Health and Urban Design
I love outdoor space, and as cities get denser with growing urban populations, streets and public spaces provide room to relax, socialize, and occasionally riot. We, as urban designers, are guardians of this space. A bit of nip and tuck, a sprinkle of street trees and we have a new pavement culture. A slight widening of a street, better sight lines, and tanks can suppress disorder.
Now, imagine that I wrote this article sitting outside a small café in our idyllic street, watching the world go by. The dappled morning sunlight shines through the trees. At my table, there’s the newspaper, a half-finished coffee, a croissant with a large knob of butter, and a small pot of strawberry jam. I am vaping – today it’s aromatic possum flavor – and will continue until, like smoking, it is banned from public spaces. By my side is a poo bag for my pet Chihuahua, Satan, who sits at my feet on the chewing gum-strewn pavement; not everything is perfect: if you thought tobacco companies were an easy push-over to accept a ban on smoking, try taking on the gum manufacturers. Forget Space Syntax, just follow the chewing gum to identify desire lines and meeting places.
However, I’m not sitting outside a café, and not because it is mid-winter or there’s a riot going on, but I value my health and according to the media, the world that goes by the café table is shortening my life expectancy by a considerable amount. Britain is on the naughty step on account of its poor air quality.
Urban air pollution is not new: the Great Manure Crisis of 1894 threatened cholera, typhoid, and other calamitous ailments. The crisis was such that urban civilization was considered doomed. The savior of the city was, of course, motorized transport. Initially electric powered, but soon outflanked by cheaper petrol-driven vehicles and then diesel, which leads us on to today’s issue.
Now we all like to do our bit, and there are many interventions that urban designers are aware of such as: the Barcelona superblock, which excludes the majority of car, scooter, lorry, and bus traffic from nine blocks to create a livable oasis (no doubt shifting the problem to the unfortunates within adjacent city blocks); Clean Air Zones which discourage the most polluting vehicles from our cities, to be implemented by 2020 in London, Nottingham, Derby, and Southampton; the outright banning of cars, by age and license plate (Paris); and, most recently, being very careful about where you put trees to avoid restricting airflow (a contributing research paper to the draft NICE air quality report). And don’t forget practical measures such as personal air quality monitors (a growing market), air scrubbers for inside buildings, the increasingly fashionable face mask (with no effect on NOx), and building new garden cities in the countryside.
However, it is highly likely that we will soon look back at this crisis – perhaps as we watch life go by from our café – and marvel at the swift uptake of the autonomous, electric car within our urban areas which solved the air pollution issue at a stroke. And hopefully, we won’t have had to try too hard at redesigning our perfectly functional urban spaces to cope with a problem that others are probably best placed to address. A good rule in life is to try to solve a problem at its source, and not pretend to solve it by doing something peripheral (such as cutting down trees). The problem is with the vehicles, and the solution lies with the vehicles.
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