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  • Reducing Auto Dependency and SprawlAn Ecological Imperative
  • Janet Biehl (bio)

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How might we restructure our cities around principles of ecological sustainability? Mona Caron portrays an ecotopian future in this detail from her Noe Valley Mural diptych.

Mona Caron (monacaron.com)

As climate change threatens to make life on earth unbearable, most of us recognize that our society must reduce its dependency on fossil fuels. Automobile use is one of the greatest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. To reduce emissions, we must stop driving so much. But how?

More than half of all Americans live in sprawling suburbs, a built environment that forces them to own cars in order to function. For thousands of years of human settlement, the functions of daily life were clustered together in one place, accessible by foot or animal-drawn wheels. Later, as cities developed, people could live in apartments above shops, or down the block from them, to meet most of their daily needs. But after World War II, for many social, cultural, psychological, and economic reasons, the United States initiated a radical departure from this settlement pattern, creating an entirely new one: horizontal sprawl. Americans fled their old urban neighborhoods for single-family homes in low-density housing subdivisions.

For a time they commuted back to work in the cities. Then workplaces left the cities as well, and cars were the only way to get around. Soon homes, workplaces, and shopping sites were cordoned off into their own dedicated areas. Zoning codes even came to mandate the separation of residential, office, and commercial spaces. People living in sprawl have to drive, usually several times a day, to meet their basic daily needs, traveling from housing subdivision to strip mall to office park. For people to simply function in sprawl, car ownership—one vehicle for each adult per household—is thus all but mandatory.

The Importance of Walkable Neighborhoods

To reduce auto dependence, we need to reshape our built environment so that it no longer requires car ownership—thereby enhancing sustainability. In recent decades, a new generation of urban planners has been devising concrete ways to do just that.

The Congress for a New Urbanism, founded in 1993, calls itself “the leading organization promoting walkable, neighborhood-based development as an antidote to formless sprawl.” Among its founders and collaborators are the architects and planners Andrés Duany (coauthor of Suburban Nation), Peter Calthorpe (author most recently of Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change), and Jeff Speck (Walkable City), who have explained this cluster of ideas. Strong Towns, a nonprofit organization inspired by the civil engineer and planner Chuck Marohn, shares their basic approach; so does the Project for Public Spaces, based on the work of the urbanist William H. Whyte. These groups understand that compact, high-density settlements are in many ways inherently more desirable than low-density suburbs, not least because they are inherently greener.

One reason for this greenness is that urban dwellers have access to public transportation, while suburban housing developments are insufficiently dense to support transit. But perhaps more important, settlements like urban neighborhoods are compact and therefore walkable. Destinations are within walking distance, not zoned into distant enclaves.

During the decades when Americans were enchanted by sprawl, our society neglected its urban cores, and urban homes and neighborhoods fell into disrepair and decay. Planners today are discovering that municipal neighborhoods that were built before the era of the car already have the bones for compactness, walkable streets, and mixed uses. They already have water lines, sewers, and streets in place—they don’t need expensive financing. As a result, many planners are rebuilding and renovating abandoned buildings and neighborhoods. Old houses can be repaired and new ones built as infill. The National Trust for Historic Preservation offers guidance and support for renovating urban neighborhoods for sustainability.

Today’s new urbanists are also creating new settlements, using traditional town planning methods. Their neighborhoods are closely woven and small in scale; they bring homes (of a variety of types including row houses), stores, offices, and civic buildings together on narrow, tree-lined streets dense with sidewalks and parks. Their towns have easily...

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