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Once a year, we take a little time to imagine Life Without Cars.
Many people live without cars today, and also without bicycles (at
least for daily transport use), mostly in urban areas with good
public transportation. In the developing world also, most people
don't own cars, and live in urban areas with good public
transportation. Before 1900, nobody used cars.
December
8, 2013: Life Without Cars: 2013 Edition
December
27, 2012: Life Without Cars: 2012 Edition
December
25, 2011: Life Without Cars: 2011 Edition
December
19, 2010: Life Without Cars: 2010 Edition
December
13, 2009: Life Without Cars: 2009 Edition
December
21, 2008: Life Without Cars
Unfortunately, when people imagine Life Without Cars today, they
usually imagine today's Suburban Hell, perhaps with some
bike lanes. This is stupid. Suburban Hell is designed around
automobile dependency, which is why even cyclists feel like lonely
refugees in a barren landscape of gigantic roadways and parking
lots. This pattern is typified by places like Phoenix, AZ, although
almost all of the U.S. today is in one or another variety of
Suburban Hell.
You can live without a car in a place like this if you are a single
male aged 18-26 with certain romantic enviro-notions, and even then
only for a little while. Or, if you have a low income and just have
to make do any way you can.
The primary alternative to Suburban Hell in the U.S. is what I call
19th Century Hypertrophism. This is the typical pattern of
large cities from before 1940, and is typified by places like
central New York and Chicago. As these environments date from the
19th century, well before the Age of Automobiles, they are often
quite "walkable", have good public transportation, many excellent
examples of 19th century architecture, and particularly for New
York, have many people who live there without cars. The problem of
these places is that, although they have many desirable attributes
from a utilitarian standpoint, they are typically rather ugly,
difficult and unpleasant places to live, especially for families
with young children, women, elderly, and most anyone who is not a
male aged 18-30.
The main reason for the failure of 19th Century Hypertrophism is
that virtually all outdoor places are "hypertrophic" and dominated
by automobile traffic, mostly in the form of a very wide street with
a central roadway section. In terms of living environments, this is
about as good as it gets:
These better examples of 19th Century Hypertrophism also tend to be
very expensive, so you can't actually live there. You might live in
a place more like this:
"Dense"? Dense enough. "Walkable"? Yes. Efficient use of space?
Close enough. Public transportation? Plenty. You don't even need a
bike. It's even rather enviro-friendly, as apartment-dwelling
carless New Yorkers are far less consumptive of natural resources
than their suburban counterparts.
Ugly as anything? You betcha. Millions of people commute hideous
distances from the suburbs so they don't have to live in places like
this.
Just imagine pushing a stroller down the sidewalk in a place like
this, or letting your five-year-olds out to play. Kinda makes you
want that suburban yard, doesn't it? The bigger the better! And so
millions of people mortgage themselves up to the eyeballs to live in
Suburban Hell with as big a yard as possible.
Oddly enough, 19th Century Hypertrophism is often at its best at its
most hypertrophic, with the addition of 20th century high-rise
architecture on the 19th century grid pattern. Like this:
However, despite some attractions, this pattern too can be a harsh
and unforgiving place, especially for families with young children,
which is to say, most everyone aged 0-15 and 30-50. The reality of
"concrete canyons" filled with the unceasing roar of automobile
traffic can be exciting at first, but ultimately wearying even to
young men, and certainly even for older men and women who might not
have young kids.
We have thousands and thousands of examples of 19th Century
Hypertrophism in the United States, most of them built before
automobiles became common in the 1920s. If this was a successful
pattern, don't you think we would have noticed it by now?
Is this your ideal of Life Without Cars? If it is so ideal, what
real-life city in the U.S. exemplifies the "ideal city"?
Pretty tough to name even one, isn't it?
The failure of 19th Century Hypertrophism can be summed up as the
failure to make pleasant Places for People.
The failure of 19th Century Hypertrophism led to what I call 20th
Century Hypertrophism. This was enabled by steel-framed
high-rise architecture, a new development in the early 20th century.
Although this is no longer very popular in the U.S. today, after
many failures in the 1950s and 1960s, it has become very common
elsewhere in the world.
