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Chapter 17 | Urban Living
17.1 Designing for Urban Life
Planning for Sustainable Cities
Cities worldwide are confronting the challenge of sustainability in the face of growth and population changes.
The concept of urban sustainability includes controlling pollution and reducing a city’s ecological footprint.
Ecological footprint: Impact of a person or community on the environment, expressed as the amount of land required to sustain the use of natural resources
Sustainable cities must also be livable, meaning they provide their residents with a good quality of life.
People in highly livable cities have few reasons to move away.
Urban planners employ a number of sustainable design initiatives to make cities more environmentally friendly and welcoming.
This can include mixed-land use, walkability, transportation-oriented development, and smart-growth initiatives.
Urban sprawl leads to environmental consequences such as the loss of rural land and pollution.
Mixed-use development (MUD): A single planned development designed to include multiple uses, such as residential, retail, educational, recreational, industrial, and office spaces
MUD is one way to limit sprawl and design livable urban spaces.
MUDs can range in scale, but all are intended to increase residential densities and minimize the need for travel outside the development.
This reduces transport and commute distances/costs.
Some MUDs are a single building, while others can be as large as 1–2 square miles.
MUD is characterized by uniform pedestrian and bike-friendly connections that form a walkable community.
Walkability: A measure of how safe, convenient, and efficient it is to walk in an urban environment
Measures of walkability may also include the ratio of people who walk or bike versus those who drive.
Walkable communities must combine land uses in a compact area while also being safe and inviting for pedestrians.
Access to transportation options is another goal of sustainable city design.
Reducing the number of cars on the road minimizes the use of fossil fuels.
Better bike infrastructure in Europe is one of the reasons they have fewer fewer greenhouse gas emissions than the United States.
Transportation-oriented development: The creation of dense, walkable, pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use communities centered around or located near a transit station
Smart-Growth Policies
Many local governments seek to control sprawl and enhance livability by enacting policies, strategies, and regulations.
Smart-growth policies: Policy implemented to create sustainable communities by placing development in convenient locations and designing it to be more efficient and environmentally responsible
Zoning is another crucial tool of smart growth.
City governments can use zoning to dictate what types of building and land use are permitted.
Mixed-use zoning: Zoning that permits multiple land uses in the same space or structure
Traditional zoning: Zoning that creates separate zones based on land-use type or economic function such as various categories of residential (low-, medium-, or high-density), commercial, or industrial
New Urbanism: A school of thought that promotes designing growth to limit the amount of urban sprawl and preserve nature and usable farmland
New Urbanists advocate for policies and practices that support multiple transit options, preservation of historic buildings, and respect for local ecology.
One of the goals of New Urbanism is to create or return a sense of place to cities by designing an environment where people can easily interact.
Some cities are looking at smart-growth strategies to solve severe urban problems.
Cities where planners have used these policies to decrease growth rate are called slow-growth cities.
Slow-growth city: City where planners have used smart-growth policies to decrease the rate at which the city grows outward
Urban growth boundary: A boundary that separates urban land uses from rural land uses by limiting how far a city can expand
Growth Management Plans
Growth management at any level is implemented so that infrastructure and services are not overwhelmed by new construction.
Zoning is a significant part of growth management plans.
Critics argue that it increases the price of housing, contributes to unstable real estate, and can harm the national economy by slowing the building industry.
Successful growth management plans succeed in balancing the needs of residents with diverse incomes and concerns.
Diverse Housing Options
Zoning also plays a role in housing diversity, another component of many smart-growth initiatives.
Housing diversity is normally encouraged through planning codes that promote low-cost housing such as townhouses, multi-family dwellings, and live-work spaces.
Diverse housing promotes mixed-income neighborhoods, as both expensive and affordable units are found side by side.
Income diversity helps build the economic base needed to support services, transportation, and results in wider access to affordable housing.
Other benefits of housing diversity include economic stability and commuting advantages.
Urban Greenbelts
At a city’s edge, New Urbanist or smart-growth plans may include greenbelts.
Greenbelt: A ring of parkland, agricultural land, or other type of open space maintained around an urban area to limit sprawl
Greenbelts can be urban growth boundaries, because conversion of land to urban use is strictly prohibited within them.
Greenbelts contribute to the ecological health of a region by limiting pollution, promoting plant growth, and protecting wildlife habitats.
Additionally, these areas give city dwellers a chance to connect with nature and enhance their quality of life.
Other urban areas have political bodies that, while not specifically for greenbelts, serve to protect natural lands in cities and suburbs.
Pros and Cons of Urban Design
Purposeful urban planning, alongside sustainability, is challenging because it can difficult to anticipate the needs of a city and its people in the future.
For this reason, it is important to engage citizens early in the planning stages.
