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 large cities across the world, electric scooters and similar vehicles are on the rise and seem to herald a new age of ecological mobility. Or is this just a flash in the pan? So far, the vast majority of cities remain car-centered, regardless of whether moving or stationary traffic is concerned. Many of them fail to even provide sufficient parking space for bikers. So, is there any room for electric scooters anyway? At this moment, they definitely attract attention as trip hazards in public space. The root of the problem is – once again – the car, as mobility researcher Andreas Knie explains, taking Germany as a case in point.
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Who would have thought that grown men are prepared to use a scooter to get around the city. And enjoy doing so to boot! Propelled by electric engines, the new vehicles are called e-scooters. They are almost noiseless, run extremely well and using them is as easy as pie. Fantastic, one is tempted to say. But this does not apply to Madrid, Zurich, Paris or Berlin.
In these cities, as well as other places, the new scooters were greeted by a hail of protests and criticisms. People were wondering why these devices were even needed. Walking would make so much more sense, and anyway they were cluttering up sidewalks and developed a habit of obnoxiously being in the way. In addition, the truly inconsiderate were using scooters in pairs and would become a menace to the elderly. Serious accidents were reported; in most cases the drivers had been intoxicated and suffered severe injuries. The media response is impressive the world over, but this is precisely what is so confounding about it. Why do so many people get upset about the new vehicles? In principle, things have been taken care of. In Europe new regulations, specifically tailored to this new means of transportation, were adopted; after all scooters are motorized vehicles. Familiar drunk-driving rules apply and riding a scooter on a sidewalk is prohibited. People could be fined and punished for contraventions.
Germany as a paradise for car lovers
To be sure, we frequently come across scooters obstructing pedestrian space or bike paths in the most impossible manner. They seem utterly abandoned as if the drivers were summoned by some extra-terrestrial force and we needed to worry about their whereabouts. What such reactions elucidate, however, is the fact how much the rules and customs of an automobile society have become ingrained in our thinking and how much trouble we actually have trying to think differently when it comes to traffic and mobility. We get upset when scooters are parked on sidewalks. Indeed, parking them on the road is not allowed and thus these additional vehicles have to share with pedestrians a space that was already scarce and had recently become further populated by shared-use bicycles. The resulting competition of uses that many experts and commentators have pointed out, has led to frustration and anger. The real cause of the problem, however, lies elsewhere: roads are exclusively reserved for cars, not only when they are being driven but above all even when they are parked. We have become so used to this situation that we don’t even become aware of it anymore. It may be useful to recall that historically allowing private cars to be parked in public space is a quite recent phenomenon. This is especially true for Germany, a country whose population believes cars to be part of its DNA. Far from it! In the very country that today is viewed as a paradise for car lovers, it took a series of legal battles to carve out public space for automobiles. It was only in 1966 that Germany’s supreme administrative court legalized the public parking of private motorized vehicles. Prior to that, this was forbidden. In Berlin, the country’s largest city, you couldn’t even get a permit for your car unless you were able to prove that you disposed of a private parking space. Permanent parking in public space was simply not legal. Reading the 1966 court decision, which is basically representative of the views of all other European countries at that time, is highly interesting for its line of thinking and its language: “Since the beginning of the 1950s, the degree of motorization has increased to where there is, as of 1st July 1963, one car for every eight inhabitants, with a further steep increase to be expected. In the course of this dramatic development, the automobile has become an object of daily use for all parts of the population”, the court wrote. Today the ratio in Germany – excepting the very old and children – is one person per 1.5 automobiles.
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In its 1966 opinion, the court further wrote: “This development has not just been tolerated but fostered by the state. The prologue to the Reich Road Traffic Regulations of 1934 reads: ‘The promotion of the automobile is the goal that this ordinance is intended to serve.’ … The increase of motorized traffic has vastly outpaced, however, the construction of roads and in particular of garages and parking spaces, which the Reich Garage Regulations seek to help provide in order to relieve public circulation spaces from stationary automobiles. The – inevitable – consequence is that a large part of motorists find themselves compelled to use public streets for everyday parking in the manner of street-light garages. Any observation of the actual traffic situation in municipalities across the Federal Republic will confirm this daily experience.”
