Infrastructure and sustainable cities

Infrastructure creates and defines cities and cities create and define infrastructure. When talking about sustainable cities, we have to deal with infrastructure simultaneously. These things can not be separated. Traffic determines access to city spaces and how they can be used. This applies to all types of infrastructure projects. Most obvious are probably roads, on a daily basis filled by a growing number of cars inhibiting the movement and dwelling of vulnerable traffic users. It also applies to railway projects. The Copenhagen metro line to the airport is a good example. Here residents of the area are divided in two groups - those with direct access to the beach and those without.

Traffic is a prerequisite for the life we know. It creates opportunities and creates conceptions of opportunities. During the last 50 years, many cities are designed with the needs of cars as a prerequisite. This has created a wide range of unintended consequences in relation to city life.

The big task for future cities is to create a balance between the environmental, social and economical before addressing being sustainable. Regarding the environment, it is prevalent that the large and growing CO2 emissions from transport have become an issue we can no longer ignore. Regarding the social, it is prevalent that the life we want in the city – the spaces we want to live, move and dwell in – is currently defined by transport flows. Finally, regarding economics lays a major challenge in decoupling the direct link that increased mobility equals increased growth, which has been the underlying rationale for many infrastructure decisions.

The direct correlation between growth and mobility is still prevalent in countries where infrastructure is not highly developed. This is, however, not the case for Denmark. If sustainability is to be a reality, if climate change is to be taken seriously, the economy must be sustainable and thus recognize the unintended consequences and externalities (costs from air pollution, congestion, noise, accidents, lifestyle diseases, etc.) which economic calculations today are happily independent of. Changing our taken for granted knowledge about the world is a huge challenge to us all. A challenge for example Odense Municipality in Denmark has faced in their traffic master plan when they talk about 'More mobility - Less traffic’.

Life between buildings is often emphasised, when new plans for sustainable neighbourhoods are created. Therein lays the idea that only 'necessary traffic' should pass through residential areas. Then it is reasonable to ask the hard questions: who defines what is necessary? A question nobody really wants to answer, therefore the solution becomes diverging traffic around the area where it thus creates new barriers and enclaves. This is not good enough. It is essential and required that we take into account the influence traffic has on our neighbourhoods and just as important to be responsible towards that which surrounds it and the people who live there.

Yes – this is raising the bar and the word impossible lies on the tip of the tongue, but if we talk about sustainable cities and we are serious about trying to slow down climate change before it is too late, we are obliged to pursue the possible impossibilities. Everything else is half measures - which, at the best, simply move problems instead of solving them.