Shanghai, China. The pedestrian overpass above the Mingzhu loop allows people to cross traffic and move between distant office buildings and shopping centers. This decision is especially relevant when you consider that about a quarter of a million Chinese die on the roads every year, and more than half of all victims are pedestrians and cyclists.
Shanghai, China. Middle-aged townspeople remember that the skyscrapers of the ultra-modern Pudong district, which are now visible from the old city, were simply not there recently. China's fantastic construction boom is a matter of national pride, but the legacy of hasty planning will sooner or later have to be dealt with.
The main purpose of cities is to bring people closer together. In the 20th century, on the contrary, we were only scattered, as after the bombing. A year ago, architect Peter Culthorpe and I drove where it can be seen most clearly. Peter has ideas on how to restore the integrity of the cities.
In the late 1970s, he helped design one of the first energy efficient government office buildings. Today, the architect looks at things more broadly: “To have a significant impact on the environment and society, it is not enough to build one building. It is necessary to change the appearance of entire territories."
Peter runs a small but globally respected company called Calthorpe Associates, an urban design company. On the wall of his office in Berkeley, there is a charter from the Congress for the New Urbanism movement condemning the sprawl of "faceless sprawling development." A quarter of a century ago, in 1993, Peter stood at the origins of the movement.
Shanghai, China. Not far from the center of China's largest city, the Yanan Expressway runs under the North-South Highway. Since 1990, the country has added half a billion urban residents and nearly 190 million cars. Cities are expected to add another 300 million by 2030, and Chinese planners say they are taking a new course - not cars, but pedestrian streets and public transportation.
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We waited until the streets became clearer, and closer to noon we drove in Peter's blue Tesla south of San Francisco - to Silicon Valley.
“The problem is that when the car becomes the only, uncontested way of getting around in the city, people start to abuse it,” says Peter. - To the detriment of the climate, their own wallet, the area where they live, to the detriment of the time they spend on the road. Everywhere you look, the effect is negative. Low mobility is a sure way to obesity. Air pollution leads to respiratory diseases."
In the 1990s, Peter helped convince the authorities in Portland, Oregon, to build a light rail line instead of another highway, and build housing, offices and shops along it. This decision - "public transport-oriented development" - has built him a reputation as an urban visionary. One of my acquaintances, an ecologist from Beijing, told me that he sent many Chinese architects to Portland.
According to Peter, his idea is not so new - he sought to "reinvent" the urban infrastructure, in which the magnificent city center was once connected by trams to the outskirts, which were convenient for walking.
Singapore. Lush tropical flora spills into the courtyard, green streams pouring down from the terraces of the Lucasfilm film studio. Singapore is an island country with a small territory, and you have to plan everything carefully so as not to lose touch with nature and culture.
… Despite the late departure, we got stuck in a traffic jam on the bridge.
According to Peter's utopia, cities will cease to expand endlessly, absorbing nature. On the contrary, they will look for ways to let nature in. Cities will grow in clusters with a high building density, small blocks within walking distance of the high-speed public transport network. In the settlements of the future, work will no longer be separated from housing and shops, as dictated by the current "sprawling" urban development, forcing people to move between these three vital areas by car; the rich will not be separated from the poor, the young from the elderly, the white from the black. (The article is mainly devoted to the problems typical for low-rise buildings in American agglomerations, areas that are difficult to reach by public transport. - Russian editorial note). By reducing car travel and paving less asphalt,city dwellers must reduce their contribution to climate change, which puts a number of cities at risk of becoming uninhabitable.
… South of the San Francisco airport we headed for Palo Alto, where Calthorpe grew up. Outside the window of the car flashed tire shops, rental offices, cheap motels … One of the oldest roads in the western United States, the El Camino Real highway, once served the Spanish colonists and priests. “The old Mission Road is now crossing the very heart of Silicon Valley and is full of devils,” complains Peter.
However, this does not irritate him: on the contrary, the architect sees new opportunities here. Very few people live along the highway, as the land is set aside mainly for commercial use. At the same time, Silicon Valley is in dire need of housing. Tens of thousands of employees commute to work by car. In Mountain View, where Google is based, hundreds of people live in parked cars.