Even as they take into account current needs and concerns, urban planners must also be open to refining their designs as needs change and unforeseen circumstances arise.
The strategies advocated by the smart-growth movement have received both praise and criticism.
Supporters point to all of the benefits discussed previously, including limiting pollution, stopping sprawl, and increasing quality of life.
Critics claim that the promises of communities with mixed-income and diverse ethnic groups don’t end up happening.
Smart-growth created desirable neighborhoods, where real estate prices rise to being unaffordable.
Lower-income residents then become displaces to suburbs or lower-quality housing anyway.
At best, they claim, the result of this process is a lack of income diversity in the neighborhoods.
De facto segregation: Segregation that results from residential settlement patterns rather than from prejudicial laws
Another criticism of urban design initiatives is that they apply similar design concepts across many different urban areas.
This can result in a sense of placelessness or a loss of historical character.
Some argue that multi-use areas can feel artificial.
Both sides of the smart-growth debate can point to successes and failures of urban design to support their arguments.
At present, smart growth, slow growth, and New Urbanism are still experiments whose long-term effectiveness is yet to be proven.
The ultimate verdict on these strategies may not be made for years to come.
17.2 Causes and Impacts of Urban Changes
Urban Challenges
Urban areas in core countries, despite their wealth, power, and opportunity, still face serious challenges.
In the United States, cities face three major interconnected problems:
A declining tax base in the central city,
Infrastructure costs,
Patterns of poverty and neighborhood decay.
The central cities of most U.S. urban areas, especially those that grew during industrialization, depend on tax revenue.
These tax dollars support a city’s infrastructure.
With economic restructuring and deindustrialization, tax revenues have declined.
As people and businesses move out of the central city, their money moves as well.
Properties in older city-central neighborhoods have not retained their value, and so less tax is generated from them.
As the tax base of most central cities decreases, the costs of maintaining aging infrastructure has increased.
As richer entities (individuals or businesses) move away from the city center, low-income populations left behind face many challenges.
For many, renting is the only option, and these rental properties are often poorly maintained.
Restaurants, stores, and service shops often struggle or move away.
Failures may result in vacant or even abandoned buildings.
Less funding for schools can lead to poor-quality education.
There are many other economic and social consequences.
Housing Discrimination
In the U.S., discrimination has long been a driver of urban population movements and racial segregation, still existing today.
Housing discrimination: An attempt to prevent a person from buying or renting a property because of that person’s race, social class, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, or other characteristic.
Discriminatory practices may favor one population over another, or a certain group may be excluded from a particular neighborhood.
These practices have included deed restrictions, redlining, and blockbusting.
Housing discrimination also happens through a process called redlining.
Redlining: Practice by which a financial institution such as a bank refuses to offer home loans on the basis of a neighborhood's racial or ethnic makeup
In the 1930s, the U.S. government wanted to encourage investment and homeownership.
They created maps that indicated areas considered poor investments for lending institutions.
This areas, marked with red, were predominantly neighborhoods with high African-American populations.
These properties fell into disrepair and were sometimes abandoned because residents could not get loans to purchase or improve homes.
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 made redlining illegal, but recent studies have found that the trend lives on.
Blockbusting: A practice by real estate agents who would stir up concern that Black families would soon move into a neighborhood; the agents would convince White property owners to sell their houses at below-market prices
Blockbusting promoted fear of minorities and the belief that houses in diverse neighborhoods were not as valuable as those in other areas.
Real estate agents profited, White owners sold at a loss, and Black buyers paid too much.
This rapidly changed the racial makeup of neighborhoods.
Like redlining, blockbusting was outlawed in 1968, but it also seems to exist to an extent today as well.
As a result of these practices, Black families tend to have much less wealth than White families.
In many areas, homeownership is the biggest investment many Americans can make.
Not being able to buy a home or relocate to a batter neighborhood makes it difficult to build wealth.
This reinforces multigenerational poverty that is all too common in inner-city neighborhoods surrounding central business districts.
Another urban challenge at least partially associated with segregation is crime.
When people are economically and racially segregated and isolated, crime rates increase.
Cities with integrated neighborhoods are among the safest.
Other connected factors, such as poverty, also influence urban crime rates.
Challenges of Rapid Urbanization
Some of the most rapidly developing cities are located peripheral or semi-peripheral countries.
People migrate internally from rural areas for a variety of reasons discussed previously.
Often, new arrivals are crowded with other rural-to-urban migrants in squatter settlements.
These cities become overwhelmed with the massive inflow of often-desperate immigrants, yet the crowded, difficult conditions do not slow immigration.
Increased Crime Rate
Globally, concentrations of poverty lead to desperation, social isolation, and often subsequently higher crime rates.
Since educational and legal economic opportunities are sparse, some residents resort to illegal activities such as drug dealing.
