What do Manila and Rotterdam have in common? Nothing, where human-friendly mobility is concerned: In Manila, bicycle-riding is a dangerous endeavor, whereas in the Dutch city, cycling is a joy. So how do we create bikeable and walkable cities – in a word of active mobility – all over the world? The secret could lie in the realization that no mobility challenge is solely one of mobility: It’s also about public space, social programs, climate change, employment, and housing. And getting rid of silo mentality. A plea.
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In a recent work visit to Manila in the Philippines, we had a morning meeting scheduled. “The taxi will pick you up from the hotel one hour beforehand.” A full hour of driving? We expected a location outside the city, hoping to catch beautiful views from the car. When checking the destination, we were surprised to discover it took place in a nearby district, a mere seven kilometres away. “That’s ridiculous!” we thought. “Why sit in a car for an hour when we can cycle to the location much faster?” Back home in Rotterdam, a seven-kilometre trip is a no-brainer; thirty minutes of relaxed cycling does the trick. This was one reason we went with the Dutch Cycling Embassy to Manila – to export the great quality of life that a cycling city can create.
Sadly, charting the route in Manila demonstrated that taking a bicycle would be a dangerous expedition; there’s hardly any bicycle infrastructure in Manila, and cycling on urban highways is a suicide mission. Walking and public transit were also not options: Both would take one-and-a-half hours. We were stuck with the car.
Sitting in the slow-moving taxi in Manila, we saw no beautiful views of Luzon island – instead we saw a dystopia, traffic at a stand-still. Towers and giant malls have been built, but the public space is dull and uninviting. Roads, bridges, and highways have been constructed everywhere, yet it’s clear they fill quickly. The taxi driver told us that in recent years, driving in Manila has gotten much worse since so many people can afford to buy cars.
This is indeed an urban dystopia. Economically, people are improving, yet they can’t buy their way out of the crisis. Just like us that morning, they lack a sustainable choice for moving around. The rich and middle class will buy more cars and every year, suffer worse traffic. The poor will walk or cycle alongside this disaster. A lose-lose situation.
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Mobility is not only A to B, but creating C, D, and E
Work on urban mobility is, generally speaking, divided into two lines. The first is, “How do you get there?” It mainly concerns the planning and building of infrastructure (sidewalks, roads, bike lanes), and the vehicles that use them (cars, buses, bikes, e-scooters, and of course, our legs), allowing people to travel from A to B. To this end, we have seen progress. More and more cities understand that car infrastructure takes up too much space. Around the world, cities are introducing bicycle infrastructure, expanding sidewalks, and removing cars from city centers. But this is not enough, as it’s only one part of the urban mobility challenge. We already know that building more roads, updating bus lanes, improving traffic lights, or introducing e-scooters to the city won’t solve urban mobility issues. A city must work, in tandem, on the other challenge of mobility: “How do you group all destinations close together?” Streets, neighborhoods, and cities should allow the achievement of a lot without traveling far. When streets are places to play, meet, shop, and work, driving is not needed. In essence, this is dense, mixed-use urbanism that combines residential, commercial, cultural, institutional, and entertainment use on small urban scales.
As many an inspirational Instagram page quote tells you, “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” In urban mobility, this is truly the case. Transit via sustainable and active mobility is achieved only when destinations are closer. That’s why cities like Amsterdam, Paris, and Tel Aviv have such a high share of walking and cycling compared to the majority of their counterparts in North America. The former allow people to achieve a lot simply by walking around the corner, making it useless to take the car out of the garage.
The complexity of planning such places is left to the “how to get there” professionals. We are fascinated by new mobility schemes, hoping they will save us from ourselves. We focus on the easier question because the “how to get all the destinations together” question is just too complex. But great urban mobility is only the result of both efforts. Let’s focus on the journey, rather than the goal. Densify neighborhoods, introduce new uses, and work with local residents and businesses to create better public space. True, it’s much more complicated work, but that’s the only way we can save existing car-oriented cities.
The silo mentality is a car mentality
In 1913, Henry Ford and his then-young motor company introduced the assembly line. The idea is simple yet genius when it comes to efficiency and production: Instead of having one employee responsible for building the entire car, why not let each worker specialize in a specific task? In this way, making a car (or phone, laptop, or desk) is a rather simple process of progressively assembling the product. Unfortunately, it seems that city-making has also become an assembly line. Municipalities are divided into departments each responsible solely for one element of a city: infrastructure, housing, commerce, mobility, social issues, education, etc. These all work in silos, rarely sitting together (unless, of course, there is a dispute over responsibility). How can we expect organizing along these lines to create a mixed-use, dense, lively city?
