Is Perpetual Densification to Eliminate the Suburbs the Answer?

A Planetizen article published in 2011 uses the case study of Athens to explore a "city without suburbs."

Athens, Greece started eradicating its suburbs in the 1970s and continued this densification goal through the 80s. There were four main reasons for this push: 1) confined land space, 2) a capitalistic political system, 3) developer lobbying, and 4) increasing population pressure. In 1981 the municipality peaked at a population of 885,000 with a density of approximately 60,000 people per square mile. Although its population has been on the decline since the 2000s, it remains one of the most dense urban areas in the developed world. 

As the city's compactness and so-called walkability in the suburbs grew, car ownership did not decrease, and positive impacts for modes of walking, cycling, and transit were not reported. Between 1990 and 2000, public transit actually fell while private transport increased. To paraphrase the conclusion from the Planetizen article: "Athens exemplifies every single urbanist approach, yet fails to deliver anticipated results. Elements in the Athenian version of natural urbanism have produced unwelcome outcomes; the pinnacle of urbanisn that achieved the eradication of suburbs came at substantial quality of life and environmental costs. 
"Dysfunctional cases in any discipline trigger insights by demanding explanation.
Athens is a case of dysfunctional urbanism and offers a true laboratory for testing assumptions, principles, and theories toward a more robust model of an urbane city."

I will take it upon myself to address the last part of this article. The first and most important question is: was there a plan from the beginning? What was it? Was it simply to answer the demand for population increase, or were there additional, more comprehensive goals? At least from this article's information, the 4 reasons mentioned above seem to answer that question. The article points out that Athens ranks lowest on a quality of life ranking for Western European cities; it's filled with noise, traffic, and pollution. Traffic fatalities also rank among the highest comparatively. These are indications that the city may not have incorporated plans to manage the consequences of an increasing population. 

My conclusion: Athens is not the case of dysfunctional urbanism, it's the case of dysfunctional planning, or lack thereof. The city's goal was to eradicate the suburbs and increase density - this was achieved. So it did succeed, if only in this way. It seems to me that quality of life was pushed under the rug in the attempt to attract and fit more people. Yet a place can immediately loose its appeal as social and environmental issues are sacrificed. Shelter alone won't cut it; people need connection and community as well. Athens may exemplify a few elements of urbanism very well, so while those can be used as a lesson, the case study as a whole can be used to see interconnectivity at work. And because of this dense web of connections, we will never get a complete story of the past, nor will we be able to predict the future. But we sure can plan with intention, holistic goals, and measurable targets towards better living situations and healthier lives for people in our cities and on this planet.

Food for thought: "If you build it, they will come" ...

Sources
Planetizen 
newgeography 

Quality of Living Rankings for Cities

Mercer Quality of Living Survey 2014 - Top 5 and Bottom 5 Cities

North America

Europe

Interestingly enough, (based on this survey) I currently live in the highest ranked American city, San Francisco (coming in at 5th for North America, 27th overall), and have lived and spent extensive time in the 4th ranked city overall, Munich, Germany. I'm shocked that Copenhagen, Denmark did not make this survey's cut for top 5 European cities, although it is ranked #9 on the overall list for 2015. 

Source: Mercer

Healthly and Equitable Density

A recent post on CEOs for Cities from Stantec senior principle David Dixon entitled "To Make Your Community Healthier, Make It Denser" contains a number of meaty statistics about the connections between health, cars, equality, and cities... fueling the reality that density saves lives:

•  1999: The Centers for Disease Control reported that inactivity and poor diet caused 300,000 deaths in the United States, second only to tobacco (CDC)
•  2008: University of Utah researchers found that men who lived in walkable neighborhoods weighed 10 pounds less than men in low-density neighborhoods (NRDC)
•  2014: Cities with more compact street networks have lower levels of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease (Journal of Transport & Health)
• Per-capita auto fatalities rise roughly 400 percent along a continuum of density from typical urban to typical suburban (Accident Analysis & Prevention)
• The United States has three to five times the amount of traffic fatalities relative to other developed countries; auto fatalities represent the #1 cause of accidental deaths in the U.S. (Source)
•  Ten percent of U.S. households control 75 percent of all U.S. wealth - the wealthy are consuming the walkable neighborhoods at a voracious rate. 
• For the first time in this country's history, more poor people live in suburbs than in cities (Source) 

"The payback from density extends beyond physical health. Walkable neighborhoods promote economic health by attracting knowledge workers and investment and promote environmental health by creating an inviting alternative to sprawl... [Yet] as we employ density to create healthy neighborhoods, we also need to employ it to create equity."

