Debra Efroymson
Dhaka, 2010
If a few words could make me run away screaming from my work promoting liveable cities, it is the reaction from people whose eyes have just lighted up with the excitement of hearing the vision I've just described: people walking and cycling, high quality public transit, children playing outdoors, the elderly and disabled able to move about safely, clean air and little noise, the revival of communities and neighbourhoods...and all the space usually taken up by cars available for other uses. They nod, they look fascinated. Then, inevitably, comes the question: "But is it practical?"
What, I ask, is practical about existing cities? About telling those with weak lungs not to go outside some days of the year, or training children to be terrified of strangers and of streets, of claiming there is no space for bicycles on the roads? Of treating pedestrians as obstacles to cars? Of allowing climate change to escalate out of control because we do not believe that any other way of life is possible?
Two malls, Los Angeles
It is terribly sad, if not surprising, that we accept what is. After all, if we really believe that our current systems are untenable, that we could have something infinitely better, then why are we living as we are? The only way we can accept denying children and the elderly independent movement, living in noisy, polluted, dangerous places alienated from our neighbours, is to believe that nothing else is possible.
So however annoying and frustrating it is to hear people answer the exhilarating, illuminating possibilities of carfree cities with that reflexive whine--"It's not practical"--it helps to remember why people say it. If I got badly beaten by the local bully every day on my way to school and someone told me all I need to do to stop it is to take a slightly different route, my first response would likely be disbelief and even anger. Why have I suffered unnecessarily so long? Surely it was necessary after all....
And of course there is the simple fact that we know what we have "works" because, after all, that is what we have...badly flawed though it is. What proof is there that something different, however much better it sounds, could actually exist? But we should never let the fear of something better stop us from working to achieve it.
Patience is, I hear, a virtue. We'll need a lot of it to convert the unconverted. It's hard to see what's not there or to imagine the absence of the ever-present. We need to learn to take a deep breath--preferably without rolling our eyes--and remind our listeners that there is a LONG list of practical objections to continuing as we are. Surely climate change, peak oil, pollution, road deaths, obesity, isolation and so on are sufficiently important to overcome the relatively minor practical difficulties of learning to live-- and I mean really live--without cars.
As for how it can be achieved at the practical level: fortunately JH Crawford has explained much of it in his excellent books, Carfree Cities and Carfree Design Manual. Sure, there are practical difficulties. They happen to be fairly minor when compared to the practical difficulties of continuing as we are, and plenty of workable solutions already exist. Where I live (Dhaka), for instance, the combination of pedicabs and bicycle vans eliminates most of the difficulties that one would encounter if cars and trucks disappeared; some urban rail lines could take care of the rest. Given that only a tiny percentage of the population owns a car anyway, it should be easy to imagine the city carfree. The number of cars only exploded in cities in the last few decades; as traffic and air quality worsen, it becomes ever more clear that it is cars that are not a practical solution to our problems. What is bizarre is not that anyone proposes carfree cities, but that so few people believe in their possibility.
Michael Pollan in Omnivore's Delight writes that the meaning of sustainability is in its opposite: if something is unsustainable, it will eventually collapse. It is not hard to see that many of our cities are on the verge of collapse, if not already beyond it. Signs include it taking an hour or more to travel to a meeting only a few kilometres away, people dying daily trying to cross the street, asthmatics constantly struggling for breath, and school children without play opportunities because the playground has been converted into a parking lot. When I hear a 15-year-old girl say she can't travel a few blocks on her own, that to me is a sign of collapse. Similar signs are everywhere; in fact, they are so common we often overlook them. Which is precisely the problem: when we learn to accept the unliveable because that is what we have, we forget to fight for the liveable.
There used to be a public trash bin at the head of my street. The smell was overwhelming, particularly in the nine months of the year when it is very hot. For quite a while, there was a small tea stand right across the road from it, where people stood around eating biscuits and bananas and drinking tea, while others walked by covering their noses. When our environment becomes so polluted that we fail to notice the stench of rotting garbage, it is no virtue to say that we have adjusted to our current living conditions and thus see no need for change.
Fortunately in this case what is practical is also better in so many ways that it is worth the effort of trying to convince others to imagine those improvements, to accept that we are making unreasonable compromises, and to realize that life could be infinitely better. It won't be easy...but it is the only possibility that is really is practical.
Debra Efroymson
Photo by Richard Risemberg
