What makes urban growth sustainable or unsustainable?

The answer as an explanation to sustainability is found in the UN Brundland Commission report.

A certain amount of building the future requires a look into the past. What patterns of civilization are similar in today’s urban growth?

What impacts do the movements in culture have on its future?

The foundation of all urban growth is based on its transportation. Civilization is built upon four different types of land-use. There are four types of land-use: 

• Nature
• Agriculture
• Transit Oriented
• Automobile Centric

Nature is its own maker of land-use design. An interesting note to the physics to this type of land-use design: nature’s growth is centripetal.

Agriculture land-use design, designates the majority of land to accommodate agriculture. This entails most of the populated land areas prior to the industrial age of mechanized farming. It is also the land-use today for large areas of land that accommodates large scale farming.

The transit-oriented land-use design is where cities are built upon train stations and street cars that provide the transportation component for commerce and pedestrians. This land-use design is predominantly vertical building growth which accommodates high density commerce and residential land development. This high-density population and commerce land-use requires fixed-rail transit with multiple destination lines extending to metropolitan areas.

The majority of modernized Western Society uses the automobile centric land-use design. Cars originally provided quick trip times and driver independence. Land was abundant, gas was cheap and the air was clean. 125 years ago, cars were technologically advanced machines and phenomenally convenient. In today’s society 125 years later, the entire society is dependent upon the automobile as its primary source of transportation.

The Car Culture

With Western society referred to as the ‘Car Culture’, impacts from the automobile are massively significant. The automobile, however, is wholly unsustainable. To have an entire culture upon automobiles; although cars are advantageous and fun, building Western Society upon an unsustainable foundation is problematic.

The only solution is to build a better mode of transportation. Something more convenient, faster, less expensive, more efficient, and safer.

The safety record of cars is less than desirable. Everyone knows someone who was killed in a car wreck. Although walking is still used as a necessity as a method of transportation, no one is killed in walking wrecks.

Safety is an important aspect for today’s transportation. Automobile safety has improved but, the amount of traffic has multiplied, lessening the safety improvements.

From the book, Rising From Unsustainable: “In Western society, today’s car culture is the victim of its own doing. Automobile and related industries have far-reaching cultural effects 14 beyond what is easily seen from environmental damage. Throughout the 100-year history of the automobile and its aggregate of related industries producers, financial success has been its primary goal, a reasonable business objective. In an automobile-centric society, however, there are further-reaching consequences that affect its participants to this car culture and the simple goals aspired by product manufacturers to increase sales.

These negative impacts of an automobile’s inefficient nature are magnified over time when used as the base of society. An automobilecentric car culture is an amalgamation of inefficiencies that include land consumption for urban growth.

In considering what makes the automobile unsustainable, one measure is its basic energy inefficiency. An average car weighs three thousand pounds. In terms of inefficient, this says it takes a 3,000-pound car to carry a 200-pound load (one occupant, with baggage). The larger the vehicle, the heavier it is, and the more energy is spent carrying its own weight.

The impact of a car’s ability to become more energy efficient regarding its fuel consumption, however, has no bearing on the inefficiency of travel time to society in traffic congestion and the reflecting lower local economic productivity. This again, coincides with the nature of building a society on an unsustainable foundation. In an automobile-centric society, land consumption is engulfed by the automobile. Including freeways, surface streets, driveways, shopping mall parking, and other parking, a staggering 70 percent of all land in automobile-centric urban land use design (sprawl) is consumed by the automobile. The human component is insignificant, and the automobile is parked 95 percent of its life.”

Here we are again with CATTCC’s actions. To discover, research and develop a brand-new mode of transportation.

The CATTCC posts point to this discovery and research: utilizing gravity as a source of motion for transportation. Gravity is the most abundant form of energy in the universe and provides the greatest potential for efficient transportation.