rinciples for building better cities | Peter Calthorpe | TED

So let me add to the complexity of the situation we find ourselves in. At the same time that we're solving for climate change, we're going to be building cities for three billion people. That's a doubling of the urban environment. If we don't get that right, I'm not sure all the climate solutions in the world will save mankind. Because so much depends on how we shape our cities. Not just environmental impacts, but our social well-being, our economic vitality, our sense of community and connectedness. Fundamentally, the way we shape cities is a manifestation of the kind of humanity we bring to bear. And so getting it right is, I think, the order of the day. And to a certain degree, getting it right can help us solve climate change, because in the end, it's our behavior that seems to be driving the problem. The problem isn't free-floating, and it isn't just ExxonMobil and oil companies. It's us, how we live. How we live. There's a villain in this story, it's called sprawl, and I'll be upfront about that. But it's not just the kind of sprawl you think of, or many people think of, as low-density development out at the periphery of the metropolitan area. Actually, I think that sprawl can happen anywhere, at any density. The key attribute is that it isolates people. It segregates people into economic enclaves and land-use enclaves. It separates them from nature. It doesn't allow the cross-fertilization, the interaction that makes cities great places and that makes society thrive. And so the antidote to sprawl is really what we all need to be thinking about, especially when we're taking on this massive construction project. So let me take you through one exercise. We developed a model for the state of California so they could get on with reducing carbon emissions. We did a whole series of scenarios for how the state could grow. And this is just one overly simplified one. We mixed different development prototypes and said they're going to carry us through the year 2050, 50 million new crew in our state of California. And one was sprawl. It's just more of the same shopping malls, subdivisions, office parks. The other one was dominated by not everybody moving to the city, but just compact development, what we used to think of as streetcar suburbs, walkable neighborhoods, low-rise, but integrated, mixed-use environments. And the results are astounding. They're astounding not just for the scale of the difference of this one shift in our ... city-making habit, but also because each one represents a special interest group, a special interest group that used to advocate for their concerns one at a time. They did not see what I call co-benefits of urban form that allows them to join with others. So land consumption. Environmentalists are really concerned about this. So are farmers. There's a whole range of people, and of course, neighborhood groups that want open space nearby. The sprawl version of California, it almost doubles the urban, the physical footprint. Greenhouse gas, tremendous savings, because in California, our biggest carbon emission comes from cars. And cities that don't depend on cars as much obviously create huge savings. Vehicle miles traveled, that's what I was just talking about. Just reducing the average 10,000 miles per household per year from somewhere in the mid-26,000 per household has a huge impact not just on air quality and carbon, but also on the household pocketbook. It's very expensive to drive that much. And as we've seen, the middle class is struggling to hold on. Health care, you know, we were talking about how do you fix it once we broke it, clean the air, why not just stop polluting? Why not just use our feet and bikes more? And that's a function of the kinds of cities that we shape. Household costs. 2008 was a mark in time, not of just financial industry running amok, it was that we were trying to sell too many of the wrong kind of housing. Large lot, single family, distant, too expensive for the average middle-class family to afford, and quite frankly, not a good fit to their lifestyle anymore. But in order to move inventory, you can discount the financing and get it sold. I think that's a lot of what happened. Reducing costs by $10,000. Remember, California, the median is $50,000. This is a big element. That's just cars and utility costs. So the affordable housing advocates, who often sit off in their silo, separate from the environmentalists, separate from the politicians, everybody fighting with everyone, now begin to see common cause. And I think the common cause is what really brings about the change. Los Angeles, as a result of these efforts, has now decided to transform itself. into a more transit-oriented environment. As a matter of fact, since 2008, they voted in 400 billion dollars of bonds for transit, as opposed to zero dollars for new highways. What a transformation. L.A. becomes a city of walkers in transit, not a city of cars. How does it happen? You take the least desirable land, the strip, you add, where there's space, transit, and then you infill Okay, here's another kind of sprawl. China, high-density sprawl, what you think of as an oxymoron. But the same problems, everything isolated in superblocks. And of course, this amazing smog that was just spoken to. 12 percent of GDP in China now is spent on the health impacts of that. Problems. Everything isolated in superblocks. And of course, this amazing smog that was just spoken to. Twelve percent of GDP in China now is spent on the health impacts of that. The history, of course, of Chinese cities is robust. It's like any other place. Community was all about small local shops and local services, and walking, interacting with your neighbors. It may sound utopian, but it's not. It's actually what people really want. The new super blocks, these are blocks that would have 5,000 units in them. And they're gated as well, because nobody knows anybody else. And of course, there isn't even a sidewalk, no ground-floor shops, a very