BY JIM GREEN
Forests and farmland eaten up, watersheds paved over, noise and air pollution from road traffic — a seemingly endless list of problems confronts the 2.85 billion people who reside in urban agglomerations. And the problem is rapidly growing: four times as many people live in cities as in 1950.
City Limits, written by Molly O'Meara Sheehan from the United States-based Worldwatch Institute, analyses the inter-related social and environmental problems associated with urban sprawl.
In large part as a result of urban sprawl, road transportation has become the fastest growing source of greenhouse gases — worldwide, the share of carbon dioxide emissions from transportation climbed from 17% in 1971 to 23% in 1997. This increase was mainly due to road traffic — cars accounted for 58% of carbon dioxide emissions from transportation in 1990, 73% in 1997.
Globally, traffic accidents kill close to one million people annually. In some countries, air pollution kills more people than traffic accidents (about twice as many in Austria, France and Switzerland).
City Limits draws data from numerous countries, but the US data is the most striking. A 1999 survey of 68 US cities found that traffic delays led to 4.5 billion hours of extra travel time and 6.8 billion gallons of fuel burned in traffic delays, costing these cities $78 billion in 1999 alone, while on average parents spend twice as much time in the car as they do with their children each day.
Between 1988 and 1999, the US spent more than six times more on highways than it did on public transportation. Half of all households in US cities in 1990 were not within walking distance of a public transportation route. Consequently, the US consumes 43% of world's gasoline production to propel less than 5% of the world's population.
Sheehan also addresses some less obvious effects of urban sprawl. For example, it partly explains the fall in participation in US presidential elections by about 25% from 1960-96, and the fall of 35% in the number of people who attended a public meeting on town or school affairs between 1974-98.
Auto companies have responded to flat sales in established markets by targeting "emerging markets". Central and eastern Europe is home to 45% of the world's light rail systems, but those rail systems are being replaced by roads and cars. From 1990-96, a quarter of Hungarian towns lost their public transportation systems. In the Czech Republic, car use surged and public transport use fell as the number of suburban hypermarkets ballooned from one to 53 from 1997-2000.
In numerous cities, authorities have discouraged or even banned bicycles and other human-powered means of transportation to free up space for cars.
Political dimensions
Sheehan is alert to the political dimensions of the problems. Oil and tyre companies, car makers, road builders, and real estate developers are the major culprits. Globally, car companies spent US$24 billion on advertising in 1998 — more than any other industry — to convince people that sprawling development enhances freedom and prosperity.
The political machinery conspires with big business. Transportation agencies reward officials for building more roads. Zoning laws often segregate stores and other businesses from homes, making cars virtually essential. Various taxes and subsidies hide the true cost of sprawl.
Legal "bribes" in the form of campaign contributions — in the 2000 US congressional elections, industries with a stake in transportation and land use decisions coughed up $218 million, 17% of the total donated by major industry groups — and illegal bribes oil the wheels of urban sprawl.
The wealthy try to keep the poor out of their communities by spurning links to region-wide public transportation and by passing "snob zoning" laws that forbid the type of housing that lower- or middle-income people could afford. In the US city of Atlanta, public transport does not extend to three of the five counties in which employment is concentrated.
Overt patterns of racism have been replaced with more insidious, class-based mechanisms such as these "snob zoning" laws. Poor quality public transport creates class, race, age and gender inequities. About one third of US citizens do not have driver's licences. About 60% of women in the US work outside the home but women make two thirds of all trips to take another person somewhere.
Solutions and non-solutions
City Limits notes that the nostrums proposed to deal with urban sprawl can be as bad as the disease. Traffic engineers advocate widening roads to move vehicles more quickly into areas of low population density, but this just extends the problem farther, and wider roads invite more cars so the alleviation of congestion is short-lived.
"We can have healthier, more livable cities and protect the planet from climate change too", Sheehan argues.
She puts forward numerous specific prescriptions: energy-efficient cars; car-sharing networks; giving precedence to pedestrians and cyclists; new development in locations easily reached by public transport; population densities that make public transportation and cycling possible; recycling old buildings, parking lots, and industrial sites; maintaining or developing good schools in urban locations to prevent sprawl, and so on.
City Limits also documents a number of "good news" cities which have managed to buck the trends in some respects, in particular Curitiba (Brazil), Portland (Oregon, US), and Copenhagen (Denmark).
