Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (15 page)

Designed for Speed

Suburban road designs such as the one shown here lead to more accidents, since drivers tend to go as fast as designs permit.
(
Above
: John Michlig;
inset
: Mark Kent)

(In a cruel irony for suburbanites, these fire-truck-friendly roads have not made a whit of difference when it comes to actually putting out fires. Just as many people die in fires in new, wide-street suburbs as were dying in old, narrow-street neighborhoods. Part of the problem is that sprawl’s wide streets and big lots take up so much space that cities can’t afford to build fire stations close by, so it takes fire trucks longer to reach each blaze.)

The Confusing Thing About Tomorrow Is That It Will Be Different from Today

The cognitive error that may have had more influence than any other on the shape of our cities is known as presentism: we let what we see and feel today bias our views of the past and future. This commonly expresses itself as a tendency to assume that the ways we think and act will not change as time passes.

Imagine being stuck in commuter traffic on one of the three interstate highways that cut through Atlanta, Georgia—one of the world’s most dispersed urban regions—back in the 1960s. It might seem perfectly obvious to the commuter you that the pragmatic way to ease the journey would be for the city or state to build more roads. For decades, engineers and politicians have shared this view. Atlanta was encircled by a new beltway—known as the Perimeter—in 1969, and highway expansion programs continued for more than thirty years.

The problem was that new asphalt changed the collective mind of the city. It caused thousands of people to regard the road differently and behave differently. Nondrivers saw open lanes and started driving. Existing drivers altered their routes. Other drivers were inspired to move their homes or work farther away. Meanwhile, property developers took advantage of newly proximate land, offering everyone what seemed like a chance to live or work in the landscape of dispersal.

Given its history of inequity and racial tension, antiurban biases run deep in Atlanta. Historian Kevin Kruse has linked the city’s rapid suburbanization to the civil rights movement: when white segregationists lost their battle in cities, they used suburban retreat as a subtle but effective means of insulating themselves from black people. But the impact of the highway explosion was far more dramatic than its origins—it’s a pattern that now shapes every resident’s experience. The more highway Georgians built, the more thinly people of every color spread their lives across the Georgia hills. Then, like dry streambeds in a storm, those new highway lanes filled up. The region came to exhibit a classic case of what transportation analysts call induced traffic, a phenomenon in which new highway lanes invariably clog up with hundreds of thousands of cars driven by new drivers on their way to new neighborhoods fed by new road capacity, a tendency that creates entirely new traffic jams faster than the time it takes to finish paying off a new car.
*
The average time it takes for new urban highway capacity to fill up with new demand? Five to six years.

Now, although it has bloated to twelve lanes in many sections, Atlanta’s Perimeter still grinds to a standstill during peak hours.
*
The driver who once prayed for congestion-easing highway lanes and got them is still stuck in traffic. Through the windshield view of presentism, he may have forgotten the futility of his old wish for more road space, and now he might well demand that engineers build a few more lanes to solve the problem.

Thinking About Crisis

The errors in individual and collective judgment described above are frustrating and sobering, but they are also trivial—at least when compared with the dangers posed by cognitive blocks that prevent us from recognizing the connection between the way we live in cities and the massive risks now facing our world and our species.

If you don’t give a damn about the environment or your descendants, then feel free to skip to the next chapter. Just remember that the urban innovations I will later propose in the name of happiness may also save the world.

Here are some things we know:

The earth’s atmosphere is warming at an unprecedented pace, mainly as a result of human activity causing greenhouse gas emissions. On this point there is agreement from every peer-reviewed journal on the subject, and from the national scientific academies of Canada, China, Brazil, India, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Australia, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the United States, and dozens of other countries,
^†
as well as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which synthesizes the work of the biggest group of scientists ever to focus on a single issue. Which is to say that to the very best of human knowledge, we are blowing so much methane, ozone, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide into the air that we are throwing the delicate system governing climate and weather out of whack. This we know: climate change is likely to cause more heat waves, droughts, intense storms, cyclones, and tornadoes; the inundation of lowland cities; the spread of infectious diseases; crop failures; and famine that may collectively kill hundreds of millions of people and impoverish many more, not to mention the disappearance of 15 to 37 percent of species by 2050. We know the change has already begun. We know that the longer it takes us to change our ways, the more the earth’s surface will warm and the more extreme the effects of climate change will be. We know all these things with enough certainty to keep scientists and global geopolitical strategists awake at night. Certainly the knowledge has alarmed the insurance industry, whose payouts from weather-related natural disasters quadrupled between 1980 and 2009.

At the same time, we know with great certainty that we are consuming plants, animals, soil, minerals, water, and energy at a faster rate than the planet can replenish them. We are using so much of the earth’s raw material that we are dooming future generations to poverty and hardship. It would take nine planets to supply all we needed if everyone ate, built, traveled, and threw stuff away as Americans do. It’s like maxing out all our credit cards without ever depositing more money in the bank.

This is not a theoretical problem, especially considering that the resource we are running out of most quickly happens to be the one cities currently depend on the most: oil. The majority of forecasters, including those who advise energy companies and military strategists in Western nations, agree that the days of cheap oil are over. Most agree that we will hit peak production of conventional oil sometime in the next twenty years. Oil prices will go through the roof well before then, as Western nations compete with such emerging economies as Brazil, China, and India for fuel. Chinese automakers expect their compatriots to be buying forty million cars a year by 2020—more than three times the American market. The U.S. Joint Forces Command predicts massive energy shortfalls.

