Three segments in the development of sustainable urban growth

The advantage of this year's final blogpost is with a post mark-date of 123123. This post will close the year with the important topic of sustainable urban growth.

Sustainable urban growth development has three segments: environmental, economic, and social. In addition to transportation, there is an intersecting component with sustainable building methodologies, gardens and landscape design.

How does urban growth happen with sustainability? There are different types of urban growth development; low-density, medium-density, and high-density. High-density urban growth is the most challenging to maintain social sustainability.

To make urban growth sustainable, one has to understand land-use. There are four types of land-use: 

• Nature
• Agriculture
• Transit Oriented
• Automobile Centric

Of these four types of land-use design, automobile centric land-use design is wholly unsustainable.

From the blogpost Why Current Urban Growth is Unsustainable:

The first official use of the term “sustainable development” came from a report in the 1980 World Conservation Strategy of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

In 1983, the United Nations (UN) convened the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), which came to be known as The Brundtland Report. One of the conclusions identified three aspects of urban growth:

1. Environmental
2. Economic
3. Social

In 1987, the UN debated the report which eventually led to the creation of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development in 1992. It grew into what is referred to as Agenda 21. 

As the definition of sustainable development, Wikipedia states: “The Brundtland Report was intended to respond to the conflict between globalized economic growth and accelerating ecological degradation by redefining "economic development" in terms of "sustainable development". It is credited with crafting the most prevalent definition of sustainability: "Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

From the book: ‘Rising from Unsustainable’:

To more clearly define and summarize unsustainable land-use design, there are three fundamental components in explaining land-use sustainability, each with its own impact:

Environmental Impact

The automobile requires road surfaces. These roadbeds are oil based. Ever watched a road being built? Lots of grading work, scraping dirt, filling, and generally reworking the natural surface of Earth. Okay, not a big deal in small amounts, but tens of millions of miles of roads heavily effect the natural water flow of streams and runoff. Secondly, millions of miles of roadbeds capturing grease, emissions by-products, pollutants, carcinogens, and oil spills are funneled as oil canals called roadbeds flowing directly into the water basins. That is undoubtedly environmentally unsustainable. Millions of electric and autonomous cars won’t resolve the damage caused by the oil-based road infrastructure.

Economic Impact

Ever hear the phrase “buy local, spend local?” This term is what creates regional economic sustainability. A dollar spent locally allows that dollar to stay in circulation, being continually exchanged within a local area. When that money is spent out of the local area, the money is gone; it can no longer be used locally. Automobile-centric land-use design is economically unsustainable. Here’s why: the first product of economic unsustainability is the purchase of a new automobile. Today’s purchase price of an automobile is what, on average? $50,000? That amount is instantly removed from circulation in a local economy, never to be recovered for circulation in that community unless that car was manufactured in that local community. Then there are the fuel consumption rates. Averages vary from region to region. For example, a county consumes 500,000 gallons of gasoline per day. At $3 per gallon, that is $1.5 million per day (less 2 percent for the wholesaler and retailer) permanently extracted from ever being used and circulated in that community. An even greater financial extraction from the community are insurance costs per vehicle, at an average cost of $120 per month per vehicle. This is economic unsustainability from the design of automobile-centric urban land-use.

Social Impact

These aspects are rarely considered by studies, except by a very few stragglers engaged in nontraditional academia. It’s the cutting edge of far-reaching consideration. There was a term coined in the early 2000s called visual hostility. It was popularized then, not so popular now, due to the extent of its content. Visual hostility is found to describe blight. Scores of nonprofit organizations declared war on urban blight. The support money behind nonprofits came from big money interests that cashed in on government subsidized, low cost, low-income neighborhood gentrification near high value real estate areas. A lot of blight was erased within a few years. To elected politicians, like homelessness, urban blight no longer exists.

Unsustainable urban growth will continue as long as the automobile remains the primary source of transportation in Western Society.