A mixed-use, dense city is anything but siloed: It’s different people from all walks of life living together. It’s many individuals, in all their complexity, moving within a small footprint and creating harmony. It’s a “complex order,” as Jane Jacobs described great streets:
“This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance¬ – not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.”
– Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
The silo mentality from which our municipalities suffer reinforces further siloing. And silo cities are best for cars. Automobiles succeed where separation exists: houses on one side of town, offices on another. Pedestrians on sidewalks, cars on the road. Any potential surprise must be removed so that separation is absolute. We cannot undo this paradigm using these organizational strategies. As Albert Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
This is probably the biggest challenge in today’s city-making, and it requires true leadership and mental strength. Dismantling silos will mean that all of us must have less ego and decision power, but we’ll all benefit in the long run. During our own work, we see how difficult this is, but also how rewarding to get specialists from all around a city to work together.
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We recently contributed to the bicycle vision for Rotterdam. The project dealt, of course, with bicycle infrastructure and promotion, but beyond that, the vision was about promoting quality of life in the city. We acknowledged that the city had to invest more in infrastructure at the same time that different domains needed to become part of the narrative. The bicycle, as it touches so many aspects of life – mobility, health, public space, and sustainability – can bring all these domains together. All departments in the city should work to promote cycling and take advantage of a place that is built for active, sustainable mobility. The creation of local mobility hubs was proposed, to be built in neighborhoods and act as a new type of neighborhood center. The hubs will be places to meet neighbors, try new mobility options, park bicycles, learn about the neighborhood, develop professional and business skills concerning the bicycle, and much more. Imagine how many municipal departments, organizations, residents, and businesses could be affected by such a hub.
So the best way to create urban change and promote active mobility is to break up silos. No mobility challenge is solely a mobility issue: It also involves public space, social programs, climate change, employment, and much more. We must create a shared vision within cities and bring together departments to work on these visions. No more assembly-line cities.
In an ongoing series exploring the effects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative on the cities involved, our next stop is the port of Rotterdam in The Netherlands, which must deal with increasing competition from land and sea as a result of China’s rise.
After a third of its buildings were destroyed during the 1940 Nazi blitzkrieg invasion of The Netherlands, the Port of Rotterdam rose phoenix-like from the rubble to become the world’s busiest port by 1962.
Benefitting from its position at the entry point of Western Europe, a region that was (and, of course, continues to be) home to several of the world’s wealthiest countries, Rotterdam held this position for a remarkable stretch of over four decades, until it was finally overtaken in 2004, first by Singapore and then by the Chinese Port of Shanghai. Since then, it has fallen out of the top ten largest ports in the world and now lies eleventh behind eight Chinese ports, as well as the ports of Dubai and Singapore.
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This probably says as much about recent changes in China as it does about the fortunes of Rotterdam and Europe more broadly: China, a country with a population twice that of the whole of Europe, has merely begun to close the gap.
Even so, the trend is suggestive of a general direction of travel that’s worth exploring.
A big port with little to gain
As previous articles in this series have shown, China’s Belt and Road Initiative has largely targeted cities which will can be easily integrated into China’s trade routes and can directly benefit from the investment and technical and logistical expertise that China offers. As a port which was already developed, and already supported by a prosperous national economy, Rotterdam has relatively less to gain from Chinese support.
That said, the railway-based “Belt” half of the Belt and Road Initiative is likely to have at least some indirect impact on Rotterdam’s role in transnational trade.
From centre to periphery
Rail’s main advantage is that it offers a middle ground: less expensive (though slower) than air freight and faster (though more expensive) than ship freight. Whereas the journey from China to Rotterdam takes a ship well over a month to complete, and on average around 55 days, the same trip can now be completed within two weeks by rail. This middle ground is also achieved with markedly less carbon emissions, something which will become increasingly important in the century to come.
The trouble this poses for Rotterdam is that it lies on the very periphery of China’s budding transcontinental rail network, something which is underlined by the fact that other European nations had already conducted rail trade with China for several years before the first freight train from China arrived in Rotterdam on July 23 2015.
What’s more, the frequency of trains to Rotterdam remains considerably lower than it is for other European cities east of Rotterdam. As an article in the Dutch newspaper AD explains, while the number of trains that travel between China and Europe is now 24 each week, many of these don’t go beyond Germany, mostly ending up in Duisburg in Germany and other cities in Central and Eastern Europe.
