A Challenge

I grew up in areas developed before traffic engineers lost track of the needs of humans and can remember well the quality of life and safety that has been lost to the automobile.  Visits to the remnants of similar areas in Asian cities has reconnected me with the importance of taking the best of what existed in those times and building on them after having lost our way for sixty years and created a massive worldwide agglomeration of unlivable communities and cities.

 I lived my early years in a “Motor City” (Detroit0 suburb without cul-de-sacs, wide radius turns or broad avenues.  Revisiting the area I found a neighborhood where everyone knew everyone, looked out for each other’s children and generally retained the same values that it had when it was first built in 1942.  The streets haven’t changed; speeding is almost impossible because they are narrow and in general the area meets the requirements of modern network design, and it dates from the beginning of World War II.

In Denver, we lived in the city although not downtown.  Again we had an environment that matched the sort of neighborhood one would want one’s kids to grow up in.  Single family homes, schools within easy walking distance, neighborhood grocery store, cleaners, doughnut shop, drugstore, etc.  Kids could be trusted to safely make their way to the Saturday matinee at the movie theatre when they were in first grade, etc.

Then, finally we lived in a small town of 1,700 people in the mountains.  A major transcontinental highway came right through the centre of town but it was only two lanes wide, leading to traffic jams during skiing season that were twenty kilometers long or more. But one didn’t fear for one’s life when crossing it.  The town was bypassed by a four-lane Interestate highway in 1959 ,opening up the Rockies to hordes of tourists while the town largely kept the original street layout from the late 19th century.

Even as I lived an idyllic life away from the city centre in communities that didn’t benefit from the latest fads in traffic engineering, Detroit was busily creating an uninhabitable environment: hugely wide streets and an environment they thought was appropriate for the seventh wealthiest city in the world which it was in 1950.  Today there are substantial parts of its inner suburbs that resemble war zones or have become ghost towns even as other suburbs remain amongst the wealthiest enclaves in the world.  The destruction wrought by poor decisions are almost incalculable.

Unfortunately, throughout Asia we see that by and large, today’s wealthy cities have learned nothing from the demise of Detroit and are repeating many of the same mistakes in the name of “progress” and as they do, they spend billions creating cityscapes that it will cost extra billions to correct.  Perhaps the greatest of all their errors is designing the cities around the assumption of automobile ownership in the new cities will track that of Japan, Europe and the U.S., i.e. designing for the past, not for the future; designing to make automobiles happy, not people.

Some of the problems with these new cityscapes:

• Hostile to pedestrians
• Few public streets
• Boring streetscapes
• No redundancy in route choices
• Few, broad streets

Quality of place exists from the air or automobile, but not from the sidewalk.

It doesn’t have to be that way.  Asia is full of areas that demonstrate what it takes to create human-centered cities.  Hanoi’s Hoan Kiem district is a case in point.

Walk through the streets of this area, ignore the fixable problems and it is quickly apparent that it is everything that most modern cities aren’t:

• it is joyously walkable
• it is well-connected even if it doesn’t have a rigid grid.
• The streetscapes are anything but boring
• Many, many route choices.
• Many narrow streets
• The streets are people-centred, not automobile-centred.
• Trees line every street.
• Blocks are short
• Buildings are well-ornamented and avoid starkitecture

Now Hoan Kiem is not idyllic, by any means, but it probably once was.  Three main things are needed to make it that way again:
Move the utility lines underground.
Replace the motorcycles and motorscooters with their electric counterparts.
Increase public transport frequency and options.

Oh, and wash all the exhaust soot from the buildings just as London did once it ceased using coal and its pea-soup fogs became a thing of the past.
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When you stop and think about it, that’s actually not a very tall order, even in a third world country.  And you can find areas like that in practically every Asian city of any age.  What is needed now is simply to rehabilitate what already exists

The sad thing is that there is virtually no interest in Asia for making new cities and neighborhoods livable although we’re surrounded with the remnants of wonderfully livable neighborhoods.  The area near Shinbashi station in Tokyo is a living museum of an ideal urban landscape but today it is a hidden gem in the midst of Tokyo’s urban blandness.

Pointing out these neighborhoods isn’t simply an exercise in sentimentalism; peak energy based on fossil fuels has arrived.  Populations continue to grow and building cities that depend on them is a road to nowhere. In fact, it is worse than a road to nowhere. They increase the demand for a decreasing resource.  Ironically, by doing this they hasten the day when they become utterly unlivable relics.  Asian cities must rebuild rebuild themselves for a tomorrow that grows organically from the citeis of yesterday, not build cities that are obsolete before they are even conceived. This is a challenge that they must take up or they will pay a bitter price for generations to come.