The tone of the following essays is somewhat optimistic while speaking to some serious problems facing humanity–far too many people and not adequate or sustainable housing. The first essay was written in 1996, and the second in 1993. However, they still intelligently address problems that we 2002 humans are continuing to ignore.
Eco-Habitats: Fulfilling a Dream for Humanity
Rashmi Mayur
It is estimated that by the year 2050 three out of four people in the world will be living in urban agglomerations-up from one out of two presently. Between now and then the world’s human population is projected to grow from the current 5.7 billion to 10.5 billion. The urban infrastructure of many of the world’s largest cities is already stretched to or beyond the breaking point and the pressures continue to mount. By all accounts we are headed for collective disaster.
According to Dr. Wally N’Dow, the Secretary General of the UN Habitat Summit II to be held in Istanbul, Turkey 2-14 June 1996, the goal of the summit is to engage policy makers, planners, city administrators, and citizens everywhere in building sustainable habitats for the future. It is an important and timely goal. The crisis of the world’s cities and towns is deepening so rapidly that this conference may be our last opportunity to build global consensus on necessary corrective actions before the damage becomes irreversible.
Almost 1.2 billion of the world’s people live in wretched environmental, social and economic conditions without home or shelter-at the edge of survival. At the present rate of deterioration, another 200 million people will join their numbers by the year 2001-an indicator of the accelerating disintegration and collapse of urban civilization.
The most dramatic examples of spreading urban pathology are found in the megacities of the South-such as Bombay, Mexico City, Bangkok, Lagos, and Sao Paulo-where crushing congestion, poisonous pollution, the nightmare of traffic jams, proliferating slums, rising crime rates, poverty, disease and death are endemic. In Northern cities rising crime rates, alienation, pervasive drug addiction and alcoholism, shattered families, and suicides suggest similar urban pathology.
Whereas the populations of the largest cities in the West have been stabilized, in India, as in the other countries of the South, megacities and large metropolises are on a runaway population growth path. With approximately 70 percent of its 945 million people still living in villages, India remains an agricultural country by international reckoning. Yet it also has 280 million city dwellers, the largest number of urbanites of any country in the world. The populations of Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta have doubled in the last 25 years. Migration from rural to urban centers continues unabated.
With 15 million people, Bombay is the largest megacity of India, one of the 15 megacities of the world, and one of India’s worst urban disasters. Two out of three people live in slums. At peak times roads are burdened with three times more traffic than their designed capacity. Air pollution chokes the people during the climatic inversion experienced during the winter months. And 80 percent of the city’s sewage is discharged raw into the sea. The situation continues to worsen in every major city of India, as it does in the major cities of other Asian countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Cambodia, where one out of three urban inhabitants lives in gruesome settlements.
By and large, the urban conditions of the majority of people in the cities of Africa and Latin America are as mercilessly cruel as in India and Asia-the only difference being the magnitude and the level of poverty. The urban civilization, which was to fulfill the dreams of the millions for ease and material abundance, has become a nightmarish curse.
What is our vision of the kinds of cities, towns, and villages in which we want to live? How do we create human settlements that function as self-sustaining eco-habitats? For many millennia human beings lived in harmony with nature in well-integrated cultures. Even today, the millions of people living in the 600,000 villages of India, several hundred thousand villages of China and tribal communities of Africa and South America live modest, yet fulfilling and sustainable lives. But the pressures of modernization are driving millions out of such communities and into the wretched cities and megacities.
We must use the Habitat II Summit as a forum to rethink our vision of the proper role and function of human habitats and reconstruct our institutions accordingly. The concept of the eco-village as a place for sustainable and joyful living should be a centerpiece of any Habitat II vision for the 21st century. The new vision must give high priority to stabilizing global population size and limiting rural-urban migration, decentralizing governance, investing in low-cost indigenous technologies to meet basic human needs in harmony with the environment, establishing universal literacy, and achieving true cooperation between peoples everywhere to create good and satisfying lives for all. We will as well need to free the world from the institutions of exploitation that support the gluttonous consumption of the world’s scarce resources by the few at the expense of the many.
Our vision must embrace the many possibilities available to us. We can treat the sewage and compost the garbage from our cities and towns to provide fertilizer for urban agriculture. We can retrofit our settlements and transport systems to function on renewable energy sources such as bio, solar, and wind energy. We can enable people to create low-cost ecologically sound housing programs. We can use information technologies to reduce commuting, enhance education, and linkage societies and cultures around the planet. We can replace dehumanizing shopping centers with people’s markets. We can produce and use fully recyclable products. We can adapt our lifestyles to principles of conservation and sufficiency rather than consumption and excess. We can preserve our humanity and the integrity of the richly diverse cultures of human societies by ending the obscene cultural homogenization of the world through the spread of Western commercialism. Let our settlements be known as centers of art and culture, music and dance, knowledge and creativity, love and joy.