Another thing we know: the twin crises of climate change and resource scarcity are going to hit cities especially hard. Sprawling cities experience nearly twice as many extreme heat waves as compact centers, in part because of the vast extent of their paved surfaces. All that hot air causes more smog, which exacerbates problems such as asthma. More heat waves, like the ones that killed more than seven hundred people in Chicago in 1995 or seventy thousand people across Europe in 2003, are on their way. Urbanites, especially the old and the young, are going to suffer from more heat stress and respiratory illness.

We know that some cities will have to absorb millions of climate refugees. Services will become increasingly expensive. Our public and private transportation systems are almost entirely dependent on fossil fuels. Cities won’t be able to afford to fund buses to ultra-low-density neighborhoods. These problems will not be confined to slum cities in Africa. People living in sprawl as it is currently configured in North America will be in for a harrowing ride. Distance will no longer be an abstraction. Everyday destinations will be even more expensive and time-consuming to reach, and if they are too dependent on long-distance customers, they may simply disappear.

All these things we know and sometimes acknowledge, yet we build and live in urban systems that actually heighten the threats. With about half the world’s population, cities are responsible for three-quarters of energy consumption and 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and the dispersed city is the most wasteful of them all. Detached suburban homes gobble up local farmland and are harder to heat and cool than apartments and town houses. By pushing apart buildings and land uses, sprawl makes it almost impossible to benefit from efficient local energy or transit systems. Even the suburban lawn is a threat: gasoline-powered lawn mowers emit eleven times as much air pollution as new cars. On average, suburbanites pump out about twice the greenhouse gas emissions of people living in dense city centers.

Any clear-eyed analysis confirms that this city and the way we inhabit it pose a direct threat to the well-being of the planet and, arguably, the future of our species. And any rational assessment of well-being should account for risks faced by our children and their descendants. The logical response to these converging crises would be to alter our individual and collective behavior in order to stave off disaster. It demands using less energy and raw materials. It means moving more efficiently and moving shorter distances. It means living closer together and sharing more spaces, walls, and vehicles. It means collecting experiences rather than objects.

Yet in the face of clear threats, most national governments, most cities, and most people have failed to take meaningful action to change their ways. National governments have been unable to agree on a plan that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to avoid a long, grinding climate disaster. Cities have continued to sprawl. People like you and me may recycle our waste and purchase more efficient cars, but few of us have taken anything close to the footprint-reducing action required by the scale of the crisis. We are held back in part by the autopoieisis of urban systems that have their own momentum and staying power. But we are also held back by our own imperfect minds.

It would be hard to design a crisis better suited to provoke inaction than climate change, say psychologists. Many people are simply ignorant of the problem. For some, the science simply conflicts too starkly with our worldview to accept: if you believe that only God or Mother Nature can change the climate, then no amount of evidence is going to convince you otherwise.
*
But for those who are aware of the science, the dangers are simply not salient enough to trigger action. They feel so remote, so far in the future, that we discount them. Like a chalkboard covered with mathematical equations, climate science does not scream at us in the night or sting like a bee or actually burn many of us, at least not yet. And while visceral natural disasters such as hurricanes Katrina or Sandy are increasingly linked to the greenhouse effect, the causal chain is, for most of us, as hard to distinguish as water vapor in the sky. Meanwhile, there has been a concerted effort by oil companies, lobbyists, and free-market think tanks to convince us that (a) the crisis is not real, and (b) action to tackle it will destroy our prosperity and lead to years of hardship and misery.

Not even a world-class guilt trip will move us. “People don’t respond to campaigns based on guilt and fear. They have a hard time linking their actions to costs far in the future. And they resent governments that fine or punish their behavior, even when they know it is unsustainable,” explained Alex Boston, who advises cities on climate and energy policy for the engineering firm Golder.

The result: a perfect calm of inaction. How can we change course when faced with such psychological barriers to action?

The solution lies in appealing to pure self-interest.

The sustainable city has got to promise more happiness than the status quo. It has got to be healthier, higher in status, more fun, and more resilient than the dispersed city. It has got to lure us closer together rather than pushing us apart. It has got to reward people for making efficient choices when they move around. It has got to be a city of hedonic satisfaction, of distilled joys that do not cost the world. The city shapes our decisions. It always has. So, just as the dispersed city limits our choices and pushes us to stretch our lives, the world-saving city must embody lessons from behavioral economics to ensure that the good choice and the happy choice can be the same.

This city is already being born—or rather, pieces of it exist in fragments and threads in cities around the world. It is appearing in downtowns where residents are sick of accepting discomforts off-loaded from those who choose long-distance living. It finds life in acts of neighborhood rebellion. Sometimes it’s an accident. Occasionally it comes in broad strokes made by powerful people in moments of civic audacity. It rarely emerges from earnest concerns about climate change or biodiversity or distant tragedy. Yet that nascent city proves that in the pursuit of happiness, we might build the city that will save the world. That is the story I will tell in the rest of this book.