Beyond Mobility: Planning Cities for People and Places

by Robert Cervero, Erick Guerra, Stefan Al

Cities across the globe have been designed with a primary goal of moving people around quickly—and the costs are becoming ever more apparent. The consequences are measured in smoggy air basins, sprawling suburbs, unsafe pedestrian environments, and despite hundreds of billions of dollars in investments, a failure to stem traffic congestion. Every year our current transportation paradigm generates more than 1.25 million fatalities directly through traffic collisions. Worldwide, 3.2 million people died prematurely in 2010 because of air pollution, four times as many as a decade earlier. Instead of planning primarily for mobility, our cities should focus on the safety, health, and access of the people in them.
 
Beyond Mobility is about prioritizing the needs and aspirations of people and the creation of great places. This is as important, if not more important, than expediting movement. A stronger focus on accessibility and place creates better communities, environments, and economies. Rethinking how projects are planned and designed in cities and suburbs needs to occur at multiple geographic scales, from micro-designs (such as parklets), corridors (such as road-diets), and city-regions (such as an urban growth boundary). It can involve both software (a shift in policy) and hardware (a physical transformation). Moving beyond mobility must also be socially inclusive, a significant challenge in light of the price increases that typically result from creating higher quality urban spaces.
 
There are many examples of communities across the globe working to create a seamless fit between transit and surrounding land uses, retrofit car-oriented suburbs, reclaim surplus or dangerous roadways for other activities, and revitalize neglected urban spaces like abandoned railways in urban centers.
 
The authors draw on experiences and data from a range of cities and countries around the globe in making the case for moving beyond mobility. Throughout the book, they provide an optimistic outlook about the potential to transform places for the better. Beyond Mobility celebrates the growing demand for a shift in global thinking around place and mobility in creating better communities, environments, and economies.

Genres: Urban Planning, Urban, Urbanism

296 pages, Paperback

Published December 5, 2017

Reviews

[Anastasia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was not written for me. It was written for city planers and politicians who plan cities. It did have information that I could use at the beginning of the book to help discuss changes with my city officials.

It really should be read by politisation of all levels to increase their understanding of what successful transportation can look like.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is a valuable and well designed resource manual that looks at how cities across the globe have use urban planning to address modern day issues. It stresses urban design and the importance of making safe places in the 21st-century as opposed to the idea of moving cars around in the mid 20th-century. As resource for urban planning it should be required reading for all municipal politicians and anyone seeking to make our cities better places to live.

"Beyond Mobility is about reordering priorities. In the planning and design of cities, far more attention must go toward serving the needs and aspirations of people and the creation of great places as opposed to expediting movement. Historically it has been the opposite." 1

"Giving stronger priority to place is another way fo saying cities should be highly accessible. Accessibility is about the ease of reaching places where people want to go." 3

"Car oriented places do not promote the accumulation of social capital. The journey of the typical surburbanite from the bubble of the detached single-family home to office cubicle is marked by isolation, with limited possibilities to interact socially." 19

"Locating metro and bus stops near places where people are known to congregate will enhance interpersonal interactions and increase the social capital of that are. This will link more people to public transportation and could help establish a public culture that normalizes its use." 21

"With increasing motorization and investments in roads and highways, cities find themselves in a vicious cycle: Reliance on the private car unleashes more sprawl and road building that further increases reliance on the private car." 39

"For example, an Australian study found that annual energy consumption of suburban households was 50 percent higher than that of households in the urban centre, explained by greater car use and longer journeys." 43
Because the post war economies of the 20th-century helped underwrite this style of increased energy consumption there was never a relationship of use to cost. This needs to change. Everyone needs to be made aware of their energy consumption and to pay for what they use.

"Globalization, containerization, and the rise of the postindustrial economy has change the makeup of Western cities. Docklands and warehouse districts in Western cities became underused when the use of standardized containers moved shipping to deep-water pots and companies increasingly outsourced manufacturing to countries with lower labor costs. Meanwhile, the rise of the trucking industry led to the abandonment of thousands of rail lines. These former industrial sites can be given a new purpose in the postindustrial city, although some forms of manufacturing in these former industrial districts still exists." 68
A really good analysis of urban change in the postindustrial world.

[Bart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Subway systems, trams, Bus-Rapid-Transit, high-speed trains, cars – these can all play useful roles in well-designed transportation systems. But we must not forget what still is and what should remain the world’s most important transportation method: walking.

That is one of the key messages of Beyond Mobility: Planning Cities for People and Places, a survey of urban planning successes and failures around the world.

Full review at:
http://www.resilience.org/stories/201...

[Mills College Library]

307.1216 C419 2017