Livable Cities Are Possible; Ending Automobile-Addiction Is Necessary

Is the collapse of the US automobile industry good news or bad news? In fact, it is both. The bad-news part is obvious: job-loss, impoverishment, urban decay. But if you think of all the damage this industry did when it was going at full throttle, you will understand that its collapse also presents – hopefully not too late – a huge opportunity for constructive change.

Of course, it would have been better to introduce the changes without having to go through the suffering associated with mass unemployment and all the consequent dislocations. But when critics like Lewis Mumford spoke up decades ago, elaborating urban visions that questioned the automobile, their voices were drowned out by a well-oiled cultural stampede – hyping the glories of individual car-ownership and the two-car garage – that still overwhelms us today.

At present, the automobile-petroleum complex contributes significantly to the steady rise of atmospheric carbon, now at 392 parts per million (well above the danger level). According to a 2006 study by the Environmental Defense Fund (“Global Warming on the Road”), 10% of this comes just from private motor vehicles.

But even in the face of catastrophes like the petroleum wars in Iraq and Central Asia and, most recently, the wholesale poisoning of the Gulf of Mexico (where the Interior Department was complicit in the drillers’ recklessness), there is no visible political force to stop this juggernaut.

What can we do? The basic answer is clear enough. Policies affecting the transportation system and the underlying configuration of economic and social activities can no longer be entrusted to the same forces – corporate as well as governmental – that have run everything into the ground. The “experts” have brought us to ruin, not just with their financial instruments but also in their choice of production and consumption priorities, with all that these entail for official decisions in such matters as what research to fund and what regimes to overthrow.

But how can we implement a truly alternative set of priorities? How do we strip political power from those whose vision is always in hock to the competitive “bottom line”? How can decisions on public policy be made – instead – in the interests of the public as a whole (including its future generations) and therefore also of the ecosystem on which our lives depend?

For a start, we need to build up a hugely visible popular presence in support of such an alternative approach. This involves two complementary lines of activity. On the one hand, we must offer a much more thorough critique of existing practices, appealing to more people and displaying more sharply the real agenda underlying those practices and the full range of their negative effects. On the other hand, we need immediate models and proposals that can begin setting a new direction.

The critique requires us to think beyond just the global-warming impact. The car-and-truck-centered transportation system, along with the inseparable phenomenon of suburban sprawl, was costly, wasteful, destructive, and anti-social from the outset. The underlying automobile-dependence was consciously foisted on city-dwellers by the deliberate dismantling of US urban transit systems in the early 20th century. During the post-World War II boom, it was reinforced by a politically stimulated process of suburbanization and the systematic privileging of highways and airports over the once-extensive railroad infrastructure.

The extraordinary wastefulness of the car-and-truck system has been evident from the beginning, in the form of daily and weekly patterns of traffic-congestion. The apparent cheapness arising from low-cost gasoline has always masked not only the collective costs associated with pollution and resource-wars, but also the huge dollar-outlay of each individual vehicle-owner for capital-depreciation, maintenance, insurance, and (in some areas) storage.

The system has from the outset discriminated, in terms of freedom of movement, against the young, the old, the poor, and the disabled (and anyone unable to obtain the required documents). Its dysfunctions result annually in tens of thousands of collision-deaths and millions of injuries, providing the pretext for vast motor-vehicle bureaucracies and police squadrons merely to assure its “normal” operation.

In addition to all this, the system has had a devastating effect upon community life. Beyond the direct razing of neighborhoods for the sake of thruways, the routine impact of the system (except in parts of certain older cities) has been to reduce street-life to a minimum, isolating those who are moving both from those who are not moving and from each other. Public space has now shrunk to the point where, for many people, the biggest opportunity for interaction with others, outside of deliberately chosen spaces (work, school, or home), arises in privately-owned shopping malls.

The deliberateness of the agenda behind this latter effect is little-recognized but has been well documented. In their remarkable book, Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened (2000), Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen describe how in 1947-48 the Senate Housing Committee, led by the notorious Joseph McCarthy (of witch-hunt fame), spearheaded a massive campaign to discredit public housing. Racist demagogy teamed up with denunciation of public services to clear the way for a real-estate-driven approach, whereby the government encouraged mass production of single-family suburban housing units, with the corresponding push to make all need-satisfaction dependent upon private purchases.

You will recognize here what has come to be known as “the American Dream,” but one can see at the same time its tawdry origins in a wasteful approach to space, fueled by anti-working-class goals and chauvinist appeals. Now that we have begun to speak of reconfiguring urban space, we need to be aware of all the baggage – political as well as environmental – that shaped the practices and the aspirations that have to be called into question.

Seeing the deep-rootedness of what we are up against poses an enormous challenge. This is why a vast popular movement is necessary. It is what the Social Forum is striving to foster. In order to advance, however, it also needs creative practical proposals. In terms of our immediate concern with transit, a key current example is the new express-bus system in Bogotá, about which you can view an inspiring 7-minute video at http://www.streetfilms.org/bus-rapid-transit-bogota/ (thanks to the Labor/Community Strategy Center of Los Angeles for this link).

This speaks to one aspect of the problem, but what is needed is a comprehensive rethinking of community, grounded in social awareness, mutual respect, restraints against private acquisitiveness, and, so far as possible, restored harmony with the natural environment.

Victor Wallis is managing editor of the journal Socialism and Democracy (http://sdonline.org) and is the author of many articles on environmental issues in Monthly Review and Capitalism Nature Socialism. The title of the present essay is an adaptation of the US Social Forum’s slogan: “Another world is possible; another US is necessary.”