Blog

 

In The City in History, Lewis Mumford once properly characterized the essence of cities as a dynamic that unfolds between two poles of human life: “movement and settlement.” Between these poles, we see the intersection of the built and natural environments, and the ongoing interaction and evolution of transportation nodes and land uses. The roles of walking, shelter, and movement between places, and the impacts of the urban form on public health, are ripe for observation in cities across the world.

Fast forward to modern cities, where leaders, municipal staff, design professionals, and other stakeholders often discuss walkable, transit oriented, and mixed-use communities as the inevitable next steps for evolving urban areas. However laudable these ideas might be, our recent work in tropical Australian cities (under the auspices of the Australian-American Fulbright Commission, UN-Habitat, and the World Urban Campaign) suggests an understanding of the climate-influenced patterns of urban life is essential for the contextual application of these tried and true tenets of good urbanism.

Beyond paradise and the importance of context

When reviewing traditional postcard imagery or the portrayals of stage, screen, and modern social media, the words “tropics” and “paradise” often seem synonymous. However, in today’s complex urban settings, this simplicity is inaccurate, because the movement/settlement dynamic is skewed by climatic conditions. Livability and human interaction is often compromised by intense seasonal heat, severe humidity, and torrential rains. Without adjustments or safeguards, outdoor activity becomes highly undesirable during certain parts of the day, and social cohesion may be inhibited or lost entirely.

In the context of tropical cities, some would characterize the reality of human movement and settlement as defaulting to a modified convenience, premised on avoidance of severe conditions. People move between insular, temperature-controlled dwellings to temperature-controlled cars to temperature-controlled offices, and vice versa. Under these conditions, as others have noted, traditional urban design and planning approaches to the movement/settlement dynamic—particularly when applied to fostering active and healthy lifestyles—requires considered reflection.

In particular, beyond familiar calls for light rail and reduced speed limits, what do transportation improvements that emphasize walkability and bicycle-oriented solutions look like in a small, tropical city? How must urban design and infrastructure (e.g., examples of planning for shade-creationand lighting) change to assure healthy activity? What are the associated roles of green spaces as activators of human recreation and social activity, beyond mere design ambience on auto-centric streets?

Given how the planning and design (or haphazard evolution) of urban spaces largely dictate the way we live, we set out to re-examine daily urban life in the tropical context. Our efforts, with our funders and supporters, has centered on the use of methods and tools from the book, Seeing the Better City, to explore how such planning and design in two Australian cities impact residents’ health in many ways. We aimed to explore whether current conditions encourage or discourage active lifestyles, social cohesion and access to healthy food choices.

The relevance of the New Urban Agenda

The New Urban Agenda [pdf], drafted by UN-Habitat, and endorsed in late 2016 by the United Nations General Assembly, contains an empowering “call to action.” It enables everyone to benefit from inevitable global urbanization trends, based on implementation of equitable frameworks.

In particular, through Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11 (Sustainable cities and communities), the New Urban Agenda provides a guide for developing safe, inclusive, resilient, and sustainable new cities that promote social integration and equity. This goal also provides the impetus for more contextual conversations about the growth, redesign and redevelopment of existing urban spaces.

Successful local implementation of the New Urban Agenda depends on more than planning document verbiage, regulatory revisions, or “cookie-cutter” imports of familiar “good urbanism tenets” (cited above) to the tropics. Even within the Far North Queensland tropical region, the climate varies. Cairns experiences a tropical monsoon climate (wet tropics), while Townsville is exposed to a tropical savannah climate (dry tropics).

Just as Cairns and Townsville deserve distinction from the settings of other Australian, European, or American cities, public space design must also vary within the tropical climate zone. We designed the Urban Thinkers Campus sessions (described in this video, as well as further below) to enable a broad range of local participants to first identify current behaviors, reflect on how planning and design impact public health, and to suggest relevant planning and design improvements.

How did we facilitate this local input into contextually appropriate design? What have we learned so far about how to adapt general tenets of good urbanism in tropical Australia?

Urban Thinkers Campuses: Understanding Cairns and Townsville through the urban diary tool

We posed these questions to groups of over 50 people in each city—though UN-Habitat World Urban Campaign Urban Thinkers Campus sessions in Cairns and Townsville in June, 2018. Drawing on the urban diaries described in detail in Seeing the Better City, these events provided the fundamental basis for understanding the context of each city through a local lens.

Urban diaries are premised on the importance of local history, values, and knowledge. They implement a scalableapproach, intended to “distinguish underlying organic relationships between people and cities from indiscriminate prescription imposed upon place.” We offered the urban diary tool as a way to enhance personal observation, increase individual awareness, and create positive urban change.

