Urbanism and Transport

Building Blocks for Architects and City and Transport Planners

Helmut Holzapfel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317630999
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Helmut Holzapfel's Urbanism and Transport, a bestseller in its own country, now available in English, examines the history and the future of urban design for transport in major European cities. Urbanism and Transport shows how the automobile has come to dominate the urban landscape of cities throughout the world, providing thought-provoking analysis of the societal and ideological precursors that have given rise to these developments. It describes the transformation that occurred in urban life through the ongoing separation of social functions that began in the 1920s and has continued to produce today's phenomenon of fractured urban experience – a sort of island urbanism.

Professor Holzapfel examines the vital relation between the house and the street in the urban environment and explains the importance of small-scale, mixed-use urban development for humane city living, contrasting such developments with the overpowering role that the automobile typically plays in today's cities. Taking the insights gained from its historical analysis with a special focus on Germany and the rise of fascism, the book provides recommendations for architects and engineers on how urban spaces, streets, structures and transport networks can be more successfully integrated in the present day.

Urbanism and Transport is a key resource for architects, transport engineers, urban and spatial planners, and students providing essential basic knowledge about the urban situation and the challenges of reclaiming cities to serve the basic needs of people rather than the imperatives of automobile transport.

1

INTRODUCTION

Streets and Transport: Separation or Connection?

A book about urbanism and transport must take a new look at what separates and what connects in this field to deal with the relation between these two essential factors appropriately. At the very outset, it is important to note that this endeavour to shed new light on separation and connection has been written by a German in Germany. This fact of national origin shapes not only the content of the work but also its method. It thus provides the English-speaking reader with a perhaps unfamiliar view of a characteristically European manner of analysis, as well as examining the relation between the city and the automobile in the country where motorised vehicles were first invented: a country that continues to play a decisive role in their further development.

Separation has always been a feature of the city. Ghettos, streets for particular trades, quarters with mansions for the rich—much of this already existed in ancient Roman settlements and even before these times. Typically, the argument is made that the transport system should connect such disparate elements. Certainly, transport has played and continues to play this role. But, as the following will show, the manner in which this role is fulfilled varies depending on the type, speed, and extent of the transport provided. The separating function of a transport system has not been sufficiently analysed.

In this regard, one may only make reference to the classic works of Dieter Apel (prepared at the Deutsches Institut für Urbanistik, the German Institute for Urbanism, and unfortunately only familiar to the German public), in which this subject is extensively examined. A clear identification of these connecting and separating factors is, however, a necessary basis for establishing a relation between transport and urbanism. It is also the basis for integrating transport in a social consideration of the urban space, as undertaken for example by Henry Lefèbvre. His writings and the ideas found in the current works of Karl Schlögel¹ and Dieter Läpple² in Germany are scarcely to be found in academic works devoted to transport planning. But a spatial analysis of transport is essential if it is to be considered in terms of urbanism. At the same time, a consideration of transport planning is lacking just as much in the recent analyses of urbanism mentioned here. The present work aims to overcome these deficits and provide just such a synthetic view of the subject.

Also necessary for this undertaking is a short reappraisal of the various misunderstandings regarding the role of transport in history. One cause of these misunderstandings is the fact that many classic works about the development of the city were written in the phase of industrialism/Fordism, and the then new phenomenon of long-distance transport with its benefits for various parties was projected into the past (see Figure 1.1). In addition, an erroneous representation of the role of transport has often been made in recent years, with the debate very strongly orientated to the modern growth of long-distance transport. This book shall show that both of these influences have resulted in an overestimation of the relevance of long-distance transport to urban development. Clarification of the state of knowledge regarding the relation between space and transport is first necessary if we are to have any chance of making a realistic assessment of the current developments in this area.