 

Street Design Shapes Lifestyle

Picture this:

You live in the neighborhood on the left where the streets were designed with the passive approach. You have errands to run so you get in your car, driving from store to store, even though each store is located just a few hundred feet from each other. You get into your car, likely just to drive across the street and park in another massive and identical looking parking lot. Get out of your car, get back into your car, spend 5-10 minutes to travel .02 miles. Your errands take 2 or 3 hours out of your Saturday.

Or picture this:

You live in a "proactively-designed-streets" neighborhood, and you spend 5-20 minutes a day, stopping for your errands down the block as you walk home from work/school/etc.

What lifestyle sounds more appealing? Which is better for health, happiness, and what is easier on our natural resources?

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Image adapted from the National Association of Transportation Officials Urban Street Design Guide

The Pursuit of Happiness

In an attempt to find a topic of conversation for today from the long list of websites I've bookmarked, a series of events lead me to an unusual article that is personally intriguing, but even more so, exceptionally relevant for this blog. 

An article from Boundless (an award-winning ministry of Focus on the Family) entitled "The Happiness Trap" focuses on the relationship between parenting and happiness, but I think the whole article gets at something broader and quite possibly more important when it comes to happiness. The article is by itself interesting, but I will dissect it below according to how it fits in with this blog as well as my interests.

What does the word "happiness" mean? How do we describe it? Is it an accurate word to use to describe the emotional state of an individuals' emotional state or life, or even a country or society's state of being? This is what I'm getting at: everyone is "happy" sometimes, and "sad" sometimes. So in the grand scheme of things, happiness and the state of being happy doesn't really say anything about how someone is living; furthermore, the virtue and good fortune in our lives.

Eudaimonia is the Greek word that is sometimes translated into the English word "happiness," but there is more to this word. The Greek word refers to an objective state of being: "a combination of living well (virtue) and doing well (good fortune)." The English word "happy", is very much subjective and short-term feeling, precisely what makes it challenging to define, but also nearly impossible to be able to describe an individual's life or an entire society as this. If you could chose, what would you want for society; a short term emotion of joy or long-term virtue, good fortune, and quality living.

I believe that quality living (meaning virtue, as well as good fortune) directly impacts and leads to the maximum amount of what we know as "happiness"; maximum amounts of feelings of "joy." This can ultimately enable us to be generally happy people, allowing us to spread this feeling to others and have positive interactions and effects on people. But it starts with a life of quality.

On a different but related note, one of the most backwards notions of the American culture and society is the recurring theme that money and abundance creates happiness. People can acknowledge that this is myth, yet the culture we live in unfortunately makes the pursuit of wealth and abundance on the individual scale sometimes hard to escape. The infamous words from the U.S. Declaration of Independence "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" have truly lost their meaning, or through the years have been misconstrued to the average American. Do we really have the maximum "freedom" to "pursue" a "happy" state of mind?

Happiness is not something that can be pursued. Living well and doing well is. We must help create a society that promotes the state of living virtuous and well in order to create actions of doing well in commitment to a collective betterment of all people. Then, and only then will we have a society that we can call "happy."

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"What's true of the western tradition is also true of the eastern tradition: In the Bhagavad-Gita, Lord Krishna tells the warrior Arjuna that happiness lies not in some subjective state, much less seeking after our own satisfaction, but rather from a whole-hearted pursuit of goodness and harmony (sattva) and practice of spiritual disciplines (yoga)."

Eudaimonia defined by Google: (also known as Eudaemonism) a Greek word, which refers to a state of having a good indwelling spirit or being in a contented state of being healthy, happy and prosperous. In moral philosophy, eudaimonia is used to refer to the right actions as those that result in the well-being of an individual.

Check out this Opinion Article from the New York Times about "Loving People, Not Pleasure" and the association between money and happiness.