In our investigation, we invited a range of citizen, professional, governmental, and academic participants (and provided associated written guidance [pdf]) to take and caption photographs of their surroundings, noting how the urban environment in which they reside impacts public health and livability. Participants actively contributed and described their photographs, and shared these images through two Facebook Groups, which we used to capture ideas and start conversations at both the Cairns and Townsville Urban Thinkers Campus sessions.

The urban diary approach helped participants clarify how urban design in Cairns and Townsville impacts the health of residents within these tropical cities. Participants further realized the empowering nature of citizen submittal of visual feedback to urban planners. In turn, municipalities are seeing the ongoing power of guided visual engagement with residents in planning processes, aligning closely with the New Urban Agenda principles.

Place-based urban planning and design

Climate-responsive planning and design are important to assure that urban residents in tropical climates incorporate incidental exercise into everyday routine. We believe that people can better use public spaces if they are designed with the premise of mitigating the negative impacts of tropical climates.

We presented three overarching questions to Urban Thinkers Campus participants to determine how existing urban infrastructure and amenities promote or restrict:

• Active lifestyles
• Social inclusion
• Healthy eating

The lessons so far

We will be finalizing an Urban Thinkers Campus report for UN-Habitat, the Cairns Regional Council, and the Townsville City Council in the coming months. Based on our preliminary data review, some provisional observations follow.

The public health issues faced by first world populations living in the tropics generally coincide with health problems of first world nations worldwide. Campus session presentations by public health professionals in both Cairns and Townsville showed how diabetes and cardiac conditions dominate the preventable hospital admissions and mortality statistics in Far North Queensland. It is well documented that the way to decrease our reliance on the increasingly strained health system, is to keep people moving[i].

Our initial review of session data also shows a general citizen desire to reconnect with one another. Participants emphasized that physical activity often occurs after the sun goes down (a time-shift effect) to avoid debilitating heat and humidity. They advocated for effective urban design and lighting solutions to ensure public safety.

We also found that participants viewed their first world tropical cities as auto-centric, but reiterated a desire for change to incorporate more active lifestyles. Finally, participants expressed a significant interest in using public space for food production, as well as capitalizing on this focus to offset gentrification and to foster more purposeful social inclusion.

The Cairns and Townsville Urban Thinkers Campus sessions provided meaningful input to conversations about how to improve public health through sustainable urban design for the tropics. Each Campus session also entertained the ongoing use of citizen-submitted visual material to assist in more meaningful dialogue and outcomes. These conversations need to expand, and we believe that they can provide a paradigm for other contexts around the world.

Do we currently have all the answers for the people of these cities? Definitely not. But we can now state with confidence that the urban diary approach provides people with a chance to meaningfully engage with the decision-makers who will influence the cities of the future.

______

London and Seattle-based author, consultant, and attorney Chuck Wolfe is serving as the Fulbright Specialist for an Australian-American Fulbright Commission grant to James Cook University (JCU) related to the subject of this article. The grant design and implementation has involved close collaboration with the co-authors at JCU’s Cairns Campus: Silvia Tavares, a lecturer in urban design, and David Sellars, a senior lecturer in environmental health.

This post originally ran on Planetizen at https://www.planetizen.com/features/99363-thinkers-tropical-shade-empowering-lessons-livable-places.  We thank the editors!

 

In the debate over climate change action, most of the attention to date has focused on cleaner energy sources, and more efficient technologies like electric cars. Surprisingly little attention has gone to one of the largest drivers of climate-changing emissions: the urban structure of our cities, towns and suburbs. There are important reasons why this is so – and why it must change.

Recent research paints a clearer picture that differences in such “urban morphology” account for major differences in emissions – in fact, much greater differences than previously thought. For example, those living in cities with average European morphological characteristics – compact, walkable, transit-served, with a good distribution of daily services – generate emissions per person of roughly half of residents of an average American city. Yet we know that Europeans do not suffer from a quality of life only half as good as residents in the US. Indeed, on many indicators their quality of life is higher.

This is a telling finding – and there is still more to the story. By combining retrofitted buildings, district-scale energy and other synergies, the reductions of emissions can be even more dramatic. (Of course, there are other significant ecological and lifestyle benefits in the European urban model as well.)

Why then is so little attention paid to this key issue?

