I Think Our Environment is Crucial. Why Should I Care About City Planning?

Planning is an important element influencing sustainability of a town or city.

The design of an urban area has inherent in it a level of resource and energy use-the right design can result in thrifty use of energy and resource savings, the wrong design can create an energy hog for decades.

Twililight Earth is proud to present a Guest Article by George Osner

For instance, how much travel is required by the design and layout?  Home to work, home to shopping, home to school, trips for recreation and experience of nature and so forth.  What is the form of this travel?  Some designs facilitate and raise the likelihood that many trips will be on foot or by bicycle, others require that nearly every trip involves a car.  Some designs work hand in hand with transit, others virtually insure that transit cannot be an option.

In addition, different designs have substantially different amounts of resources used in their development, and require differing amounts of energy and resources to operate.  For instance, low-density areas require, on average, more length of street per unit, and therefore more asphalt and concrete to construct streets and sidewalks.  The utilities beneath the streets-gas pipes and electrical lines, water and sewer pipelines, storm drains, phone and cable TV lines, all must be longer and therefore use more materials, and take more energy to install.  Furthermore, they will require more energy to operate as long and they are in use-water has to be pumped farther, electricity has line losses, and so forth-and there are the added miles of lines requiring maintenance.  Of course, the more miles of streets, the more maintenance, the more potholes needing filling, the more resources, energy (and cost!).

Individual separated units are less energy efficient than attached units.  More materials are required in their construction, and they require more heating and cooling energy for the same level of insulation.  Lower density, spread out units mean longer distances to everything, hence more trip miles.  In addition, they don’t create the “critical mass” for transit.  Effective transit needs a large number of people living within walking distance of transit stops.  Savvy developers know that property values increase dramatically around light rail and trolley lines, where people can walk to the line, and will create “transit-oriented developments,” or TOD’s.  Historically, rail and trolley lines were used to create development opportunities, a kind of development-oriented transit, and smart cities are again taking this approach.

Most cities have a form of zoning regulation that requires that different uses be separated-residential with residential, commercial with commercial, offices, with offices, and industrial with industrial.  Often these categories are further separated into a dozen or more rigidly separated groups.  In practice, this means that the rules are set up to ensure that every trip to the store for a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk requires that you get in your car, and that every trip to work also is a trip in the car, usually of several miles (or many, many miles if you live in a “bedroom community”).  This type of regulation has been around less than 100 years.  It was evolved in response to a need to separate sensitive uses, such as housing, from noisy, polluting, hazardous industrial uses.  But the end result has been a rigid system that does not recognize the value of bringing daily commercial activity together with the places people live.  This type of zoning, together with public improvement standards for factors such as streets, is the DNA that dictates our urban form today, and it is flawed.

What is needed to produce a walkable, sustainable, livable neighborhood for the 21^st century in the United States?  We need to break down the separation of uses to get back to the basics of keeping genuinely hazardous or obnoxious uses separate from living areas.  We need to provide for more attached housing and higher densities.  We need to renew and revitalize our downtowns.  We need more grid street designs and less cul-de-sacs, breaking down the barriers to walking from place to place.  We need street and trail designs that make walking and cycling a pleasant and safe experience, and that make it possible to go by foot or bicycle anywhere a car can go.  We need to design nodes of higher density to allow for viable transit lines, and commit to the installation and operation of transit-and to making the transit trip a pleasant as well as useful and reliable one.

Most of all, we need committed and informed citizens who will participate in the civic processes that generate our urban forms, that will hold government decision makers and staff accountable to provide liveable, sustainable places.

I often hear that the typical suburb is simply giving the consumer what they want, that it is a pure response to the market, that the suburban home is “the American Dream” desired by every citizen, and that there is no role for those that would attempt to change this.  The reality is that “what the consumer wants” is heavily shaped by what the market has to offer and by advertising and media.  For many years the suburban home has indeed been presented as the ideal.  We can no longer afford to promote that outmoded model as a society.  A good plan and good implementation can influence urban form and enhance our cities, making them more liveable, more walkable, less resource and energy-intensive.  I hope you’ll get involved.

George Osner, AICP

George is also @gosner on Twitter and can be found there, vehemently defending the environment. He recently wrote an article for the Grass Stain Guru and we are honored to feature him on Twilight Earth.

photo credit: KimonBerlin

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