to convince me to give you the keys so you can sell the car and and distribute the proceeds the way YOU see fit.
Because in the end, this isn't about climate, it's about "Social Justice" and "Sustainability" which are code words for "Command and control" and "redistribution".
Right-Wing Anti-Environmentalist Science Denier?
How about mouth breathing, knuckle dragging, racist misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic, Right-Wing Anti-Environmentalist, Science Denying Neanderthal? If you're going to label a person, why do it half way?
@Timbo,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The lake is not a fact just because YOU say so, or even because YOU tell me that EVERYONE agrees there's a lake."
There is a lake. It meets all the definitions of a lake. Relevant experts on lakes all agree that you have a lake in front of the car. They even provide tests to test how much a lake we got here. Like:
Is it full of water? Check
Does is encompass measurable area that is larger than a pond? Check
If it is a lake full of water can I use it to irrigate my crops? Check
Is it deep enough to drown in? Check.
It is a lake and it presents a danger the libertarian and his passengers. QED.
"To be sure; it's always at least ten, but no more than say, 70 miles away."
Misinformation. The car drives on to the pier on the lake. Does it bother you at all that you act just like the caricature of the Libertarian?
"Because in the end, this isn't about climate, it's about "Social Justice" and "Sustainability" which are code words for "Command and control" and "redistribution".
Alarmist clap trap. Tell me, does it bother you at all to be in denial of the science? A denial that serves the interests of the trillion dollar fossil fuel industry?
"Right-Wing Anti-Environmentalist Science Denier?
How about mouth breathing, knuckle dragging, racist misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic, Right-Wing Anti-Environmentalist, Science Denying Neanderthal?"
If that is your preference...
Again, we have not reached the lake. The lake will always be an idea of a catastrophe waiting to happen. No one outside of God can tell us if there's really a lake in front of us or not. And I have just as many relevant experts telling me there is no lake as you have insisting there is. My relevant expert can beat up your relevant expert.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd if your not prepared to admit to the IPCC as a left leaning political organization with wealth redistribution on its mind, then I suggest you look up the meaning of the word denial before you use it in another sentence. For that matter look up "alarmist" as well.
@Timbo,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Again, we have not reached the lake."
Your making the same exact argument that the Libertarian did. He pretty much says, "No, worries! We are not dead yet." Not really the most intelligent decision you can make.
"The lake will always be an idea of a catastrophe waiting to happen."
That looks like ideology speaking not reason or facts. Fact: The lake is approaching -fast.
"No one outside of God can tell us if there's really a lake in front of us or not."
Sophistry. I am willing to bet it is a inch deep. Here is a bet for. I want you to hop in a car and accelerate at a brick wall. If you really do not think the brick wall is their or just question the existence of the brick wall then you will not ever apply the breaks. I will give you $10.00 for every 10 mph over 55mph you are at when you hit the brick wall. And no wearing of any of those government mandated seat belt.
I will of course provide specifications to be met for the brick wall and at what angle you must approach it at. Are we on?
"And I have just as many relevant experts telling me there is no lake as you have insisting there is. My relevant expert can beat up your relevant expert."
Funny the surveys of the relevant experts would contradict this assertion. I do believe the last survey of geophysicists was at 97% for the following two questions.
Is the Earth Warming?
Is it attributable to human activity.
Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change
http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf
This is a PDF download.
"And if your not prepared to admit to the IPCC as a left leaning political organization with wealth redistribution on its mind,..."
Well, no, it is not. It is a science organization. You are again invoking conspiracy theories.
"then I suggest you look up the meaning of the word denial before you use it in another sentence."
I did it had a picture of this libertarian approaching a brick wall at 65 Mph on it.
"For that matter look up "alarmist" as well."
I did and it cited people who worry about evil geophysicists ruling the world.
Good story and great after-posts....but one thing, you missed: "polar cities" as envisioned by James Lovelock in the UK and Danny Bloom in Taiwan, and illustrated now by Deng Cheng-hong in Taiwan, google Polar Cities Research Institute or Polar Cities Project to see the images of the real future might look like 30 generations from now. Scary, yet real. Be prepared, is all I can say. Happy to discuss ideas with anyone at danbloom at gmail
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI could post a link to a paper put together that, on its own, pretty much debunks the AGW (man-made global warming) story made up by the IPCC and 'scientific' organisations in Britain, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (one, in the USA, is actually been sued for fraud).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlthough, at the moment, i cant get on my emails so i can get the link.