For one thing, the form of cities changes slowly. Policy makers, tempted to look for “quick wins,” often turn to technological solutions – but those, as history shows, often don’t pan out. In fact, precisely because urban form changes slowly, its effects over time accumulate in a powerful and predictable way. The urban infrastructure being built today will be in place, and will continue to shape emissions, for decades to come. It is particularly alarming that China, India, Brazil and other rapidly growing countries are continuing to import a US-style, car-dominated model of growth: that fact alone could easily overwhelm all other efforts at reduction of emissions.

 

Another reason for the scant attention is that it’s difficult to grasp all the disparate elements of urban morphology, and how they work in a system. Small factors together can create a much bigger effect than they may seem to have in isolation. By contrast, it’s tempting to hang our hopes on discrete improvements in the efficiency of technology, which are more easily understood. But as noted, sometimes these don’t pan out. Perhaps even more importantly, improvements in efficiency can be quickly erased by increases in demand.

Even many champions of urban land use as a climate change issue often focus on the relatively narrow topic of automobile travel, and so-called Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMTs). Although this is indeed an important emissions source, the research shows that it’s only the beginning of the total contribution from urban form. As a result, VMT reduction advocates miss the bigger picture, and argue over relatively modest reductions of emissions which may – or may not – be possible through a variety of strategies. This was illustrated most clearly in debate over a recent study released by the National Academy of Sciences, which looked only at emissions from “personal travel” – and was accompanied by the headline in MIT’s Technology Review, Forget Curbing Suburban Sprawl: Building denser cities would do little to reduce CO2 emissions, a new NAS report concludes.

But this is far from what the latest research really shows. This author was part of a team that presented and discussed survey research at last spring’s Scientific Congress on Climate Change in Copenhagen, a research symposium of 2,000 leading scientists hosted by the International Alliance of Research Universities. The conclusions are dramatic.

The research suggests that a change in the way we build cities can, in the coming decades, cut total emissions by one-third or more. Conversely, if we do nothing, the way we build cities and suburbs will likely continue to increase emissions – possibly dramatically, as large countries like China, India and Brazil continue to develop their cities in the coming decades, and choose whether to copy the American sprawl model, or other, much lower-carbon models of urban morphology.

 

Many authors have noted the strong correlation between urban density and emissions per person – particularly when it comes to the role of personal travel by automobile. But density, like automobile travel, is only the start of the story, and we need to tease out the other factors “packed in” to density, and how they operate together within urban systems.

In addition to the effects of personal travel by automobile, our research identified significant sources of emissions from urban form in five key categories: infrastructure, and its embodied and operating energy; other advantages of “location efficiency,” including additional benefits of walking; optimized size, orientation and urban shaping of buildings; lost ecosystem services; and behavioral factors and “induced demand.” Taken together, these factors account for an amount equal to or more than (and up to twice as much as) the emissions from personal transportation and VMTs alone. This is a compelling finding, warranting more research – and much more awareness and action among policy-makers.

Infrastructure, Embodied and Operating Energy

As noted, tailpipe emissions from VMT are only the beginning of the story. To that we must add the emissions from the construction of the vehicles; the embodied energy of streets, bridges and other infrastructure; the operation and repair of this infrastructure; the maintenance and repair of the vehicles; the energy of refining fuel; and the energy of transporting it, together with the pipes, trucks and other infrastructure that is required to do so.

Research indicates this is another roughly 50% again of energy and emissions over tailpipe emissions – and much of it occurs regardless of VMT. It is, however, very sensitive to urban morphology: it is greatly affected by the amount of infrastructure per person, the need to have cars available when other options are not available, the need to build and maintain more shops and service stations for an auto-dependent transportation system, and so on.

 

Moreover, to the factors above we must add other significant contributions: the embodied energy and repair of other infrastructure, such as water, sewer and gas pipes, wires and so on; the energy required to pump or otherwise operate them; the significant “transmission loss” of energy to more dispersed users; the very high efficiency possible in district-scale energy – particularly when it captures waste energy; and the ability to capture other efficiencies of co-location, such as waste heat from sewage.

Location Efficiency

Another significant area is so-called “location efficiency,” or optimal distribution of the various destinations within a city – jobs, shopping, schools, recreation and so on. As many advocates note, this helps in reducing Vehicle Miles Traveled — but here again, that’s only the beginning of the story. Location efficiency also reduces the need for long travel on public transit, and it increases the efficiency in the public transit system itself. It can also facilitate walking, bicycling and other modes that have additional positive effects.

