Connecting Places, Connecting People

A Paradigm for Urban Living in the 21st Century

Reena Tiwari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315449227
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

What is a better community? How can we reconfigure places and transport networks to create environmentally friendly, economically sound, and socially just communities? How can we meet the challenges of growing pollution, depleting fossil fuels, rising gasoline prices, traffic congestion, traffic fatalities, increased prevalence of obesity, and lack of social inclusion?

The era of car-based planning has led to the disconnection of people and place in developed countries, and is rapidly doing so in the developing countries of the Global South. The unfolding mega-trend in technological innovation, while adding new patterns of future living and mobility in the cities, will question the relevance of face-to-face connections. What will be the 'glue' that holds communities together in the future?

To build better communities and to build better cities, we need to reconnect people and places. Connecting Places, Connecting People offers a new paradigm for place making by reordering urban planning principles from prioritizing movement of vehicles to focusing on places and the people who live in them. Numerous case studies, including many from developing countries in the Global South, illustrate how this can be realized or fallen short of in practical terms. Importantly, citizens need to be engaged in policy development, to connect with each other and with government agencies. To measure the connectivity attributes of places and the success of strategies to meet the needs, an Audit Tool is offered for a continual quantitative and qualitative evaluation.

PART I
The Concept

Connecting Places, Connecting People asks seemingly simple questions. What is a better community? How can we reconfigure places and transport networks to create environmentally friendly, economically sound, and socially just communities?

These questions are fundamental to our task of grappling with environmental and social challenges. These include growing pollution, depleting fossil fuels, rising gasoline prices, traffic congestion, traffic fatalities, increased prevalence of obesity, and lack of social inclusion (Friel et al., 2011; Litman, 2016; Ribeiro et al., 2007). Analyzing the interactions between urban form and motorized travel provides some important insights for reshaping our environment and our community.

With the worldwide number of cars on the road reaching 907 million (using 2014 data; Statista, 2016), and this number projected to rise to between two and four billion cars by mid-century (Ford, 2011), simply building more roads for more cars and planning cities with more super-highways are not viable options. There is a worldwide movement to reduce the use of private vehicles and the vehicular kilometers traveled per year, to promote healthier communities and more sustainable urban forms (Newman & Kenworthy, 2015; Suzuki et al., 2013). Sadly, these strategies are unlikely to have the necessary impact, largely due to the failure to engage the local communities during their formulation and implementation. Real progress and successful implementation of policies and strategies requires local insight and ownership.

The concept of connecting places, connecting people is offered as a way forward. This concept is truly a paradigm shift. It involves reordering urban planning principles from prioritizing movement of vehicles to focusing on places and the people who live in them. The concept recognizes that people need to reach places and interact, and that movement between places needs to be efficient, environmentally benign, and conducive to healthy communities. The term ‘connecting places’ conveys this meaning. ‘Connecting’ indicates that sustainable forms of movement enable interaction between places. ‘Places’, while being the central focus, implies high-quality areas with a strong sense of locale, within which the community can live, work, shop, learn, and play.

A key distinction between this book and others in the same field is the perspective of place making. Instead of a simplistic reliance on manipulating form and materiality in the creation of a place, the emphasis is on synthesizing physical and cultural components with the needs and aspirations of people. Place making is about making visible people’s ‘right to their cities’ and urban spaces (Purcell, 2002, p. 102).

The book is based on an ‘enabling’ approach, connecting people to people, people to transport, and people to places.

There is another level of connectivity occurring in our cities. The quest to create ‘super-smart’ cities with the ‘Internet of Things’¹ through smart devices is resulting in a global digital mesh connecting individuals, their homes, and communities. Are the connections made online in isolation more important than connections made socially on the streets? While face-to-face street connections can revitalize urban spaces and local communities, the future for the millennial-driven culture for disruptive change in public spaces could be devoid of difference, vibrancy, and interaction. What is the way forward?

As well as reconfiguring urban morphology and movement to confront a car-induced disconnection, Connecting Places, Connecting People offers ways of community-enabled place making to strengthen connections between people, place, and transport.

Note

1The ‘Internet of Things’ is visualized as a hyper-connected urban environment—a super-smart city. Sensors provide connectivity to everything from cars, to road infrastructure, to rubbish bins (Perera et al., 2015).

References

All online references retrieved August 17, 2016.

Ford, B. (2011). 1. Retrieved from www.ted.com/talks/bill_ford_a_future_beyond_traffic_gridlock/transcript?language=en.

Friel, S., Akerman, M., Hancock, T., Kumaresan, J., Marmot, M., Melin, T., & Vlahov, D. (2011). Addressing the social and environmental determinants of Urban Health Equity: Evidence for action and a research agenda. Journal of Urban Health 88(5), 860-874.

Litman, T. (2016). Well measured: Developing indicators for sustainable and livable transport planning. Retrieved from www.vtpi.org/wellmeas.pdf.

Newman, P., & Kenworthy, J. R. (2015). The end of automobile dependence: How cities are moving beyond car-based planning. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

Perera, C., Liu, C. H., & Jayawardena, S. (2015). The emerging Internet of Things marketplace from an industrial perspective: A survey. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.00134.pdf.

Purcell, M. (2002). Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant. Geo Journal, 58 99-108. Retrieved from http://faculty.washington.edu/mpurcell/geojournal.pdf.