For millions in the South a simple decent place on earth to live with their families in a community is all they want. It is within our means to create societies that realize this dream for all 5.7 billion people in the world while maintaining a healthy and vibrant ecosystem. We must make the realization of this dream our driving commitment for Habitat II-a commitment to creating a futuristic vision based on values of sufficiency and simplicity where the earth and the sky dance to the symphony of children’s smiles.
Dr. Rashmi Mayur, is Director of the International Institute for Sustainable Future, 734 Mittal Tower Mariman Point, Bombay, India.
From Urban Sprawl to Sustainable Human Communities
William E. Rees and Mark Roseland
Developing sustainable human communities will require an unprecedented emphasis on reducing urban sprawl and its unsustainable consequences. Such an effort must simultaneously create more efficient use of urban space, reduced consumption of material and energy resources, improved community livability, and improved administrative and planning processes capable of dealing effectively, sensitively, and comprehensively with the social and environmental complexity of urban settlements.
Most North American cities were built using technologies that assumed an inexhaustible abundance of cheap energy and land. These communities grew inefficiently, becoming increasingly dependent on lengthy distribution systems. Cheap energy fostered an addiction to the automobile, and increased the separation of workplaces from homes.
Urban sprawl is the legacy of abundant fossil fuel and a perceived right to unrestricted use of the private car, whatever the social costs and externalities. Per capita gasoline consumption in many cities in the United States and Canada is now more than four times that of European cities. It is over 10 times greater than in high density cities like Hong Kong and Tokyo. These differences in consumption are not due to large car sizes and low gasoline prices, so much as differences in the efficiency and compactness of land-use patterns. Sprawling suburbs are arguably the most economically, environmentally, and socially costly pattern of residential development humans have ever devised.
The negative local and regional level consequences of sprawl – such as congestion, urban air pollution, and commuting distances between home and work – are now widely recognised. Less widely acknowledged are the global ramifications of North American land-use patterns. Largely because of low-density sprawl, the residents of Canadian cities produce about twice as much carbon dioxide per capita as do Amsterdam residents.
A San Jose, California study compared the environmental demands of 13,000 new residential units contained within an urban “greenbelt” with the same number if they were built in the usual exurban pattern. The exurban homes would require 200,000 more miles of auto commuting and three million more gallons of water per day. The exurban units would also require 40 percent more energy for heating and cooling than would their urban counterparts.
Cities with low “automobile dependence” are more centralised; use land more intensively; place more restraints on high-speed traffic; and offer better public transit, walking, and cycling facilities. This points to the considerable need for a new approach to urban transportation planning and traffic management. In the past several decades transportation planning has consisted largely of reacting to increasing highway congestion, which often is a direct result of the low-density outward expansion of the city, by building more highways. This pattern is painfully evident in many of the rapidly growing cities of the South, such as Manila, Jakarta, Bangkok. If sustainability is to be taken seriously, transportation planning must become a tool for inducing changes in the physical layout of cities.
Similar reforms are needed in urban land-use planning and controls. Metropolitan planning must shift away from the prevailing assumption that the primary urban access will be by automobile or even mass transit. Planning for sustainable urban centres must be based on the contrary assumption that people will be concentrated in the urban centre and that access will be determined primarily by the proximity of residences to work, recreation, shopping, and services.
Urban sprawl can be contained by setting limits on physical expansion and favouring alternatives to the automobile. Appropriate measures include limiting automobile access to inner cities, levying regional carbon dioxide taxes, restricting parking availability, and using traffic-calming street designs.
Governments, investors, and banks should all be required to analyse alternative long-term least-cost strategies for transportation and land-use investments. This would tend to give pedestrians, cyclists, and public transit riders priority over the automobile. It would favour building surface light rail and bikeway systems connecting higher density pedestrian-friendly city and suburban centres. It would favour building bicycle parking garages and policies that slow down car traffic to improve conditions for pedestrians and cyclists.
The models and strategies for limiting urban sprawl through innovative and provincial state planning, local government initiatives, and public-community partnerships are available. Promoting their more extensive use is an area that merits major attention from nonprofit organisations.
William E. Rees is a Professor in the School of Community and Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Mark Roseland teaches in the Resource Management Programme at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
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