The statement of the court’s majority opinion closes with a remarkable statement: “This proves that the parking of automobiles in public streets over night and on Sundays and public holidays corresponds to citizens’ mobility needs and constitutes a fundamentally customary and acceptable practice. It is therefore a form of parking as defined [by the Road Traffic Regulations].”
This court decision, symptomatic of the development of cities across the world, demonstrates two things: for one, the concept of parking cars in public areas was not originally part of the scheme of automobile motorization. Furthermore, the phrasing of the court decision provides hints at how the law could be changed: when governments declare their intention to comply with certain goals, such as the Paris Climate Goals for example, and the bicycles, scooters and other non-motorized for-rent vehicles require more space than expected, the conclusion to draw will be to use the public space for this overflow of vehicles. If many users do so, sooner or later the practice will be legalized – a line of argument that provides interesting perspectives for environmental movements such as Fridays for Future or Extinction Rebellion.
The expansion of sharing systems has reached the limits
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This is a point we have not yet reached, however. In the current state of affairs, it is private cars that occupy the public space, with their operational time on average amounting to only 8% while 92% of a car’s lifecycle are spent in stationary position. Scooters, bicycles and non-motorized for-rent vehicles are forced to share the remaining public space. While this disparity is the cause of much frustration, the resulting conflicts should be carried out in a politically prudent rather than a gruff and non-empathic manner. What do we actually know about the behavior of users of e-scooter and other sharing products, apart from the fact that they are perceived as a “nuisance”? In terms of verifiable, authoritative knowledge we do not have much to show for at this point. What has been discernible so far is the fact that such vehicles tend to be rented as well as parked particularly near public traffic junctions. Proportionally, their users are more often subscribers to monthly or annual public transport passes. While for some interested observers, tourists still seem to be the dominant pioneer group, slowly but surely, and without getting much attention, a type of use pattern is emerging towards which the operators’ calculations had been geared, namely trips to and from the next available traffic junction. By offering service from door to door, sharing systems can compensate for the systemic drawback of overground and underground rail systems. The next difficulty to be confronted, however, is the fact that the expansion of sharing systems – whose services are still niche products – has already reached its limits. The available space on our narrow sidewalks is clearly insufficient. In addition, the business models that are being used lack a firm basis. E-scooter providers are currently still well-financed owing to risk capital, but this source of funding is likely to dry up by next year already. The core of the issue is that road traffic regulations are centered around the use of public space by private cars.
The cities of Europe are still caught up in the heritage of the Athens Charter of 1933, a vision of urban development based on separating the disorderly structures of the city into functional sectors of “living,” “working” and “leisure.” The sectors were to be geographically far removed from each other and connected by the automobile as a fast and flexible means of transport. Lamentably, this type of urban planning produced cities that were reduced to transfer spaces. Even if the removal of such compartmentalized urban structures and a concomitant reinvention of the city has been pursued for a while, the legal order and the primary definition of traffic space as an instrument for overcoming distances have remained in place and stand in the way of ecological and sustainable mobility concepts across the world. Commercial providers are usually not conversant with the existing legal system, and anyone wanting to make a profit by renting vehicles in public space, first has to find the space needed for them and will pay even higher prices for it than private users. Granting cars priority when it comes to the allocation of public space may have been a good idea in the 1950s, but it no longer is today. Compared to private cars, all sharing systems are burdened by high costs that usually cannot be recouped through ongoing operations. Only very few cities have made possible rather limited exceptions and support sharing schemes. A breakthrough has not happened so far. On the contrary, there are indications that the boom is already subsiding. BMW and Daimler have announced their withdrawal from the market and want to concentrate on a few large cities. Others are likely to follow suit. If this scenario comes true, there will once again be peace and quiet on our streets, a peace of the graveyard one is tempted to add.