In Portland, a six-lane riverfront expressway was replaced with a park for cyclists and walkers, and a large downtown parking lot was transformed into a pedestrian plaza. The high-quality public transport system in Curitiba has had a "ripple effect", encouraging the improvement of public transport systems in other cities and countries.
"Policies to promote urban development around public transportation and remove incentives to sprawl are far easier to recommend than to put into practice", Sheehan notes. She recognises that to be successful, coalitions have to counter the political power of large automotive and real estate development companies.
However, the solutions proposed in City Limits do not amount to a serious challenge to corporate power. The analysis is set in a liberal pluralist framework: "many people ... realise that they can pressure their leaders to choose a different future".
The narrowness of this outlook doesn't sit easily with the information provided in City Limits, which shows that positive changes tend to come only when the pressure is substantial and sustained, and other circumstances favourable, while today's victories can become tomorrow's losses in the face of corporate profiteering and political collusion and corruption.
Anything heading in vaguely the right direction is applauded in City Limits — citizens' groups, non-government organisations such as the Intermediate Technology Development Group (which helped reduce the luxury tax on bicycles in Nairobi), the coalition of local government officials which formed the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives in 1990 to share success stories, corporations involved in bicycle and rail production — and that's really the beginning and end of the analysis.
There's even a place at the table for auto, energy and real estate companies so long as they "reposition" themselves.
The best possible outcome within this framework of broad acceptance of corporate power is the odd niche of urban civility sitting uneasily within a broader pattern of ecological disintegration.
Moreover, a program as eclectic and tame as that provided in City Limits risks sliding into the abyss of conservative ideological containment. "The importance of engaging businesses and appealing to consumers cannot be overstated", Sheehan writes.
Sheehan's support for increased fuel taxes would be questionable at the best of times since it does nothing to counter corporate power, and wealthy consumers are likely to simply absorb additional costs while everyone else cops an extra tax or is forced to rely on usually inadequate public transport.
"By raising gasoline taxes, governments can generate funds for public transportation, discourage excessive driving, and encourage development of alternative fuels and vehicles", Sheehan writes.
Yes, governments could do that, but for an explanation as to why they generally don't, there's no need to look further than the examples of political-corporate collusion presented in City Limits.
The advocacy of increased fuel prices is still more problematic given that Sheehan also suggests that governments can rein in sprawl by minimising spending on new infrastructure in outlying areas.
More taxes, less resources ... this is business as usual, it's blaming the victims — and what happened to countering the power of those responsible for the current mess, the corporations and their political operatives?
There is scarcely any attempt to tackle the broader, structural issues in City Limits. Sheehan's proposals — such as countering corporate power by demanding greater openness, developing a "clear vision" as a "powerful agent of change", rejigging relationships between different levels of government, and information-sharing networks to multiply people's efforts — only serve to confirm the limitations of the analysis.
Academic Timothy Luke, in a critique published in the June 1994 edition of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, noted that the Worldwatch Institute, founded in 1974 on the strength of a substantial donation from the Rockefeller Brother's Fund, still enjoys sponsorship from a range of "blue ribbon" corporate and private foundations.
The worldview propagated by the institute, Luke argues, is technocratic and managerialist. Chunks of the world (forests, atmosphere, cities, energy, agriculture) are treated in isolation and technocratic, managerialist fixes flow inevitably from this blinkered perspective.
According to Luke, in the Worldwatch worldview, "The existing flow of energy, information, and resources is not wrong as such, only in its volumes, rates and levels, which shrewd ecological management — via the mobilised worldwatchers — can provide."
Many of these problems are evident in City Limits, although the Worldwatch Institute's preoccupation with population growth is not recycled in this book.
Sheehan presents data showing that sprawl tends to substantially outstrip population growth. Chicago, for example, saw a 38% increase in population from 1950-90 while the city's land area increased by 124% over this period.
Despite its limitations, City Limits is a useful summary of the interconnected social and environmental problems associated with urban sprawl, with a great deal of information and data synthesised in just 85 pages.
[City Limits: Putting the Brakes on Sprawl can be purchased for US$5 through the Worldwatch Institute website <http://www.worldwatch.org> or by phoning 1-301-567-9522.]