"Towers in a park" circa 1960 (lower left corner)
20th century hypertrophism circa 2005: Dubai.
1928.
1930.
2010. Dubai.
Shanghai. Note cookie-cutter "tower in a park" residential
pattern.
Although people still build this stuff today, it is not very popular
in the U.S. This is basically a combination of highrises with a
suburban pattern, of gigantic roadways and "green space," this
buffer vegetation everywhere which is not a park or other useful or
pleasant place that people can use. It's the same kind of buffer
vegetation we see today in every suburban U.S. strip mall and office
park. Because, once you have eight to twelve lanes of roaring
traffic, you want a buffer, right? The result is that, once you step
out of the highrise, you are in a wasteland of landscape greenery,
parking lots and giant roadways. Not a Pleasant Place for People, no
no no. Look at that photo of highrise apartments in Dubai. Is that
where you would want to raise a family? What an alienating
wasteland.
You can kind of see how people thought this was a good idea. The
best parts of 19th Century Hypertrophism (New York) were places like
Manhattan, where the original 19th century buildings were eventually
replaced by highrises. However, Manhattan is a horrible place to
drive. People like Robert Moses bulldozed neighborhood after
neighborhood trying to bring superhighways to New York City.
However, this was a kludge at best. How much better just to design a
big superhighway in the middle from scratch! The other problem of
19th Century Hypertrophism was not really the buildings themselves,
which are often either rather nice 19th century buildings or 20th
century highrises. The problem was when you stepped out of the
building, into this noisy mess dominated by the roar of traffic. So
we again adopt the Suburban ideal, of the yard/buffer around the
house. However, instead of a real park, this typically degenerated
into a landscaping buffer, which is not the kind of place you would
want your kids to play. Once you have a lot of landscaping buffers
and giant roadways, you can't really walk anywhere anymore, so you
either have to take a train or take a car.
Is this your vision of Life Without Cars? The one with a
superhighway in the middle, and highrises surrounded by landscaping
buffers and roadways, hardly any different than Suburban Hell?
Now we have three patterns of failure: Suburban Hell, 19th
Century Hypertrophism, and 20th Century Hypertrophism.
We've spent decades, and hundreds and hundreds of attempts all over
the world, to make one of these patterns work and I would say that
there is not one example in the world of a Pleasant Place
for People resulting. I know that a hundred architects and urban
design geeks would claim I'm wrong, but name just one real-world
example of success. Because, if there was even just one
example, then other people would imitate it, and there would
eventually be hundreds of examples, and we would no longer hate the
places we live.
So you see, just riding a bicycle, train or bus in one of these
failed environments doesn't really accomplish anything. We spent a
century riding around the 19th Century Hypertrophic City in the U.S.
without cars, and it was so great that, once Henry Ford made the
automobile affordable in the 1920s, everybody escaped to the country
as fast as they could build houses in former farmland.
What is the alternative? It is something I call the
Traditional City. Although the form is as old
as civilization itself, over 5000 years old, it can take many
contemporary variants as is common particularly in Asia. I've
written a lot about it elsewhere, so today, we will just take a trip
to some real-world urban places where you can live happily ever
after, with a family, for the entirety of your life from birth to
old age, without a car. You could even combine Traditional City
elements with highrise architecture, creating a hybrid where you can
step out of your 60-story apartment building into a beautiful Place
for People, not a 19th Century Hypertrophism or 20th Century
Hypertrophism disaster.
That's a long enough intro, so now sit back and enjoy your walking
tour of some Traditional City environments.
This tour of the Nakasendo, an old walking highway in Japan, has
several stops in the charming rural villages along the trail.
This tour of the Shinjuku district of Tokyo gives you an idea of
how Traditional City design can be incorporated in a contemporary
fashion not only in an antique village, but a giant metropolis.
Try to find a place like this in any 19th Century Hypertrophic
city in the United States.
This walking tour of Dubrovnik, Croatia shows one of the hundreds
of awesome Traditional City places in Europe.
This is a walking tour of Lyon, France.
Here's another contemporary example. Shanghai, China.
Get it? It's so simple.
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Here for the Traditional City/Heroic Materialism Archive
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