Some areas have such extreme poverty that they become disamenity zones.
These zones are often on the periphery of cities, do not receive their services, have lots of informal housing, and are controlled by gangs and drug lords.
Affordable Housing
Changing urban populations results in challenges to affordable housing in cities everywhere.
Specific difficulties may vary among cities of the core, periphery, and semi-periphery.
In core countries, affordable housing is a top urban challenge for a variety of reasons.
Recall how practices such as redlining have made homeownership difficult for minorities.
Increasing labor and material costs have made it more difficult to build affordable housing units.
As rents and home prices rise in desirable areas close to successful business districts, people with a lower income are forced to move further from their place of work.
Governments in both core and semi-peripheral countries have attempted a variety of policy solutions.
This can include things like rent control and public housing developments.
Some local governments offer rent subsidies, tax credits, or reduced property taxes to help long-term, low-income residents remain in neighborhoods with rising housing costs.
Successful transportation-oriented developments help residents reduce the money and time they spend commuting to work.
Municipalities in the United States have also used zoning to address issues of affordable housing.
Inclusionary zoning law: Law that creates affordable housing by offering incentives for developers to set aside a minimum percentage of new housing construction to be allocated for low-income renters or buyers
The practice has been the subject of debate.
Those in favor argue it requires fewer government subsidies and promotes integration.
Those against it warn that it may result in an overall increase to the cost of housing, because consumers who pay market-price are asked to subsidize lower-cost housing.
Semi-/Peripheral countries face particular challenges to affordable housing because of rural-to-urban migration.
These urban areas have insufficient affordable housing and resources to accommodate the rapid increase in their populations.
The lack of adequate affordable housing leads to the development of squatter settlements.
Land Tenure
People living in squatter settlements are especially vulnerable because they do not have an official claim or title to their land.
Land tenure: The legal rights, as defined by a society, associated with owning land
The concept of land tenure includes who can use the land, for how long, and under what conditions.
Rapid urbanization challenges tenure policies because it brings abrupt, large-scale changes in land use, which can quickly change land value.
These sudden shifts can profoundly affect those living in squatter settlements.
Often, local governments cannot keep up with registrations of new land developments.
Because of paperwork delays alongside expensive housing, both permanent development and squatter settlements pop up in off-limit areas.
The ability of women to secure land rights is another important component in urban development.
Like female farmers, urban women may face multiple challenges when they try to assert property claims.
Some countries have longstanding traditions against women holding land tenure.
As more women become empowered, they are more capable of challenging restrictive beliefs.
Sometimes a government invokes a right to land tenure that overrides the rights of individual owners.
Eminent domain: A government’s right to take over privately owned property for public use or interest
The justification is that this allows governments to make decisions that benefit the whole population.
Environmental Injustice
Environmental injustice: The ways in which communities of color and poor people are more likely to be exposed to environmental burdens such as air pollution or contaminated water; also called environmental racism
The concept also encompasses unequal environmental protection provided through laws, governmental policies, and enforcement.
Environmental justice is the idea that environmental laws and regulations should apply equally in all places and to all people.
The movement began in the 1980s as people realized major polluters were near low-income areas.
Researchers use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to map occurrences of environmental injustice.
Mapping tools have confirmed suspicions that areas prone air and water pollution are frequently located near poor or minority neighborhoods.
The presence of these disamenities makes nearby housing less expensive and therefore affordable to low-income residents.
Residents of these communities generally lack the political and economic power to oppose potentially harmful industrial facilities being built nearby.
Some argue that it’s not the job of industrial areas to be livable if they were established first.
Others claim it’s the job of area governments to establish a safe living environment for neighborhoods regardless of who came first.
Likewise, low-income neighborhoods in the inner city or located near busy highways cannot avoid the exhaust from traffic.
Low-income housing can also pose environmental health risks characteristic of older dwellings, before certain building regulations were in place.
Residents, who are usually renters, often lack the means to repair the buildings and combat these hazards.
Environmental injustice encompasses more than instances of dangerous water and air pollution.
Low-income and minority communities have been shown to live in environments where they struggle to meet basic needs sustenance-wise.
This can be avoided by local food efforts, ensuring the community isn’t reliant on outside parties for food.
Urban Renewal and Gentrification
Recently, more middle- and upper-income people have chosen to remain in cities or return to them, especially in core countries.
People move back to the city for a variety of reasons, including convenient access to entertainment and shopping.
Suburbia is often associated with placelessness, and many people are drawn to the culture and character of cities.
Many also value the walkability of urban neighborhoods, which is often absent in suburbs.
