Sustainable Urban Growth

The first thing to say about sustainable urban growth; it is not attainable with an unsustainable foundation. To find out about what sustainable urban growth is, it's necessary to examine what unsustainable urban growth is.

What is an unsustainable foundation? The automobile centric land-use design. But, the automobile is wholly unsustainable. Western society is known as the car culture and to build an entire society on an unsustainable foundation is problematic. 

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

·        Environmental

·        Economic

·        Social 

Environmental: 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 effects 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: impacts of unsustainability means that the currency of the community are extracted out of the area. 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 used within a local area. When that money is removed out of the local area, the money is gone; it can no longer be used locally. Automobile-centric land-use design is economically unsustainable.

The first product of economic unsustainability of the automobile is the purchase of an 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 the car was manufactured in that local community.

Then there are the fuel consumption rates. Averages vary from region to region. Where I live, the county consumes 500,000 gallons of gasoline per day. At the current price of more than $4 per gallon, that is $2 million per day (less 2 percent for the wholesaler and retailer) permanently extracted from ever being used and circulated in the community. An even greater financial extraction from the community are insurance costs per vehicle, at an average cost of $120 per month per vehicle. Again, in the county where I live, there are 700,000 registered vehicles. Even at $100 each per month, that is $840,000,000 annually removed from the area. This is economic unsustainability based on the design of automobile-centric land-use.

Social: social impacts are rarely considered by studies, except by a very few stragglers engaged in nontraditional academia. It’s the cutting edge of far-reaching consideration. In one of these rare studies by traditional academia, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Ph.D., Former Chair, UCLA Dept, of Urban Planning coined the term 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 as blight. Scores of nonprofit organizations declared war on urban blight and out came the paint brushes. The support money behind nonprofits came from big money interests that cashed in on government subsidized, low cost and low-income neighborhood gentrification near high value real estate areas. A lot of blight was erased within a few years, and to elected politicians, like homelessness, urban blight no longer exists.

Initially, the automobile was sold to the general public as a method of attaining independence. By partaking in the feeling of independence, suburbia was created and progressed into what we have today, which is uncontrollable sprawl. One of the unforeseen aspects to this claim of freedom and independence was dependency to its unsustainable design flaw and costs to its future. 

Among the consequences of an automobile-centric society is the pervasiveness of social isolationism. The standard procedure for people today is to get up from bed, walk outside to their car, and drive to work with no social interactions. Many people park in a parking lot, walk to an office, work an entire day without the benefit of the interaction of close personal relationships, and then drive home, lacking any relevant social interaction. In its proposition of independence, the automobile-centric society evolved into a culture of social isolationism, or a lack of social interacting.

Unsustainability of the automobile reaches deep into an automobile-based society. The cultural implications of social isolationism and the myriad of health problems created by the stress of traffic congestion are yet to be fully investigated.

Prior to the automobile-centric urban land-use design, Western society had been building its urban growth upon the railroad and streetcars: a transit-oriented land-use design. That type of urban growth has characteristics of sustainability. 

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.

What is sustainable urban growth?

• Economically, the local currency tends to stay local.
  
• Environmentally, roads are used for public service access and minimized.
  
• Socially, human interaction becomes normalized.