In an 800-meter roadside area along the 70-kilometer stretch of El Camino between San Francisco and San Jose, there are 3,750 commercial land plots occupied by motley buildings, mostly one and two stories. Peter knows this thanks to the UrbanFootprint computer program, which he developed with colleagues. The data is sourced from a national land parcel database and processed through several analytical models that can be used to build development concepts.
And here is Calthorpe's concept: if the land along El Camino is built up with residential buildings of three to five floors, and shops and offices are placed on the ground floors, there will be about 250 thousand new residential spaces. Thus, you can solve the "housing issue" in Silicon Valley and at the same time improve the area, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption and wasted time of many people.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. One of the first light rail railways in Black Africa, funded and built by China, has been in operation since 2015. Carrying more than 100 thousand passengers every day, the road launched the transformation of the Ethiopian capital: it became much more convenient for thousands of citizens to get to work. In fast-growing African cities, “sprawling development” is a pressing problem. Photo: Lawrence Dutton.
On sections of this 70-kilometer lane, children will be able to get to school, as in the old days, and their parents to the store, on foot or by bicycle. To move along the "lane" public transport will be adapted, which also plays a very important role: it must be accessible and fast. By the way, says Peter, the choice is not in favor of light rail technology - so far it is too expensive. Something better is coming soon.
What is this? Unmanned vehicles. Cultorp is confident that if everyone gets access to drones, or if taxi services like Uber and Lyft start using the technology, the situation will only get worse. And he proposes to allocate lanes in the middle of El Camino only for unmanned "minibuses". They will run every few minutes and make infrequent stops, thanks to an app that assigns passengers based on destination. Being on the fenced lanes, according to Peter's idea, these cars won't hit anyone.
… In the late 1960s, Cultorp taught at a school in the Santa Cruz mountains. The nearby valley, which had not yet received the name of Silicon Valley, was drowning in smog - the highway, which was supposed to unload El Camino and the Bayshore highway, was still under construction. “In those days, the valley was simply not visible,” recalls Peter. "And I understood: something was clearly going wrong." Today the smog is less, but the cities are still not all right, and Calthorpe does not lose hope of improving the situation.
Singapore. Could a city with skyscrapers become a garden city? The Singapore government is subsidizing vertical gardens like this one that has taken root at the 191-meter Oasia Hotel. Designed by a local firm, the building is cooled by 54 species of trees and flowering climbing plants. The latter, in turn, attract insects and birds, and all this together helps to calm the nerves of the townspeople.
At the annual United for a New Urban Conference in Savannah, Georgia, the keynote speaker last year was Ian Gal, an urban design specialist from Copenhagen. Jan is already in his 80s, for decades, he has been observing the behavior of citizens in public places, collecting data on what stimulates social life, and what, on the contrary, emasculates and devastates it.
“There is a serious misconception about the image of the city of the future,” he explained to me at a table in a street cafe. "Every time architects and designers try to portray something, they show a world where no one would want to be for anything."
Gal opened his computer to show me the Ford City of Tomorrow website. The picture shows skyscrapers and boulevards buried in greenery. There were also people who, however, did not interact with each other in any way.
“Look how great it is to walk here,” Yan described the picture sarcastically.
Urban planners have a lot of work to do: the “sprawling development” has divided urban residents.
New urbanists call this approach "skyscrapers in a park" - a legacy of modernist architecture, of which Le Corbusier was the founding father. In 1925, he proposed to demolish much of central Paris north of the Seine and build 18 identical glass high-rise buildings there, 400 meters apart. Pedestrians would move along "spacious lawns", directing their gazes to "translucent prisms". Cars would rush along the highways raised above the ground. According to Corbusier, cars were out of place on the streets of Paris, in this "sea of human passions and faces."
Like most of Le Corbusier's plans, this idea, called the Plan Voisin, was not destined to come true. But her ghost roams the planet. It can be seen in infamous residential projects in American city centers and in office parks of large corporations. He also lives in new cities that are being designed and built all over the world, primarily in Asia. According to Sarah Moser, an urban geographer at McGill University in Canada, the designers of most of these cities claim to prioritize pedestrians and public transport, but this is not the case. Putrajaya, the new federal administrative center in Malaysia, is a good example. Half of the territory is set aside for green spaces. “But to get from one building to another, you have to walk a lot,” says Sarah.