Ribeiro, S. K., Kobayashi, S., Beuthe, M., Gasca, J., Greene, D., Lee, D. S., & Zhou, P. J. (2007). Transport and its infrastructure. In B. Metz, O. R. Davidson, P. R. Bosch, R. Dave, & L. A. Meyer (Eds.) Climate Change 2007: Mitigation—Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (pp. 323-386) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Statista (2016). Number of passenger cars and commercial vehicles in use worldwide from 2006 to 2014 in (1,000 units). Retrieved from www.statista.com/statistics/281134/number-of-vehicles-in-use-worldwide/.

Suzuki, H., Cervero, R., & Iuchi, K. (2013). Transforming cities with transit: Transit and land-use integration for sustainable urban development. Washington, D.C.: World Bank.

C H A P T E R 1

CONNECTING PLACES, CONNECTING PEOPLE

Why do we travel? Isn’t it to access places so that we can directly manage our everyday affairs? Isn’t it to connect with other people?

Connecting [with] people, getting things done–that’s what makes the travel worthwhile.

(Tim Finchem, quoted in Shipnuck, 2011)

Yet why do our transportation systems seem more focused on movement between places (mobility) than on safe and easy access to places (accessibility)?

How have we allowed our cities to be dominated by roads and highways and their designs to be dictated by automobiles? What have we lost economically, socially, and environmentally through this myopic vision where the concern has been solely on movement? These are questions we need urgently to address.

Spurred by these questions, and with the aim of providing a more appropriate road map to creating better communities, Connecting Places, Connecting People reconfigures the urban environment by replacing mobility-based planning with planning centered on two aspects: accessibility and place making. It deals with the negative economic and environmental repercussions of planning around movement as a dominant approach to transportation planning. A cursory examination demonstrates that the ‘mobility first’ approach, due to its reliance on segregating ‘place’ functions and ‘movement’ functions, has, over time, wreaked havoc on cities by reducing opportunities for social interaction (Appleyard, 1981; DiMento & Ellis, 2013; Giles-Corti, 2006; Jones et al., 2008; Monderman, 2005; Tiwari & Curtis, 2010; Weymouth & Hartz-Karp, 2015). Connecting Places, Connecting People refocuses our attention squarely on a fundamental question that has been languishing at the periphery of social awareness over the past half a century. What kind of places do we aspire to live in for the remainder of the twenty-first century, which will lead to healthy, safe, prosperous, equitable, and proud communities?

Perhaps the best place to start is with a review of the current state of urban environments.

The Crisis

The Great Crawl of China … Thousands of motorists have been caught up in a 60-mile tailback since August 14–an incredible 11 days ago. And it could last a further three weeks. While many motorists took detours, some ended up trapped for up to five days, sleeping in their cars and taking shifts behind the wheel … 400 police were drafted in to ensure the communal road rage was kept in check.

(Bates, 2010)

Imagine being caught in a traffic jam for five long days, not due to any natural disaster, but entirely man-made. Ironically, in this case, caused by roadwork planned to ease traffic congestion. What are the costs? We must include not only loss of productivity and the increased costs to the community and businesses, but also the lost opportunity to spend time with friends and family, the impact on health due to increased pollution, noise, loss of amenity, and driver stress. This one example is reflective of what is happening in urban centers all around the world.

We spend a significant proportion of our available time in the ‘in-between spaces’–the streets, highways, transit-stations, and hubs– struggling to move between destinations. This should prompt us to explore the nature of these spaces and the experiential quality they offer to travelers and commuters.

Prior to the automobile era, people used these spaces to meet other people and experience cultural amenities (Glaeser, 2005; Jacobs, 1961; Monderman, 2005). This facility has been largely lost as these spaces have been transformed into movement conduits. Studies show that face-to-face contact or the proximity factor, while important to creativity, innovation, and livability in cities, has always been invaluable in attracting people, firms, and private investments. People-oriented rather than movement-oriented places allow for ‘agglomerations’ which, studies show, spark innovation and prosperity (Glaeser et al., 1992; Putnam 1995). A smaller carbon footprint is associated with the more intimate scales of people-oriented places (Albrecht, 2005; Cervero, 2010; Shutkin, 2005). Well-designed, livable places can also be more socially inclusive, promoting affordable housing and enabling those with limited budgets to economize on travel by living close to goods, services, and employment opportunities (Cervero, 2010; Newman & Kenworthy, 2015; Renne, 2005). Neighborhoods that promote interaction and everyday face-to-face contact, experiences show, have lower crime rates, promote friendships, and feel safe (Newman, 1972; Putnam, 2000). Highly engaged communities allow natural surveillance, what Jane Jacobs (1961, p. 45) called ‘eyes on the street’. Furthermore, with IT advancements, ‘formal social capital’ is shifting to the virtual realm (Putnam, 2000, p. 49). While this has its attractions, it raises questions about the future roles of streets, plazas, sidewalks, bus stops, train stations, and other parts of the public realm, which formerly encouraged face-to-face interactions. A role repositioning of these spaces– of destinations, and connections between destinations–is more vital than ever. The time is ripe for urban reconfiguration.

Urban Reconfiguration

There are two main ways to reconfigure urban spaces. First, make the connections between destinations stronger, speedier, safer, more equitable, and affordable. Planning policies aimed at bringing destinations closer to each other, thereby reducing the vehicle kilometers traveled, have been put to the test (Cervero, 2004; Iravani et al., 2011). Plans catering for multi-modal traffic and active transport, integration of transport modes, and prioriti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Foreword by Professor Peter Newman
• Part I: The Concept
• Part II: Mapping the Context: Urban Reconfigurations
• Part III: Connecting Places, Connecting People: Making it Happen!
• Part IV: The Future
• Epilogue: Ethnography of Place and Movement
• Index