The Death of Urbanism. Marcus White
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loss of environmental stability, biodiversity, urban health, social diversity and urban amenity. Many have responded in ways that closely resemble the denial stage de-scribed by Kübler-Ross. The response is ‘this is not happening’, ‘these losses cannot be real’, ‘the diagnosis is incorrect’.
They then proceed with business as usual which involves continuing to facilitate 20th Century planning procedures of uncontained lateral urban expansion using low density, single-land-use zoning, car-dependent development pushing endlessly into cities’ surrounding agricultural areas. The result of these planning procedures is sometimes called urban sprawl. As architectural historian Spiro Kostof pointed out, in sprawling development, residential areas are surrounded with moats of major roads and barricaded with noise walls with a single-entry road (1991). This form of suburbia is in a way a return to the walled medieval city, where the stone walls are replaced with concrete sound barriers, and the ‘scatterbrained pack donkey’s way’ is reproduced by traffic engineers and town planners with asymmetrically planned streets and cul-de-sacs designed to slow traffic. Unfortunately, unlike the medieval fortress cities, markets and other civic buildings are not to be found within the suburban enclosure due to land-use zoning, a concept that we discuss later in this chapter.
In an ironic and somewhat tragic way, the symptoms of the losses the urban professionals are experiencing are worsened by many of the business as usual procedures they continue to apply in their state of denial. For those in denial, maintaining the current practice of suburban sprawl as though nothing is wrong, is like the patient with terminal lung cancer sitting in their wheelchair out the front of the hospital, just beyond the painted ‘exclusion area’, chain-smoking cigarettes. It is heartbreaking to see.
Climate change denial – denying the loss of environmental stability
To understand the urban design paradigm of denial, and the response of ‘business as usual’ we need to understand the current standard practice of lateral urban growth, and to understand lateral urban growth’s link with the environment, energy use, CO2 emissions and climate change.
The theory of climate change, which put simply, is that a build-up of greenhouse gases (predominantly CO2) in the atmosphere traps the sun’s heat, causing the earth’s temperature to rise and altering the climate in different parts of the world. For a popular culture explanation of climate change, see ‘Crimes of the Hot’ Futurama (Avanzino, 2002). One of the major contributors of CO2 and perhaps one of the apparent symbols of denial is the use of the car. In the US, 33% of CO2 emissions come from cars and light trucks (US EPA, 2015). Australian sustainability researchers Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy have, over the past thirty years, documented evidence that increased density and improved public transport reduces ‘car dependence’, CO2 emissions, and reliance on oil.
Density reduces transportation energythrough several mechanisms: it shortensdistances for all modes and makes oftransit, bicycling, and walking more viableas alternatives to the car; it also reducesthe number of journeys, since when transitis used, many journeys are combined –forexample, shopping on the way to or from thetrain (P. G. Newman & Kenworthy, 1989).
US cities generate an average of 4,405 kg of CO2 per person from passenger transport, whereas denser Western European cities generate lower at averaging 1,269 kilograms, and high-income Asian cities considerably lower at 825 kilograms (Kenworthy 2003). According to Mike Batty, Professor of Spatial Analysis and Planning at University College London, one of the critical problems with sprawl is ‘environmental: low-density cities use more energy’ (2003). This is supported by Stern, who states ‘Spatial and strategic planning can affect patterns of energy consumption. Higher-density urban environments, for example, typically consume less energy for transport and in buildings’ (2006).
Despite warnings by scientists such as Professor Peter Newton‡‡
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