Urban renewal: The nationwide movement that developed in the 1950s and 1960s when U.S. cities were given massive federal grants to tear down and clear out crumbling neighborhoods and former industrial zones as a means of rebuilding their downtowns
Three policies were enacted in the postwar era to fund the large-scale demolition of declining industrial and residential neighborhoods.
Housing Act of 1949, the Housing Act of 1954, and the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956.
The housing acts established federal funding to cover a large part of demolishing and rebuilding costs for renewing housing and infrastructure.
The highway act launched the building of the Interstate Highway System that today crisscrosses the United States.
According to a 2018 study, more than a million people were displaced from their homes by the urban renewal projects these three policies supported.
Most of the areas targeted for renewal were lower-income and predominantly African American.
Gentrification has a similar stated intention—to improve and rebuild downtown areas or inner-city neighborhoods.
Neighborhoods become gentrified when developers or higher income people buy deteriorating homes to restore or renovate.
Gentrification has similar advantages and disadvantages to the smart-growth initiatives described earlier.
It brings a city benefits such as increased property value and higher tax revenues, and attracts new businesses and investments.
It can also cause the displacement of less affluent residents, often the elderly or marginalized.
A neighborhood’s cultural landscape can also be hurt rather than enhanced when historic buildings are altered and replaced.
Local businesses may be replaced with global chains, and all of these changes can result in a loss of community and an increase in social tension.
17.3 Creating Sustainable Urban Places
Challenges to Sustainability
Sustainability in this context refers to finding ways cities can exist into the future so that generations to come can benefit from what they provide.
In order to be sustainable, cities but balance economic development with the need to protect natural resources, the environment, and city dwellers.
Sustainable urban practices should eventually lead to environmental regeneration and replenishment.
Cities have a massive impact on the environment.
Dense urban populations bring challenges such as sprawl, large ecological footprints, higher energy uses, poor air and water quality, climate change, and struggling sanitation systems.
To confront these concerns, governments are deploying different strategies with varying degrees of effectiveness.
There is a direct correlation between a city’s physical footprint and its ecological footprint.
The more extensive the sprawl, the more significant the environmental damage.
Constructing vertically or renovating within existing neighborhoods is more complex and costly, but can help contain sprawl.
High-density neighborhoods also consume less energy per capita than low-density ones.
Bloated urban landscapes with poor public transportation, crowded highways, and few walkable areas discourage healthy lifestyle habits.
Longer commutes imposes by sprawl, traffic, or inefficient transportation also lead to more energy use, then causing more pollution.
Water and air quality are among the most serious challenges cities face in planning for a sustainable future.
Cities with poor infrastructure struggle to maintain water quality.
Urban sustainability efforts attempt to address these problems by increasing safe water supplies and decreasing pollutants from factories or contamination.
In many cities of the semi-/periphery, domestic sewage is the main culprit for water pollution, but industrial and agricultural waste also contributes.
Air pollution is also common in cities, coming from factories, businesses, power plants, and vehicle exhaust.
In fast-expanding urban areas, laws that regulate polluting industries and vehicle engines often fail to keep pace.
Climate change remains a rising global problem and a formidable challenge to sustainable cities.
Urban areas are both causes and victims of climate change.
They consume massive amounts of energy, making them a key source of greenhouse gases.
Many cities are also vulnerable to the effects such as rising seas or more frequent heat waves.
Experts warn that the problem cannot be solved at the local scale, but rather, solutions will need to be coordinated at global, regional, national, and local levels.
Funding is a key issue for cities striving to limit the causes and effects of climate change.
Cities need opportunities to collaborate with financial institutions which will allow them to borrow the money necessary for taking meaningful steps toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Responses to the Challenges
To address sustainability, planning must take place at the regional scale to coordinate efforts.
Coalitions of governments may work together to establish urban growth boundaries and enact laws that protect farmlands from sprawl.
Regional planning: Planning conducted at a regional scale that seeks to coordinate the development of housing, transportation, urban infrastructure, and economic activities
A group of municipalities may cooperatively share services.
By sharing the costs of planning, building, and maintaining the services, regions can achieve economies of scale.
Well-executed regional planning can overcome many barriers typical of fragmented local governments.
The coordinated efforts of multiple political bodies can be more effective than those of individual governments working independently.
Farmland protection policies and urban growth boundaries are often associated with regional planning.
Farmland protection means enacting laws that prevent agricultural lands from being converted to nonagricultural use.
Within cities, cleaning up and developing old industrial sites can lead to the creation of new, more sustainable land uses.
Brownfield remediation and redevelopment processes can offer innovative responses to multiple urban sustainability challenges.
Brownfield: Abandoned and polluted industrial site in a central city or suburb
Remediation means removing the contaminants in these sites, which reduces health and safety risks and opens the land up for new development.
Brownfield remediation and redevelopment can promote growth within a neighborhood and reduce the number of zones of abandonment.