Mobility at the next level: More and more metropolitan areas are discovering cable cars as a means of transport in inner cities. Pioneers in this regard are conurbations in Bolivia and Mexico, which are already showing how its possible to move through urban areas far removed from the noise and stress of the streets and traffic jams. Especially where cities are growing, numbers of commuters are increasing and existing transport systems are reaching their limits, cable cars could establish themselves as a new form of environmentally friendly mobility.
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Urban areas are growing and encountering new challenges. Cities are getting louder and louder, traffic is increasing, streets are getting more congested and the air is getting more polluted. These are all factors that affect people’s quality of life. More and more cities around the world are therefore looking for alternatives to cars, buses and trains in order to find answers to their traffic problems. Planners are increasingly advocating inner-city cable car systems as a means of mass transport: What has primarily been used in mountainous areas to open up valleys is now beginning to provide traffic relief in cities as well.
Cable cars around the world
Cable cars can connect nodes within transport networks and expand a city’s transport infrastructure, for example by linking rail networks on the ground or extending tram lines that don’t go far enough. They are therefore considered an ideal complement to existing mobility systems and can solve urban challenges at a new level. Examples in South America show that cable cars can help to prevent traffic gridlock: The Colombian city of Medellín has successfully installed cable cars as a means of transport since the turn of the century, and the Bolivian capital La Paz and its neighbouring city El Alto now have the longest inner-city cable car network in the world, which is over 30km long. In Taipei (Taiwan), a 4km-long cable car has been running from an underground station to the entrance of the zoo since 2007. 24,000 passengers use the system everyday, which adds up to 2,400 people per hour in each direction of travel.
London has also successfully solved some of its traffic challenges through the use of a cable car: Since June 2012 visitors have been able to glide across the Thames at a height of almost 90 metres. Work on the “Air Line” took just under a year, and it now connects Greenwich with the Royal Docks, offering views of the Olympic Park, Canary Wharf Finance Centre and Thames Barrier flood control structure. Built for the 2012 Olympic Games in order to link the various Olympic arenas, the cable car was subsequently made available to commuters and tourists. During his first ride on the cable car, London’s Mayor Boris Johnson enthused that he felt like Yuri Gagarin. Everyday passengers silently float over the United Kingdom’s capital city, leaving the noise and hecticness of the streets behind.
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Urban cable car boom
A big advantage of cable cars is also a reduction in nitrogen oxide pollution compared to cars, buses and trains. Another important advantage is speed: Cable cars can travel at 21km per hour, which buses cannot manage during rush hour, and even trams only reach a speed 19km per hour. Construction and operation of cable cars is also more cost-effective than trams or underground trains: The first cable car line in Medellín – which has more than 7 million passengers per year – supposedly paid for itself within a year. The global leader in cable car construction is the manufacturer Doppelmayr. The Austrian company from the Vorarlberg had record sales of 935 million euros during the 2018/19 financial year. “Demand is currently high in South and Central America, but there are also some interesting projects in France and Italy, for example in Rome and Milan,” explains Thomas Pichler, managing director of the Austrian company. “We see cable cars primarily as feeder lines to larger public transport systems. In Mexico City, we are currently building a cable car line that will serve as an extended arm to one of the city’s largest transportation hubs,” says Pichler. Such solutions are being discussed in Germany as well. In Trier, a fast public transport connection is currently being sought between the city centre and the university on the other side of the Moselle. Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Munich are also thinking about solving their traffic problems with inner-city cable cars: An urban cable car boom in times of climate change.
Mexico’s capital is a complex and contradictory place. As the saying here goes, there is not one Mexico City, there are many Mexico Cities. Indeed, sprawling shantytowns coexist with gated communities. Fourhour commutes are a reality for many, while helipads crown developments for the uber-rich. The metropolis’ history is equally surreal and tumultuous. Once the heart of the Aztec civilization, it has since seen waves of colonizers come and go. But over the course of half a millennium, it has become accustomed to ongoing conflicts and crises and has developed an incredible resilience. In the face of countless challenges including inequality, pollution, crime and corruption, the megalopolis has learned to bounce back and life continues unceasingly with will power and vitality that will stop at nothing.