Baku, Azerbaijan. The capital of the oil-rich state, the largest city in the country, has tried on the Dubai model of urban development - the so-called business card buildings come first, the master plan comes second. Flame Towers are reminiscent of tongues of fire that appear where natural gas seeps to the surface. In the dark, their LED-studded facades sparkle in a fiery dance.
Le Corbusier's influence is particularly felt in the urban areas that have been built in China over the past 40 years. At a conference in Savannah, Peter Culthorpe compared these hordes of identical residential high-rise buildings lined up along 400-meter "superblocks" with low-rise American suburbs, despite the obvious external differences.
"They have a common problem," says Peter, "that the development is sprawling." This stretch, he said, creates a "disconnected environment." People living in high-rise buildings in the middle of the park can be separated from their neighbors and from the street unsuitable for walking under their windows no less than the inhabitants of back alleys on the outskirts. In new cities in China, narrow streets lined with stalls have given way to 10-lane avenues loaded with cars.
In the United States, “sprawling development” arose for other reasons and was considered a good idea at the time: millions of soldiers returned home after World War II, overcrowded cities were in decline; new families needed housing. Driving home from work to the suburbs, you felt free and modern.
Singapore. With the city's explosive growth, the government decided to preserve Kampong Glam, a 19th-century Muslim neighborhood around the Sultan Hussein Mosque. Today it houses trendy boutiques and restaurants.
China has its own explanations for such a development. Peng Haixiao, a transportation specialist from Tongji University, told me that when he came to Shanghai as a student in 1979, the streets were already very congested - not because the city was full of cars, but because of the dense network of narrow streets. In those days, Peng could take up to two hours to get 6 kilometers from the university to the city center.
"Maybe it would be faster to get there on foot?" I asked.
“In those days, people didn't have enough food,” Peng explained. "I was starving as a student, and walking was very exhausting."
In the 40 years since Deng Xiaoping's Reform Decree was passed, China's population has grown to 1.4 billion and millions have lifted out of poverty. This result was achieved by dragging the rural population to the cities to factories.
“After the Cultural Revolution, the first priority was to provide people with housing and food,” explains He Doncheng, an ecologist in Beijing. According to him, urbanization was accompanied by a hasty erection of apartment buildings - and the fastest solution was the typical development of high-rise buildings in superblocks. The subtleties of urban design were neglected.
Welwyn Garden City, UK. 100 years ago, when people were just starting to leave overcrowded cities in Europe and America, British sociologist Ebenezer Howard created the concept of two "garden cities" in north London. Some of Howard's ideas still seem cutting edge, such as how he combined the accessibility of the natural environment and the metropolis for the people of Wellin - from here you can reach London by train in just half an hour.
As with the urban suburbs in the United States, which helped make the "American dream" of millions come true, China's housing reform has done great - in a way. Today, the average Chinese family has 33 square meters of living space per person - four times more than 20 years ago. However, according to He, the space between the houses is uncomfortable, no one uses it. Fearing crime, residents are demanding to build fences, turning superblocks into protected areas.
Meanwhile, over the past 20 years, the number of private cars in China has grown from almost zero to 190 million. In Beijing, seven ring roads have been built, diverging in circles from the Forbidden City. According to Wang Zhigao, head of urban greenhouse gas mitigation program at the Energy Foundation China, 70 percent of investments in transport infrastructure in developing cities are in cars.
Public transport in China works great, but it's not enough to get any significant number of people to give up cars. “If the city strategy is not straightened out, the problem will remain for hundreds of years,” Wang is convinced. “If we continue to create a driving environment, people will not get up from behind the wheel, and emissions will not go down even if we switch to electric cars.” Most of China's electricity is generated by burning coal.
To relieve Beijing, China plans to build a green city as a model for future projects.
Ten years ago, Wang and He learned about a project called Chenggong, a city of the same name in southwestern Kunming County. Designed for 1.5 million people, it was to become a typical new Chinese city: the main street is 80 meters wide, the distance between buildings across the street is 180 meters. “We contacted Peter and other experts and they were shocked,” Wang Zhigao recalls. “They kept repeating:“This street is not for people!””.