The Urban Shaping of Buildings

In urban studies, we quickly learn that no building is an island. Buildings respond to the structure and density of their neighborhoods, and their complex mix of proximities, market dynamics and other factors. Among the urban factors we must consider: prevailing housing type and size; adjacencies with other units (e.g. common walls and floors that reduce heat loss); efficiencies of exposure and shelter, from sun, shade, wind etc; efficiency of private outdoor space: large yards versus compact ones, or other small outdoor spaces, and the resources they require for maintenance; and ability to support a walkable streetscape. Many building types, notably those that orient parking toward the street, are not conducive to a walkable public realm.

Lost Ecosystem Services

Another important area that has only recently begun to come into focus is what is known as “ecosystem services.” The more we achieve compact growth, leaving existing areas of vegetative cover, wetland, permeable ground and so on, the more we can leave intact ecosystems that perform potentially costly services to clean our water, air and soil. The factors here include vegetative cover per person (the amount of area left, or re-grown, which helps to clean the air and remove CO2); infiltration zones that allow water to be cleaned and purified as it re-enters the ground, or passes through wetlands; and albedo effects – that is, the ability of surfaces to reflect solar energy back into space, or in the case of plants, to convert it to use in the breakdown of CO2.

Behavioral Factors and “Induced Demand”

Perhaps the most poorly understood area, and yet what may prove to be the most important, is that of growth in demand for the consumption of resources, and related behavioral effects. “Induced demand” is the tendency to use up additional efficiencies of the urban system (e.g. to drive more, use more drive-through facilities, fill up new roads, etc).

There is intriguing evidence that urban and building morphology shape individual consumption patterns, and thus demand, in important ways. For example, evidence suggests that a large suburban house that affords few nearby outdoor activities, may encourage more energy-consuming indoor activities, and potentially more consumption of relatively disposable goods.

Conversely, evidence suggests that a more compact neighborhood, offering walkable streets, inviting public spaces, recreation areas, and a mix of daily amenities and needs, does promote much more walking, social interaction and other low-carbon activities. (It also offers significant health benefits, and other long-term benefits.)

We suggest that this important topic requires more careful research. Although it is a thorny area — as human and behavioral sciences often are — we need not fear any behavioral determinism. The built environment merely defines the scope of options available to citizens, so that they can choose more desirable options for themselves — and for society as a whole, through democratic decision-making about the shape of the common realm.

We see this principle working very well in empirical examples of the most desirable neighborhoods – we already mentioned Europe, but there are other equally good examples in the United States, and many other countries as well. On a comparable, income-adjusted basis, research suggests that for the citizens of Paris or London or San Francisco or Vancouver or many other vibrant urban places – places where people freely choose to live, and often pay handsomely to do so – the carbon footprint per person, and the ecological footprint in general, are dramatically lower.

On the other hand, sprawling, high-carbon suburbs do not appear by miracle, or by virtue of pure consumer choice in a vacuum: they have been no less consciously planned, and they continue to exist through a powerful system of economic and regulatory incentives and disincentives. They also effectively push off real costs into the future, when our children and grandchildren will be forced to pay for increasingly alarming environmental costs like climate change – not to mention for costly and inefficient infrastructure, and for the broader consequences of unsustainable housing economics.

In this respect, the current global financial crisis – which originated in the sprawling suburbs of the US – may be seen as a harbinger of the likely devastating economic consequences of continued “business as usual”. By contrast, new research is pointing the way to promising – and feasible – reforms of the “operating system” of urban growth and change.

ABOVE, higher density strongly correlates with lower emissions, as this striking illustration of total emissions by household demonstrates.  The lower emissions of central San Francisco (in green) correlates with higher density in yellow), whereas in the East Bay neighborhood near Hayward, higher emissions (in red) correlates closely with lower density (in blue). Source: ESRI https://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=94b9eff6547f459fba27a6853327e1a2

 

Conclusion

It must be acknowledged that in the fight against climate change, we will certainly need new, cleaner forms of energy, and much more efficient technology. But we will need more than that. As the compelling research shows, it is in our cities, towns and suburbs that the vast majority of the demand for the world’s resources originates — and in turn, the vast majority of the emissions that cause climate change. These places cannot force people to live a more elegant, satisfying, low-carbon way of life. But they can make it possible – or, as is far too much the case now, they can make it improbable, or even impossible.

 

Our job as professionals and citizens, surely, is to make it possible, and moreover, desirable – working in concert with policy experts and researchers to understand better, and to act on, the growing body of evidence discussed here. That research begins to show us how we can build a world of far more efficient, lower-carbon urbanism – which is, at the same time, more livable and beautiful. As the clear findings from the world’s top researchers demonstrate, very much is riding on it.

This post also appeared on Planetizen.com at https://www.planetizen.com/node/41801.  We are grateful to the Planetizen editors.