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While the country wrestles with the increasingly gruesome violence spurred by the nation’s drug war, Mexico’s vibrant capital seems to dance to its own beat. Forget what you think you know about “el monstruo”, as the city has been known in the past, and you will be surprised to find a cultural epicentre bursting at the seams with fresh, raw energy.
“A cultural epicentre bursting at the seams with fresh, raw energy.”
Chefs are cooking up a new culinary movement by remixing age-old pre-hispanic recipes. The city’s flourishing contemporary art scene has led many to call it the next Berlin. And a new generation of architects is pursuing an architecture that is both contemporary and timeless, Mexican in its extraordinary sensuality and material sensitivity, yet by no means folkloric. Add to that a veritable renaissance in the film, fashion and design scenes and it becomes easy to understand why young creatives have started to stream in from all corners of the world. Key to Me-Mo – as this “Mexican Moment” has been affectionately dubbed – is the rediscovery of a number of decaying historic neighbourhoods located adjacent to the old city centre. A devastating 8.1-magnitude earthquake in 1985, exacerbated by the fact that the city is built on the unstable and sinking ground of a dried-out lake bed, had killed more than 3,000 and led many to relocate from these areas to the city’s outskirts in search of the safety of the bedrock. In the following years, insecurity led to an increase in gated communities. Urban life became more and more segregated.
Since then, however, the city has gone through a catharsis. In recent years, neighbourhoods such as La Condesa with its stunning Art Deco architecture and lush parks have been rediscovered and are in a process of reinvention. In the eclectic colonia Roma dilapidated French-style mansions from the turn of the last century have been retrofitted and transformed into art galleries and restaurants. The municipality’s investment in upgrading public space has breathed new life into these barrios’ plazas and tree-lined boulevards. While 15 years ago cycling in the city was unthinkable there is now an abundance of bike-sharing schemes and use of the automobile is being disincentivized. The rehabilitation of these central districts goes hand in hand with their redensification. In a sense, the metropolis’ seemingly endless sprawl has reached its physical limits, a necklace of mountains and volcanoes, and the city has started to fold back on itself.
“The metropolis’ seemingly endless sprawl has reached its physical limits.”
About six years ago, the government introduced zoning modifications that combat urban sprawl. While applaudable in principle, this shift in policy opened the floodgates for high-rise office towers like the ones popping up relentlessly along the city’s principal avenue Reforma. Mono-programmatic ghettos for ultrawealthy corporations, they have exacerbated traffic problems and put a significant strain on the city’s service infrastructure. Luckily though, private actors have started to step up to the challenge of sustainable densification. Young developers with a keen passion for architecture are championing the adaptive reuse and extension of historic properties.
“The city centre is virtually bursting with the energy of the reinvention.”
Their projects are highly dense despite being low- to mid-rise and cater to a more tenable mix of use and income. The urban model of radiating growth is thus being challenged by a new ideal: one of restoring, adapting and upgrading the historic urban fabric. As a consequence, the city centre is virtually bursting with the energy of the reinvention. The main beneficiaries of this tendency are of yet a privileged elite. While it remains to be seen whether the more than 20 million inhabitants outside of this gentrification bubble will benefit from this new urbanity, there is optimism in the air. New government incentives are targeting corruption and pollution while poverty is being countered by the growth of the country’s middle class. Give it some time and the Mexican spirit of persistence might just deliver.
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Max von Werz is a German architect who has lived in Mexico City since 2014. He studied at the Architectural Association in London and after gaining extensive work experience with David Chipperfield Architects and Tatiana Bilbao Estudio, established his own architecture practice in 2013 with a particular interest in adaptive reuse, housing and projects related to the arts.
Read this Metropolis Explained and other articles in topos 110.
Climate targets? That was something we were trying to address, wasn’t it? It’s been five years since the world community in Paris committed itself to the 2°C, or better still 1.5°C, target. And yet we are emitting CO2 as if there were no tomorrow. And the carbon clock is ticking louder and louder. Natalie Sauer, a French-British environmental journalist, takes a look at Great Britain, where the next UN climate conference will take place in November 2020 in Glasgow, Scotland. And what is Boris Johnson doing? He shows no sign of embarking on the green revolution that’s needed to show any sort of climate leadership.