The Energy Foundation dispatched Cultorp and an architect from Yang Gal's firm to Kunming to meet with city officials. “After the first lecture, officials began to grasp the main ideas,” Wang recalls. As a result, the NGO paid for Peter's work to redevelop Chenggong. “By then, the plan had been approved and the infrastructure was being built,” says Cultorp. "The superblocks have already been laid." Where possible, Peter divided each of them into 9 squares, like a tic-tac-toe field, using small roads. He "moved" buildings closer to the streets, placing retail space on the lower floors, and offices and apartments on the upper floors.
The project, which is still underway, has caught the attention of the country's Ministry of Housing and is the first of many that Peter and his young colleague Zhojian Peng are working on in China. It so happened that the invited architects precipitated long-overdue changes. In 2016, the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the State Council of the PRC issued a decree: henceforth, when expanding, Chinese cities must preserve agricultural land and their own heritage, lay out small neighborhoods and narrower, more pedestrian-friendly streets, develop buildings along public transport lines, and so on. In 2017, these guidelines were published as a guide for urban planners called Emerald Cities. Most of the document was written by specialists from Calthorpe Associates.
“We were somewhat surprised,” said Zou Tao, director of Beijing's Tsinghua Tongheng Urban Planning and Design Institute, who also worked on Emerald Cities. - For 10 years we have been repeating that it is time to do it. We are still trying to figure out how to transfer plans from paper to real life."
Urbanization in the PRC is at a turning point. The government plans to relocate about 300 million people to cities by 2030. China is facing a housing shortage, despite the bubble in the real estate market: apartments are often bought for investment purposes and taken out of the market. The government is trying to create human-centered cities that do less damage to the environment, while simultaneously deflating the bubble so as not to crash prices.
Singapore. The Helix bridge imitating a DNA molecule is illuminated in the dark by LEDs. It closes the pedestrian zone around the bay. Singapore has many memorable architectural structures, such as the lotus-shaped building of the Museum of Art and Science.
The Xiongnan project - the development of a swampy area with an area of 177,000 hectares, 100 kilometers south-west of Beijing - may become a touchstone. In April 2017, President Xi Jinping announced that he wanted to build a new city here. When completed, it will house five million people, relieving Beijing and lowering emissions in the capital. Last summer, when I visited the site with He, I saw only the temporary city hall from the buildings.
A video in the tourist information center shows a city surrounded by greenery with low-rise buildings and small neighborhoods. The master plan, approved in December, indicates that the metropolis will be built on the principles of "Emerald Cities". Construction is scheduled to be completed no earlier than 2035 - an eternity by Chinese standards.
“We are trying to solve all the problems of Chinese cities,” a landscape architect told me, who asked not to reveal her name. - We are not sure that we will succeed. This is an experimental site."
Singapore. Greenery wraps around the red trellises of the "supertrees" in Gardens by the Bay and graces the SkyPark, a park with a swimming pool topping the three high-rises of the Marina Bay Sands Hotel.
The next morning, He suggested that I watch a more spontaneous experiment, Art Zone 798 in northeast Beijing. We waited for the subway crowds to dissipate. The nearest station is one and a half kilometers from 798. Fortunately, a lot of rental bicycles have recently appeared in the capital - we rented a couple and hit the road.
District 798 occupies the territory of old factories. In the 1990s, the production was closed, and artists chose low brick houses. A district with galleries, bars and shops was gradually formed. The quarters here are small - this is how the factories were set up.
He suggests that it will not be easy to reverse the consequences of 30 years of superblock hegemony: “Given the scale of the task and the funds needed to accomplish it, this will take 20 to 30 years. Individual shoots are already visible today. We hope that over time the entire urban landscape will be transformed."
Rotterdam, Netherlands. In the historic district of the city, the new building of the Market Hall strikes with its originality. “This is a space where people can celebrate and meet each other,” explains architect Winy Maas. The apartment building is built in the form of an arch; under it are the market, bars and restaurants.
Islands of hope are also emerging in the sea of "sprawling development" in the United States. Ellen Dunham-Jones, an architect and urban designer based in Atlanta, one of the most sprawling cities on the planet, keeps track of them in her database. In 2009, in the book “Modifying the Suburbs,” Ellen and her co-author June Williamson analyzed 80 examples of transforming neighborhoods in the surrounding suburbs and creating a more urban-like environment, with more building density and opportunities for walking. Today there are about one and a half thousand such projects in its database.
