A Future of Polycentric Cities

How Urban Life, Land Supply, Smart Technologies and Sustainable Transport Are Reshaping Cities

Cole Hendrigan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9789811391682
• eBook ISBN:
  9789811391699
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, Dr Cole Hendrigan examines the options for sustainable transport and land-use planning based on building heights, mixes of land-use, transportation mode capacity and others to build the next generation of parks, housing, commercial and retail spaces along high-capacity rail corridors. Following the paradigm of 'Transit Oriented Development', Dr Hendrigan provides unique knowledge and insights on how to best make the transition towards more sustainable and livable cities, offering a practical method to better integrate transport and urban development to this end.

© The Author(s) 2020

C. HendriganA Future of Polycentric Citieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9169-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Freedom in Cities

Cole Hendrigan¹

(1)

SMART Infrastructure Facility, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia

Cole Hendrigan

End Abstract

Cites develop and change. This book is relevant to almost all developing cities, except a few in decline or which are leading. This book will be wide-ranging, as the topic is broad. Often the links between facets of city life and growth are only alluded to. This book examines closely, numerically, the many links.

Fundamental to the role of changing cities is space. Cities are places with a lack of space, or at least, less space than the countryside. This book is about creating more space in cites for more economic and social life to occur with lower travel time costs and many enumerated co-benefits.

This book will challenge the current engineering design of cities to refocus, deliberately, around high-capacity transportation nodes. Such development patterns will create a connected, semi self-organising [9] polycentric city, and generate benefits accrued to the city government and to the residents as the leading actors/citizens. It will also be about the future of technology and the potential for gathering urban data to provide more quantity of knowledge on quality city life. Lastly, this book is about residents having more choice and encouraging an emergence of elegant options within the complexity of interesting urban life.

The parts of city life urban planning should and must have a role in are the public realm, the street, the parks and the city shaping benefits of mass transit. As such, this book anticipates better living with better health for more people most of the time.

Density creates amenities, but also amenities attract density. This is particularly obvious when the amenities are associated with a public transport node. [8]

Urban mobility is the key to housing affordability. Improved urban transport makes more land available for housing and therefore allows low-income people to live in areas that are both affordable and accessible to most of the city. [10]

City Air

‘City air makes you free.’¹ City life offers higher wages, an opportunity to match skills with needs, to be open to new experiences in the cosmopolitan setting; it frees you to associate with others and it frees one to have choice. Though there are many reasons to imagine worse outcomes, cities of the future will be better. Cities will become increasingly freer as the digital air, the radio waves sending data, serves the people. They will also become free as cities move further away from automobile-oriented planning and towards walking and high-capacity transit. Residents will be able to act upon the most rational choice they may make, given more options. Walkable access to transit and shops will increasingly be more important than motor-vehicle mobility as people choose neighbourhoods richly served with transit, public services and amenity. City neighbourhoods, and especially those on high-capacity public transit routes such as trains or bus, need to be denser with residents, commercial retail, office space and public spaces for any of the benefits to accrue. Cities will be places for more choice and innovation combinations of choice to create the lives we wish, so long as regulation doesn’t confound our innovation or choice making. City air, while still questionable as to its quality, will once again make us free.

As the world urbanises and persons flock to cities,² there are patterns of emergence we can observe or would be observable if current urban planning rules permitted them. It grows tiresome to read or repeat concerns about sprawl and the problems of automobiles in determining a type of urban living. This book anticipates filling in the land area of cities with the types of urban quality we want and deserve, but with the volume of activity linked directly to the public transit capacity and active transport facilities to serve the growth.

People are attracted to people [11]. In keeping with well-managed growth, the cities of the future will be filled with people preferring the company of others thriving in the city’s energy. This is further evidenced in the heightened awareness or excitement of being somewhere with activity and action, matched with the pleasure of the same place operating well and efficiently.