sterile environment. I found this one case here in one of the superblocks, where people had illicitly set up shops in their garages so that they could have that kind of local service economy. The desire of people to get it right is there. We just have to get the planners on board and the politicians. All right, some technical planning stuff. Chongqing is a city of 30 million people. It's almost as big as California. This is a small growth area. They wanted us to test the alternative to sprawl in several cities across China. This is for four and a half million people. The takeaway from this image is, every one of those circles is a walking radius around a transit station. Massive investment in Metro and BRT, and a distribution that allows everybody to work within walking distance of that. The red area, this is a blow-up. All of a sudden, our principals called for green space, preserving the important ecological features. And then those other streets in there are auto-free streets. So instead of bulldozing, leveling the site and building right up to the river, this green edge was something that really wasn't normative in China until these set of practices began experimentation there. The urban fabric, small blocks, maybe 500 families per block, they know each other. The street perimeter has shops, so there's local destinations. And the streets themselves become smaller because there are more of them. Very simple, straightforward urban design. Now, here you have something I dearly love. Think of the logic. If only a third of the people have cars, why do we give 100 percent of our streets to cars? What if we gave 70 percent of the streets to car-free, to everybody else, so that the transit could move well for them, so that they could walk, so they could bike? Why not have geographic equity in our circulation system? And quite frankly, cities would function better. No matter what they do, no matter how many ring roads they build in Beijing, they just can't overcome complete gridlock. So this is an auto-free street, mixed-use along the edge. It has transit running down the middle. I'm happy to make that transit autonomous vehicles, but maybe I'll have a chance to talk about that later. So there are seven principles that have now been adopted. by the highest levels in the Chinese government, and they're moving to implement them. And they're simple, and they are globally, I think, universal principles. One is to preserve the natural environment, the history and the critical agriculture. Second is mix. Mixed use is popular, but when I say mixed, I mean mixed incomes, mixed age groups as well as mixed land use. Walk. There's no great city that you don't enjoy walking in. You don't go there. The places you go on vacation are places you can walk. Why not make it everywhere? Bike is the most efficient means of transportation we know. China has now adopted policies that put six meters of bike lane on every street. They're serious about getting back to their biking history. Complicated planning is here. Connect. It's a street network that allows many routes instead of singular routes and provides many kinds of streets instead of just one ride. We have to invest more in transit. There's no silver bullet. Autonomous vehicles are not going to solve this for us. As a matter of fact, they're going to generate more. More traffic, more VMT than the alternative, and focus. We have a hierarchy of the city based on transit rather than the old armature of freeways. It's a big paradigm shift, but those two things have to get reconnected in ways that really shape the structure of the city. I'm very hopeful. In California, the United States, China, these changes are well accepted. I'm hopeful for two reasons. One is, most people get it. They understand intrinsically what a great city can and should be. And the second is that the kind of analysis we can bring to bear now allows people to connect the dots. allows people to shape political coalitions that didn't exist in the past. That allows them to bring into being the kinds of communities we all need. Thank you. So, okay, autonomous driving, self-driving cars, a lot of people here are very excited about them. Thank you very much. What are your concerns or issues about them? Well, you know, I think there's almost too much hype here. First is, everybody says, well, we're going to get rid of a lot of cars. What they don't say is you're going to get a lot more vehicle miles. So you're going to get a lot more Cars moving on streets, there's going to be more congestion. Because they're so appealing to people who can drive or reading or sleeping. A couple of reasons. One is, if they're privately owned, people will travel greater distances. It'll be a new lease on life to sprawl. If you can work on your way to work, you can live in more remote locations. It'll revitalize sprawl in a way that I'm deeply frightened. Taxis. About 50 percent of the survey says that people won't share them. If they don't share them, you can end up with a 90 percent increase in vehicle miles traveled. Mm-hmm. If you share them, you're still at around 30 percent increase in VMT. Sharing them, meaning having multiple people riding at once and some sort of intelligent ride sharing. So the Uber share without a steering wheel. The reality is, the efficiency of vehicles You can do it with or without a steering wheel, it doesn't matter. They claim that they're the only ones that are going to be efficient and electric, but that's not true. But the real bottom line is that walking, biking and transit are the way cities and communities thrive. And putting people in their private bubbles, whether they have a steering wheel or not, is the wrong direction. And quite frankly, the image of an AV on its way to McDonald's to pick up a pack without its owner, just being sent off on these kind of random errands is really frightening to me. Well, thank you for that. And I have to say, the images you showed of those mixed-use streets, really inspiring, really beautiful. Thank you for your work today.