Hundreds of large shopping malls are closing down, losing out to online trading, and, according to Ellen, dozens of them are transforming: this is how a suburban area acquires its own "urban center", unheard of!
Market mechanisms drive this transition. Families in which children live with their parents - this is precisely what suburban areas were originally conceived for - are no longer the statistical norm: only a quarter of American households have children. People, especially young people, strive for a full-fledged city life. “In small towns near Atlanta, as elsewhere in the US, the main streets all but disappeared back in the 1970s. Now, with the disappearance of large shopping centers, they are gaining new life. " (The crisis of megamalls in the United States creates opportunities for the "conversion" of the vacated areas: turning them into spaces with restaurants, clubs, skating rinks, lecture halls, etc. This is how the suburb acquires the attributes inherent in the "downtown", the central quarters of the metropolis. edition.).
Singapore. Will we like the cities we build? Will we want to escape from there at the first opportunity, or, on the contrary, will they attract us to each other? In one of the small city parks, a family settles into a playground in front of a cafe.
I visited one of these streets - in the town of Duluth (Georgia), located 40 kilometers from Atlanta in Gwyneth County. According to Chris McGahie, Duluth's economic development manager, Gwyneth was the kingdom of farmers - until it was hit by a wave of sprawling urban sprawl. From 1970 to 2008, the population of the district increased by an order of magnitude - from 72 to 770 thousand inhabitants (in Duluth - from 1.8 to 25 thousand). “People came home from college and didn't recognize their hometown,” Chris continues. "By some miracle, a group of eight buildings survived in the center of Duluth."
McGuhee took office in October 2008 at the height of the financial crisis. Not only problems awaited him: new opportunities also opened up. “Thanks to the recession, land has become affordable,” explains Chris. In a few years, the city bought out 14 hectares surrounding these eight buildings along the railroad tracks.
Unremarkable brick houses of the late 19th century had a certain charm and carried an emotional load. Today they have become the center of a restaurant district with a music venue where people come for experiences not found on the Internet. A ten-minute walk from them, the city is building townhouses for 2.5 thousand apartments. According to Chris, they are snapping up in the early stages of construction. He himself lives in one of these and gets to work on foot.
The most ambitious project in the vicinity of Atlanta is the BeltLine. It should breathe new life into the abandoned 35-kilometer railway ring that encircles (belt - in English "belt") the city center. Five sections of the ring, about a third of the total length, have already been transformed into paved paths for walking, jogging, cycling and rollerblading.
“The economics of the project have been fantastic,” says Ryan Greywell (he conceived the BeltLine concept in 1999 while working on his graduation project at the Georgia Institute of Technology). Ryan said the $ 500 million allocated to the project by the Atlanta authorities boosted $ 4 billion in construction investment. Where the former Sears warehouse was formerly a Ponce de Leon market, a café, a shopping center and an office complex. The former workshops of the Ford plant became residential.
However, Greyvel is convinced that BeltLine simply needs a tram line that will kick-start economic development and affordable housing development in areas where the need for this is especially acute - in the southern and western parts of the city. The Atlanta-based public transit company built a small tram line and pledged $ 2.7 billion to develop it, but the company has no plans to build the entire 35-kilometer ring in the foreseeable future, and Ryan is worried.
Gravel grew up in Chambley, a suburb in northeastern Atlanta. During his college years, he spent a year in Paris, where he learned what it means to use the subway and discovered the joy of aimlessly walking the streets. Ryan returned to Atlanta to help transform his city.
From the Ponce de Leon market we head south to the old telephone factory, where Gravel plans to open a cafe. Cyclists and runners rush past us. The railway has always been a barrier separating neighboring areas, and now it is a place that brings people together.
A hundred years ago, Atlanta grew from downtown to the outskirts along tram lines. Many large cities in the United States have followed the same path, spreading railroad tentacles into the countryside and building settlements around stations. By the end of World War II, Los Angeles had the most extensive urban rail network in the world, with a total length of more than 1,600 kilometers.
