The challenge
You look out of the window and you see congested streets.
How can we give back the public realm to the people, instead of the
cars ?
By 2050, two-thirds of humanity will live in urban areas.
Cities are huge magnets to people. We can forget about saying that we
have to stop the growth of cities, we have to manage that growth and we
have to direct that population growth into forms that can be better
serviced, more sustainably, with less use of resources, with less use of
cars. The focus will need to be set much more on the public realm, not
just the private realm.
With the cars, the public realm has deteriorated very badly
with the roads and the car parks. The whole history of transportation
planning has been to predict the amount of extra traffic growth based on
the extrapolation of current trends and to say that in 20-25 years the
cities will need so many extra lanes, roads and car parks.
Traditionally the streets were not just for the movement of
vehicles only, they have been places where people congregate, talk to
one another, places where children play in the streets. This
idea was with us only 40-50 years ago and somewhere along the line we
changed all that, we gradually gave over the streets to the automobile
and the street became a place for passage only, not a "place". That is
fundamentally wrong, because streets occupy about 20 to 30% of the land
in any metropolitan area.
If we just take that all away and say that is just a purely
transportation function, then people have lost a major part of the
public realm.
Public space does not only have an aesthetic dimension, it is essential also from the social and economic point of view.
People congregate in cities to have community, to have this
casual kind of interaction and support that help to make people thrive.
That is what cities should be providing for people, quality of life,
outside the door.
The public environment of cities that is what is most lacking in urban development today (Sustainable policy institute, Curtin University of Technology, Australia).
You look out of the window and you see congested streets and
therefore you simply just add in another lane or build new roads. That
in theory is possible for more dispersed areas, but certainly for urban
territories as long as we stick to a rather agreeable definition of what
city and urban is, meaning a certain degree of public space, of public
engagement, then we face serious challenges because we simply cannot
expand the road infrastructure to infinite levels (Urban Age Project,
London School of Economics).
Today, European cities face challenges in urban planning and
other societal issues (job creation, climate change, land use,
immigration, etc.), but are also the best placed to find solutions.