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Would you board a plane if the captain told you there was only a 50 per cent chance of surviving?
By the time I submit this article to the editor we will be a mere 7 years, 11 months, 3 days, 23 hours and 9 minutes away from using up the carbon budget to limit global heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. That is only around 0.4° more than where we currently find ourselves, a temperature at which a sea of fire has engulfed Australia and killed an estimated one billion animals. Save for the advent of risky, carbondrawing technologies, the greenhouse gases we inject into the atmosphere will linger there and alter the climate for at least 10,000 years. Does any previous crisis in human history compare to the present moment? It’s a rhetorical question, because there are none. And yet the scale of the threat is simply not being addressed by the few people who have the power to force major change.
In November in my own British backyard, Boris Johnson’s newly elected government will host the most important climate summit since Paris. Countries will be expected to hike their national climate targets, as we are currently heading for an increase in warming of 3.4°C by the end of the century. And yet, Johnson shows no sign of embarking on the green revolution that is needed to show climate leadership. Much of the government’s climate boasts are empty talk. Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg remind us that the 2050 net-zero target enshrined into law by the UK provides us with at least a 50 per cent chance of capping warming to 1.5°C – should all state signatories stick to it. As the argument goes, would you board a plane if the captain told you there was only a 50 per cent chance of surviving? Sadly, this government doesn’t appear likely to hit the underwhelming targets it has set itself. It is persisting with the ecocidal project of expanding Heathrow airport and has come under fire from its own climate watchdog, the Committee on Climate Change, for failing to advance any meaningful proposals on home insulation or energy efficiency. Worse, new legislation seeks to water down energy performance standards in building regulations by scrapping what is known as the Fabric Energy Efficiency Standard, a move Joe Giddings, the co-founder of the Architects Climate Action Network (ACAN), has called a “massive disappointment”. It’s not as if the Brits hadn’t seen this coming. An investigation by the Desmog blog showed the Conservative Party received £5 million from supporters of climate science denial, with Boris Johnson receiving most of these donations. Along with UKIP, Johnson was the only leader to ignore the country’s preelection climate debate in December. As the Prime Minister now cosies up to Donald Trump in a bid to secure a trade deal, the state looks like it is part of the problem, rather than the solution. So, where does this leave citizens seeking a safe future?
To begin with, we must abandon any illusions that electoral politics, abetted by media conglomerates who are overtly hostile to structural change, will provide the action we need on time. While continuing to pressure central government, it falls to ordinary citizens to bring about a cultural shift in climate consciousness and action at the local level. State and town initiatives in Trump’s America go some way in showing how it can be done, with both California and Hawaii pledging carbon neutrality by 2045. But community alternatives, as Extinction Rebellion has rightly pointed out, must go beyond the illusions of green growth capitalism. The idea that we can consume and produce more than ever before while decreasing our use of resources and decarbonizing through efficiency gains is all but a myth. Architects around the globe have a duty to push for more down-to-earth alternatives. Aside from the imperative of spearheading affordable, low-carbon and climate-resilient homes, I see two other battles for the architects’ community to fight. One is to oppose the rush towards “smart”, automated cities, whose voracious consumption of mineral resources is paving the way to horrors like deep-sea mining. The second battle involves questioning the very concept of urbanisation. By 2050, 75 per cent of the world’s population will be living in cities – up from 50 per cent today, according to research by University College London. Both urban construction and dwelling is associated with carbon emissions, however, with the urban half of the world’s population accounting for 75 per cent of emissions. That trend is increasingly driving global supply chains that are highly exposed to climate shocks. Both of these moves would also begin to adapt communities to climate disasters – or in the case of the UK, floods and food insecurity. The carbon clock is ticking.
NATALIE SAUER is a French-British environmental journalist with an interest in climate politics and environmental health. A former reporter at Climate Home News, her work has also been published in Le Monde Diplomatique, Politico, AFP and The Ecologist. She lives down and out in London and Paris.
The “Opinion” and other articles can be found in topos 110 – as print version or as e-paper.