“This is what shapes the urban environment,” said Joe Distefano, head of UrbanFootprint and a long-time associate of Peter Calthorpe. "For example, it is comfortable to travel around Berkeley on foot, because the urban environment has been shaped by investments in the construction of a tram system." Even in the "stretched" Los Angeles, almost everywhere within walking distance one could find a tram stop, until the city, and the whole country, radically changed the approach to organizing urban traffic. “Cars have provided people with the ability to travel long distances on their own - cars and trillions of dollars in infrastructure investment for them,” says Distefano.
Los Angeles has become a benchmark for motorization, but these days it is trying to get out of the trap it has fallen into. Since 2008, voters in Los Angeles County (which includes the city and its suburbs) have approved a half-cent sales tax increase to fund public transportation - in part in the hope that freeways will become freer.
Public transport alone will not solve Los Angeles' problems - passenger traffic even dropped last year. “Car travel is too cheap and housing is too expensive,” says Michael Manville, a city planner based in Los Angeles.
Shanghai, China. All modes of transport intersect at the Wenshui metro station in the north of Shanghai. A dedicated lane has been left for the cyclists who once shaped the streets of China.
… In Santa Monica, I met the architect Johannes van Tilburg, who over the past 15 years has designed 10,000 residential spaces near public transport lines. And yet, is it possible to radically change the urban environment of "sprawling development"?
“My answer is:“Of course yes!”Exclaims Joe Distefano. "It took us only 50 years to destroy the pedestrian urban environment that has existed for millennia, and we can reverse it in another 50." Joe worked with Peter Calthorpe to create an experimental concept for the El Camino highway. “There are roads like this all over the United States,” he says. And such an opportunity - to create pedestrian zones in single, not "stretched" cities and accommodate a growing population in them, without cutting down an extra tree and without rolling another kilometer of road into the asphalt - is available throughout the country.
Self-driving cars should increase the "capacity" of the highway and reduce the space required for parking. But, following the same logic, the technology could lead to an increase in mileage - while robotic taxis run around the clock waiting for passengers. And if you imagine that your car turns into a self-moving office on wheels or a living room, how far would you agree to travel?
Singapore. How will we move within cities over time? One of the promising solutions is unmanned minibuses being tested in the Gardens by the Bay park.
What if the car could fly? In a hangar south of San Jose, I looked into the future. The hangar is owned by Kitty Hawk and houses four small aircraft. Each wing has six upward-facing propellers with electric motors. Cora - the so-called aerial vehicle - takes off like a helicopter and travels with battery power. It has two seats, but none of them is intended for the pilot, because Cora flies herself. The pilot monitors the flight from the ground and, if anything, is ready to take control.
Fred Reid, who until this year led the Cora project, told me at the meeting: "Any sane person will say that this technology is not just 'most likely, sometime there' will appear - it must appear by all means!" This opinion is shared by numerous competitors of the Kitty Hawk.
Such devices will initially occupy the niche of air taxis, Fred said. Cora lifts you 300 meters above the traffic and delivers you along a given route. Running on electric power, the Cora will be quite quiet and relatively environmentally friendly. Fred dreams of the days when thousands of cars will take to the skies over Los Angeles.
In various US states, hopes for the revival of the suburbs are associated with the development of public transport.
I caught myself thinking that I would like to fly this one, but I asked about something else: “You are developing a technology that has no less revolutionary potential than cars. What will our world be like?"
"We'll figure this out," Fred promised.
Maybe we can figure it out. But it would be wise to think over, if not all, then at least something in advance. We might not allow private cars to dominate our entire city structure. We could not have dismantled all the tram lines. We might not forget that cities are primarily for people. Finally, we don’t have to repeat our mistakes.
When Ian Gal first started his career in 1960, Copenhagen was also choking on cars. Yang then designed the modernist buildings, which he now disparagingly calls "perfume bottles." But he changed the vector of his own development - like his hometown. The authorities set a challenge: Copenhagen should be the best city in the world for pedestrians and cyclists. And they do it - 40 percent of all daily trips are made here by bicycle.
Of course, bicycles are not the point. The bottom line is that we can and must consciously approach urban development. “It's so nice to wake up every morning with the thought that the city is a little better than it was yesterday,” says Yang. - Think about it … Your children will live in an even more beautiful city, and your grandchildren will receive a great living environment - much better than the one that was in your childhood. I think that's how it should be."