Visions of the Future
Wednesday, 28 July 2010 |  Llewellyn van Wyk  |  0 comment

Image by Mndoci

Excerpt from Chapter 14 of The Sustainable Transport and Mobility Handbook, Volume 1.

Background and History

Man has been fascinated with transport modes ever since the invention of the wheel: many of the art pieces of antiquity feature vehicles as a significant indicator of the dynamism of times or of the wealth of the person depicted. However, it was not until 1807 that the first public passenger tram began operation followed by the first public passenger rail service in 1825. By 1850 the experimental stage of railway station building was over in both Europe and the United States as passenger amenities increased and the larger stations provided shelter all the way from the street to the train (ed. Guedes 1979:68). New stations were built on a larger scale, partly to leave room for expansion and partly because they began to incorporate hotels and office buildings. Trains especially seem to capture the imagination of the time and the 1860s gave birth to a period of great train stations. Railway companies set out to be impressive, and concourses inside the buildings became monumental best illustrated perhaps by Central Station in New York (1903-13).

Rail and rail stations offered engineers and architects an opportunity to break with the building styles of the past, largely because the building represented a new building typology and the programmatic demands required large clear spans. One of the architects who embraced this new building type and what it potentially represented was Antonio Sant’Elia. As described in the manifesto Futurist Architecture (1914), his vision was for a highly industrialised and mechanised city of the future, which he saw not as a mass of individual buildings but a vast, multi-level, interconnected and integrated urban conurbation designed around the “life” of the city. His extremely influential designs featured vast monolithic skyscraper buildings with terraces, bridges and aerial walkways that embodied the sheer excitement of modern architecture and technology.

Airports offered a similar opportunity, even though they came much later than railway stations. Like railway stations, airports are no more than a transportation interchange, the interface between different modes of travel.

The tram and the train remained the dominant personal transport choices available for most people up until 1939: the post-War years brought advanced technologies and the growth in private wealth following the war enabled access to private transport modes for more and more people. With the proliferation of the motor car and the vision of vast freeways allowing travel to wherever one liked, new visions of city life emerged. The Ville Contemporaine or Contemporary City was such a vision: an unrealised project to house 3-million inhabitants designed by the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier in 1922. The centerpiece of this plan was the group of enormous 60 story cruciform skyscrapers built on steel frames and encased in huge curtain walls of glass. They housed both offices and flats for the most wealthy inhabitants. These skyscrapers were set within large, rectangular park-like green spaces. At the very centre was a huge transportation centre that, on different levels, included depots for buses and trains, as well as highway intersections and at the top, an airport. Le Corbusier segregated the pedestrian circulation paths from the roadways, and glorified the use of the automobile as a means of transportation. This design philosophy was adopted as the vision of the modern city around the world with most affluent countries and cities investing heavily in extensive roads and freeways which were considered essential to underpin growth and prosperity (See image).

This planning philosophy has come in for harsh criticism, most notably in the seminal book The Death of Cities by Jane Jacobs. One of the negative impacts of this transport model, for example, is on public health: public health impacts are not generally given a lot of consideration in transport planning decisions such as choosing between freeway and public transit improvements, or whether to rise fuel taxes and parking fees, but recent research suggests that creating a more diverse and efficient transport system may be among the most cost-effective ways to improve public health, and improving public health is one of the largest benefits of improving alternative modes (walking, cycling and public transit), encouraging more efficient travel patterns, and creating more accessible, multi-modal communities (Litman, 2009). Automobile dependency contributes significantly to sedentary living, obesity and associated health problems such as heart disease, stroke, hypertension and diabetes. A recent study titled Walking, Cycling, and Obesity Rates in Europe, North America, and Australia (Basset et al, 2008) shows a strong positive correlation between automobile mode split and obesity (or put more positively, a strong correlation between transportation system diversity and healthy body mass).

A significant amount of recent research shows that people who live in more walkable and transit-oriented communities are significantly more likely to achieve physical activity targets and avoid obesity than residents of automobile-dependent communities. Alternative visions of transportation and mobility thus pose a solution to some of the most difficult and costly health problems facing affluent countries in general.

Click here to order the Sustainable Transport and Mobility Handbook to read the rest of the chapter in which alternative visions of transportation and mobility are highlighted as possible solutions to some of the most difficult and costly health problems facing affluent countries in general.

Picture Source: Flickr