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Mobile vision Towards a vehicular urbanism (and beyond?) Prof. Pieter van Wesemael
Innovative Technologies like E-vehicles, active lifestyle apps and the sharing economy open up new promising vistas for a vehicular urbanism to mitigate the negative effects of the current vehicular urban mobility paradigm. Still the fundamental question is how these new challenges and technologies will impact the quality of place and life in tomorrow’s cities. In the nineteenth century the industrial revolution, urbanization and rise of (lower) middle class resulted in a massive influx of vehicular transport (both private carriages and public omnibuses and streetcars) in the urban streetscape formerly dominated by pedestrians. This led to the recreation of the street into an arena in which pedestrian, carriages, omnibuses and streetcars fought for their right of way. New traffic surveys and rules to facilitate vehicular transport, instated by Eugene Henard, resulted in regulation of the arena by developing the concept of the roundabout to create safe crossings, instigating the traffic rules on the right of way coming from the right, and developed urban traffic policy based on empirical traffic surveys. All focussing on the flow, safety and efficiency of vehicular traffic at the cost of the pedestrians. World Expos of 1939 and 1964, both in New York City, presented futuristic vistas of modern cities completely planned around car mobility, an ideal that has been heavily criticised in later decades. Still, in General Motors’ 2010 Futurama, GM presented a mobile vision that
was surprisingly similar to the utopian urban ideals offered during the better part of the twentieth century. Their vehicular urbanism solves only partly the downsides. GM’s vision does contribute to a healthier urban environment, but doesn’t do much when it comes to local urban business (introducing new global players like Uber, Snappcar, etc.) and certainly not when it comes to basic social constraints on in-active, un-healthy lifestyles and social estrangement. As long as vehicles and the associated separated infrastructure for it is dominating the urban mobility system, the public domain will be a transient space, ideal for vehicles at the cost of the human needs for the streets as a stage set for local social life and business. The challenge is to embed technology into everyday life and the everyday living environment, building on the local space identity of the historical urban landscape. Picking up the other tradition of 19th and 20th century urban planning, reaching from the Park Movement through Jane Jacobs and William Whyte, to nowadays the Greenway Movement and Place Making Movement, transforming transient space in a public domain serving the full urban agenda. Thanks to the Casseres Plan, the city of Eindhoven and the Brainport Region have a strong sense of place identity on which we can build, namely a full grown radial park system as well as historic radial arteries. In short, a strong tradition on co-creation of space, society and economy.
