April 8, 2008
I am glad that public opinion has shifted back to concern for the environment and climate change. As Al Gore has pointed out, we have known about this hazard for some time. Orman Granger taught me climate change in the fall of 1984, and he had been teaching the course for some time. For those of you who ask, 'Why didn't you warn us earlier?' here is a response that I hope is useful.
First of all, American academia is very disconnected from American public discourse. This is a two-sided problem. On the one hand, scholars working in American universities appreciate the freedom to focus on their work without having the public breathing down their necks. On the other hand, there is a tradition of reverse-snobbery in this country, such that the word "academic" is an epithet that means "irrelevant" in American usage. So: scholars aren't necessarily good at publicizing the work that they do and the things that they worry about; but there is also a weak infrastructure in this country for public intellectualism.
Then again, when scholars focus on an area of serious public concern, American scholars sometimes feel like Cassandra of Troy: warning a people who seem hell-bent on ignoring advice at their own peril. This is especially true of scholars focused on policy. Planners with even the most rudimentary understanding of urban economics have been biting our nails for the last seven years while watching the mortgage-refinancing craze. We knew it was a Ponzi scheme, but who to tell, and how? Now the sub-prime lending crisis is causing serious economic damage as we expected, and we can only grieve. In the last seven years, even conservative scholars and policy-analysts have been ignored. Hard-nosed military and intelligence-operatives are retiring from public service so they can criticize their Commander-in-Chief. Finally, it seems that even the civil servants rebelled when the CIA deflated the hype about Iran in the winter of 2008, publicly undercutting the drive towards another war. So, urban planners have an obligation to get the word out, but with our Lefty-socialist reputation, we know the odds that we will have a public impact are extremely low. And there is another challenge: there are all sorts of folks making predictions and warnings that range from the surreal to the totally reasonable in the American media-sphere. For the public as a whole, there is a problem of sifting the signals from the noise. And how to do that? Scholars are not very confidence-inspiring with our carefully-qualified statements.
So here I will be blogospherically blunt. I was convinced of climate change the moment I topped a ridge in the North Cascades and faced a deep gorge instead of a glacier. I checked the USGS map again and again. But it had been drawn in 1956, and I was standing on that ridge in 1983, and a cubic kilometer of ice had vanished in the 26 years between. Climate change hit me like a hard slap in the face that I will never forget. Nothing abstract there.
Since then I have been thinking about cities and the Earth's climate.
In the midst of great complexity, one problem is very simple. How much energy do we use, per person, per day? Americans have actually gotten quite good at insulating our buildings, so per-capita energy spent on heating and cooling in the U.S. has improved greatly over the past 30 years. The place where we use the most energy is in daily movement. A lot of critics say 'Americans use cars too much' but I want to step back from that specific criticism for a moment because the problem is more general: we travel great distances each day, and we are inefficient in how we do it. Most environmentalists focus on the efficiency problem, hence the promotion of mass-transit, carpooling, and low-emission cars. I hope we improve travel efficiencies, but I am more interested in the basic physics problem that we move so much on a daily basis.
I am actually strongly in favor of travel. I think Americans should visit all 50 states and at least five continents in our lifetimes. That will burn quite a bit of fuel, but the exposure to our wider world is worth it. And the energy required for such travel is vanishingly small compared the energy we burn in daily commutes, shopping trips, and child-shuttling. If Americans can design our lives so that our daily movements are on foot or bicycle, that will be our greatest achievement and our greatest gift to our children.
And that is where urbanism connects so centrally with environmentalism. There are three surprises in this general policy recommendation:
1. It is not a recommendation for a specific urban design. A huge variety of spaces and layouts can support walkability.
2. It is good for health-maintenance. Humans are built to walk, every day.
3.
It is valuable for public society. The more time we spend in shared
public space encountering each other, the more we have to deal with our
membership in a society; in this case a republic founded on the
assumption of a strong social contract among the people and between the
people and the government.
For me, the first and the third points
are the most interesting. Dense, publicly-oriented urban environments
do not necessarily make good citizens. People have lived cheek-by-jowl
in sustained mutual animosity for generations in cities across the
world and across history. The original Ghetto was in the ultimate
pedestrian-oriented city, Venice. So I am not advocating a
physical-determinism that "good cities make good citizens" since the
record shows that there is no direct relationship either way. But for the same reason I reject American anti-urban presumptions, from Jefferson
to Thoreau to the promoters of suburbia and exurbia. Small towns are no
more sociable than Flatbush in Brooklyn or Mission Street in San
Francisco. I am interested in a different issue: if we know that daily movement is burning too much fuel, generating too much heat, and producing too much greenhouse-gas, if we know that we should live in environments that are dense enough in some way to support pedestrian lifestyles, then:
A. What can those environments look like? and,
B. How should we live in them?
Question A occurred to me first, and so I studied architecture and urban design and practiced both for ten years. But professional practice taught me that the second question really drives the first: How should be live in cities? A compact city of 5,000 people in the middle of farmland can be just as walkable as a networked metropolis, and everything in between. The minimum is quite small and there is no maximum size. Some spatial variables are quite specific like building types, street designs, and the integration of land uses and open-spaces. Some are large-scale questions of regional economy and national and worldwide economic integration. But all of these are driven by who we are as citizens; what we feel about the public sphere and the fellow citizens who are unlike us; and the political economy we choose to practice. There is no such thing as an 'economy' divorced from politics, and vice versa. And we are shirking our responsibility as citizens if we believe that we do not choose to practice that political economy in very specific ways. In the past twenty years, we have chosen re-segregation and we have chosen to allow homelessness. We have also chosen to accept diversity in the public sphere far more than ever before in American history. Now: how do we choose to live together as twenty-first century citizens? This is not just a return to dense living patterns of the past, because apartment-dwellers in midtown American cities in the 1930s could not tune each other out with iPods nor access vast arrays of media through internet connections. There is no such thing as going back; but how do we imagine some form of social re-densification going forward?
I think that is a question a whole generation of us will
have to answer, not just specialists. If my work and study on these
issues is of any value to the public, it is mainly by finding and
asking these questions. Hopefully the case studies of cities that I do
will help provide material to answer these questions, but that is
enough.