From the blogpost https://www.cattcc.org/impacts-of-the-automobile-centric-land-use-design:

Social

Here’s where things get odd. The style of an automobile is created by designers. Primary influences relevant to these designs are current trends in fashion. Car sales are promoted by advertising agencies’ campaigns exclusively measured by fashion trends to encourage customer purchases. While this is reasonable in business, its effects reach further than mere car sales in the automobile-centric society. 

The date of every car manufactured can be visually ascertained by its style of that decade. Further reaching social implications of fashion can be seen in the patterns and styles of the tract housing built to accommodate automobile-centric urban growth. The houses built in the 1920s are different than those of the 1930s, 40s, 50s, etc., through newly built dwellings today; every decade can be visually distinguished in its style.

One of the negative repercussions from fashion-only production in the automobile-centric society is the consequence of worn-out parts. Trends in design no longer fashionable fade into a negative social enigma. Outdated tract homes and strip malls no longer in vogue stimulate economic activity to newer growth centers of sprawl development. The significance can be seen in every urban area that is several decades old.

As clothing fashion styles change from season to season, the automobile and tract house styles make major shifts every decade. Inasmuch as fashions quickly go out of date, each tract style becomes out of fad after a decade and a new tract house area becomes popular. The nature of automobile-centric society follows new trending patterns based on that era’s marketing popularity in cultural and sprawl development.

Sustainability

In reading all this information about sustainability, what’s the point of talking about it? Pointing out problems about things that people are satisfied with is futility. “Give me an alternative” is the point.

Again, transportation is the foundation to all urban growth. There can be no sustainable urban growth without changing the primary source of transportation for Western Society.

The current transportation mindset regarding changes in transportation is to convert a gasoline engine to an electric motor. Throughout the CATTCC documentation is the constant phrase: ‘the automobile is unsustainable’. Changing its engine has little effect on the negative environmental, economic, and social impacts. As much as all of Western Society is dependent upon the automobile, the automobile is unsustainable.

To replace the automobile as society’s primary source of transportation, it can only be replaced by a methodology that is more convenient than a car. Such methodology has to go faster, be significantly less expensive, more comfortable, safer, more efficient, and lastly; better environmentally.

What transportation advances has CATTCC made?

In exploring where such a transportation device can be found, the CATTCC search began with physics. It seemed the most practical approach. It didn’t take a tremendous amount of effort to find that the greatest source of energy in the universe is gravity. There is more to gravity than throwing something up in the air and watching it fall to the ground. Studying gravity as a source of motion for transportation is relevant to efficient energy use. This is one of the primary pursuits of CATTCC. Discovering answers and developing transportation solutions is a necessity for sustainable urban growth.

One of the most significant discoveries is in the field of theoretical physics. What is gravity? 400 years ago, Isaac Newton wrote the Law of Universal Gravitation. His law explains properties of mass and the effects of influence to other bodies of mass. However, the why it does what it does is absent from his law of gravity. CATTCC has postulated a new theory of gravity.

Another significant effort is the recognition for two areas of transportation; short-distance and long-distance travel. This is defined as creating a brand-new mode of transportation. Yes, this requires finding a way of doing something that hasn’t been done before (or alternatively, discovering something that isn’t currently normal). There are several considerations of importance in developing a brand-new mode of transportation. To approach this, CATTCC took the view from the aspect of energy efficiency; friction is the by far the biggest contributor to ineffective energy use. 

Current technology

Current rocket technology for long-distance space travel is by propulsion. Here is a simple analysis of rocket inefficiency: the molecular release of energy in a chemical explosion is 360 degrees. A rocket’s direction is only one degree. The maximum speed attainable by rocket technology is 25,000 mph. The fastest speed ever reached by mankind was attained by the Parker Solar Mission with a speed of 300,000 mph. It reached that speed by the manipulating the gravity of Venus.

Short distance transportation is currently dominated by the automobile. To change this; requires a transportation device with the capability of levitation. CATTCC research carries this discovery into 2024.