This suggests that, as the rail network continues to develop, Rotterdam could become a progressively less essential source of international trade for other countries in the European heartland.
Panic in the press
This is certainly the fear expressed in the Dutch press, which has become increasingly panicked about China’s infrastructural development in recent years, seeing it as a direct threat to the country’s economy, and a general threat to the West’s global pre-eminence.
Surveying the facts on the ground, however, it’s hard not to conclude that Rotterdam will actually probably be fine. It’s a relatively wealthy city in a very wealthy country, whose diverse and highly developed economy is more than capable of riding the wave of change brought about by China’s global infrastructural development, taking advantage of new and improved connections with the European heartland and beyond.
The decline of Western global pre-eminence is very real, but really only significant because of how long it took to happen. So long as policymakers and port management swallow their pride and make the best of the new situation, nothing will change for countries that once stood out because the rest of the world had been held back by centuries of Western imperialism.
The new Rotterdam Centraal Station could be considered the latest addition to the city’s squares. To meet the complexities of the site, the team of architects and landscape architects developed a design that conceives of the station as an open space rather than a building. A continuous band of pavement runs through the entire structure connecting the new station with the city.
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“An allergic reaction against closed terminal buildings”
In the course of the last 10 years a new iconic Rotterdam Centraal Station arose at the place where before a humble city station was located. Responsible for the design is Team CS, a cooperation between Benthem Crouwel Architects, MVSA Meyer en Van Schooten Architecten and West 8. Team CS approached the new station complex not as a terminal building, but as a square. “All team members had an allergic reaction against closed terminal buildings,” Adriaan Geuze, landscape architect and partner of West 8 urban design & landscape architecture explains. Conceiving of the station as a square helped to master the complexities of the commission and offer Rotterdam and its citizens a safe and comfortable urban environment.
Multiple complexities
Rotterdam Centraal Station is a highly complex project for many different reasons. To begin with, the building ensemble itself is a transfer point where different modes of transport like train, metro, bus, tram, taxi, bicycle and car as well as pedestrian traffic require their own logical space. Commercial spaces, offices, areas for travellers’ services and large parking areas for cars and bicycles needed to be integrated in this tangle of infrastructures. Furthermore, there are the users of the complex, a diverse group of people comprising commuters, tourists and other visitors, and the people who live in Rotterdam. They all have different demands. Commuters know their daily routes in their sleep, while guests from out of town might feel nervous about finding their way into the city centre.
Drastic rise of daily users
Rotterdam Centraal Station sees itself confronted by an even more complex future. Prognoses predict a growth of the number of travellers from currently 110,000 per day to 320,000 in 2025. The projected drastic rise of daily users is partly linked to the plan to make Rotterdam a stop in the European high-speed train network. As a result, platforms had to be widened, as well as the existing 8-metre-wide underpass that connects the platforms and would never have had sufficient capacity for the multitudes of passengers expected in the future.
Not only spatial but also psychological barrier
This narrow underpass was the only connection between the two parts of the city that were brutally divided by the extensive railway area. How to negotiate this divide? Provenierswijk, the district situated north of the station, is a quiet and green 19th-century residential area. The more dynamic city centre is located south of the station. The architects felt called upon to create a more convenient connection between the two parts. In the original station the barrier that people needed to overcome when moving from one side to the other was not only spatial, but also psychological. In the 1990s the station and its underpass became notorious as a location for petty crime, such as muggings, harassments of various kind and drug dealing. The Rotterdam city government tried to solve the problem by proclaiming a ban on public assembly, but never succeeded in dispelling the atmosphere of notoriety and lurking danger.
Leaving intact some of the structures
It became clear that the commission of Team Centraal Station (CS) involved more than solving mere spatial issues. The architects and their collaborators had to deliver a design that would turn the station and its surroundings into a safe and comfortable public space. The decision to start from scratch – demolishing the old station and designing an entirely new one – could only be partially realised due to the fact that the construction work had to be carried out while trains kept running at their regular speed. This was the reason why Team CS chose to leave intact some of the structures, like locations of platforms and the metro entrances.
Smart solution to bring order to a chaotic situation
By contrast, an initial plan for the whole area by Alsop Architects, who presented a grand-scale development with shiny towers in the shape of champagne glasses, had been rejected by the Dutch government as being too expensive. After Team CS won the contest that followed the rejection of the Alsop proposal, all eyes were upon them. They had to come with a smart solution to bring order to a chaotic situation.
Read more in Topos 91 – Urban Squares and Promenades.
