Planners and architects now agree that to improve the social and environmental condition of cities the top priority is to cut car use. They say zero-emission cars running on electricity or burning hydrogen are not enough. “Automobiles still require massive networks of streets, freeways, and parking structures to serve congested cities and far-flung suburbs,” says Richard Register, founder of the nonprofit campaigning organization EcoCity Builders in Oakland, California. What is needed is a wholesale rethink of how new cities are laid out and how existing ones expand to minimize the need for cars in the first place. One way of achieving this is to build cities with multiple centers where people live close to their work in high-rise blocks that are also near public transport hubs. In parts of the world this is already taking shape.
While planners look at how to cut back the energy consumption of big cities, at the other end of the scale are shanty towns organically evolved and self-built by millions of people in the developing world without a planner in sight. These shanties meet many of the ideals of eco-city designers. They are high-density but low-rise; their lanes and alleys are largely pedestrianized; and many of their inhabitants recycle waste materials from the wider city. From a purely ecological perspective, shanties and their inhabitants are a good example of the new, green urban metabolism. Despite their sanitary and security failings, they often have a social vibrancy and sound ecological status that gets lost in most planned urban environments.
So perhaps something can be taken from the chaos and decentralized spontaneity embodied in shanties, and combined with the planned infrastructure of a designed eco-city. Cities built without extensive high rises can still be dense enough to make life without a car profitable, and they can retain the economies of scale needed for the new metabolism built around efficient recycling of everything from sewage to sandwich wrappers. At the same time, they need to remain flexible enough for people to adapt them to the way they want to live.