Cities will be the locations of social change, seeking new ways of using resources while being test beds of innovation. Large-scale nutrient cycling, product recycling, waste to energy, solar and wind electricity production will occur near cites, as they will need to manage their wastes better. This will be data generated. This data will need to be monitored and managed and will be as important as actual energy and waste production. Likewise, cities will forever be reliant on the hinterlands to supply water, forests, soils for food and overall ecological services that they rely on. Managing this flow of materials can be as much of a datascape as a factual landscape: The physical and the digital are merging. City air, making people feel free, will be reliant on a wide flow of resources and managed change. The freedom of association to innovate is the unwritten goal—both a precursor and an outcome.

But what of closer—in scales, at the level we experience the city, daily or hourly?

Building Blocks

To paraphrase Tolstoy: Excellent blocks of city life are somewhat similar, but all disappointing blocks are disappointing in their own way.³

Zooming in to focus on the city’s more closely grained multitude of site and corridors, we see that cities are composed of blocks. Blocks are composed of streets, buildings, facades, lanes, sidewalks (or footpaths/pavements), curbs (kerbs), street furniture and street trees. Cites and blocks are built by people and for people. Everything we see in a city was a deliberate choice made by someone with real money to satisfy some short- or long-term objective. This is often forgotten.

The best of urban blocks—those blocks on which people meet, do business, trade ideas, attend school, walk, play, remain cool in summer and attractive in winter—have characteristics we might call ‘comfortable’. They are well organised, perhaps even self-organised in details, but they offer many amenities, services, destinations, attraction, jobs, retail turnover, shade and other such, approximately in proportion to the needs of the people there. The best of urban blocks do not offer too much space, making a place seem too open, too business-like or too weighted to one purpose, or too little of what attract humans. The best urban blocks have, by accident or by planning, human uses of seating, walking slow or fast, waiting, eating, and watching each other. A disappointing block has few openings, is long, has blank walls, few retail options, few facades, favours private mobility over public access, and there are few opportunities to meet other people. We tend to avoid these places, except as places to speed past in private cars.

Yet, though we are speaking about cities, this could also describe a medieval village in France, or a village in the mountains of British Columbia.

What separates a village and a city, aside from a less personal space, is the ability to move between one such space and another space with great efficiency. A city will have mass transit, or mass frequency of transit forms, so that all people can access other places to carry out more trade, more visits with more idea exchange, more social life, to contribute and receive the benefits of all that a city offers.

It is difficult to balance the wants of all people or their needs for economic activity. Not all urban places need to be social or business-like; some places are warehouses; some places are ports or road interchanges; and occasionally, some are hospitals or schools. These are all important to the functioning of a city as highways and rail transport people and goods or care for the aged and vulnerable. What is at question here are the places that can be more than what they are now, and the need to be more, to achieve some of the goals set out before many cites. Housing quantity, housing affordability, lower carbon footprint, increased ecological biodiversity, more education, more care of the infirm, more walking and cycling, and much higher use of mass transit and less personal motor vehicles are all goals that cities—globally—are trying to achieve.

We all recognise a lively street. Most of the time, we wish to be there, among the crowd, sensing the fun, energy and delight. Sometimes, streets can be too lively, with too little room for the people who need to be there for travel or trade. This is a sign of success and urban vitality, but also one of stress—with the city not coping. Often, a too lively street may be described as ‘congested’, and when motor vehicles are the majority of road users, we use the term ‘congestion’. While congestion may not be convivial, it does represent two things: (1) economic vitality as the destinations are evidently places people want to be in, and (2) congestion signifies an opportunity to bring in another set of transportation options for the masses. In this way, congestion makes cities find time for thinking and action. In addition to the related local air quality concerns from fossil fuels, the global atmospheric chemical conditions or the increase in cardiovascular disease due to inactivity, the need to act on transportation options can be compelling. Where to start? Start with people.

As Jan Gehl has stated, people attract people. We know we can do better to make cities productive, low carbon, healthy and social. They can be all these. They need not be separated. Though culture-specific and not uniformly achieved or conceived around the globe, living with less air pollution with longer and better health and with a rich social life is ‘living well’. We will do well by ourse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Freedom in Cities
• 2. Smart Cities and Smart Citizens: Are They the Same?
• 3. Global City Shaping
• 4. Research and Results
• 5. Analysis and Discussion
• 6. Conclusion: The Transit-Oriented Region
• Back Matter