The goal of this work is not only to overcome widespread prejudices regarding the role of transport and its effect on urbanism and the space of the city, but also to provide strategies for dealing with the current questions of urbanism that confront us today. In the contemporary discussion about “global” spaces, transport has indeed acquired a fully new function. In this connection, the thesis has been formulated that distance no longer plays a significant role in spatial relations because, for example, an e-mail sent from one point on the globe to any other point takes the same amount of time. On the other hand, space and distance do continue to exist, particularly in the everyday lives of just about all of us, where they persist in playing an important role. In current developments, however, this space has “shifted” in its accessibility and overall configuration in a manner that is unprecedented. In this regard, it is one of the consequences of modern forms of neo-liberal capitalism that new images of this space, various “maps”, are continually being generated and overlaid on one another. This leads (often temporarily) to the creation of new centres as well as depopulation or demolition (e.g. abandoned industrial facilities or remote locations).

Most striking, however, and this will be the subject of remarks to follow, is the creation of what Karl Schlögel in a debate with Rem Koolhaas has called archipelagos.³ These can be understood as spatial islands that are connected with one another by networks. Such spaces—self-contained residential areas, enclosed holiday resorts for the rich, secured communities as found for example in South Africa—are increasingly becoming the norm, in Europe and in many cities. The prominent art curator Roger Buergel described it this way: “Today in an English city, Indian workers live in the same area as the former English working class. But the two groups are nearly as far removed from each other as in the 19th century.”⁴

There will and must always be social differences and contradictions, and these are expressed in many cases through segregation. Transport contributes significantly to this fragmentation of urban areas. Of course, transport supports the networks connecting Indian workers in an English city with one another, but these are different networks from those used by the English workers. Transport also separates residential areas effectively and very simply through the main corridors and thoroughfares that can hardly be crossed. The English authors Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin describe this as “splintering urbanism”⁵ without succeeding in clarifying the role of transport in this process. As will be shown in the following pages, settlements and regions are becoming socially segregated, splintered units organised in separate communication networks.⁶

A work that deals with urbanism and transport and the current questions of further development must take on this situation as one of its starting points. It must also trace the history of the street—which was once seen as a useful amenity and has now become a distinctly unappreciated entity—and not only by protest-minded citizens’ groups. An important undertaking of the future, which also has a societal dimension, could be to reconnect and reintegrate the archipelagos in urban (and suburban) space. A central contradiction of the post-modern period is without question a deficiency in groups of all sorts to deal with conflicts constructively, or even to recognise the living conditions and problems of a group other than one’s own. A common sense of humanity and the development and enhancement of cultural forms can only occur through direct personal contact and discussion. The continuation or the recovery of a capacity for urban integration would depend on establishing bridges between the archipelagos; this could be a new, trendsetting task for urban and transport planning. Thus an important aim of this book is to develop ideas and planning proposals for dealing with the “archipelagised”, fragmented city and to provide useful input for current urban and transport planning activities.

FIGURE 1.1

The railway brought distant destinations “close” to one another for the first time in history (image: Jan Houdek)

Notes

1  The work of Karl Schlögel is not well known outside Germany. A translation of parts of his main work “Reading Time through Space: On the History of Civilisation and Geo-Politics” is provided by the Goethe Foundation at www.litrix.de/buecher/sachbuecher/jahr/2004/raumelesenzeit/leseproben/enindex.htm (accessed 30 October 2014).

2  See Läpple, D., “City and Region in an Age of Globalisation and Digitisation”, in: German Journal of Urban Studies 40 (2001).

3  At the “Interview Marathon” with Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist on 5 May 2007.

4  So-called “gated communities”.

5  Cf. Graham, S., Marvin, S. (2001).

6  In this book, the very widely used and often misunderstood term “communication” appears for the first time. In the following it will not be used for the exchange of senseless noise, but rather (for example in the sense of Flusser, 1998, pp. 12–13) as a process for the creation and exchange of differences, thus as a “negentropic process”.

2

WHAT WE THINK ABOUT TRANSPORT AND URBANISM

Mobility: A Culture and Phenomenon of Industrialisation

It might seem that it is outside the purview of a scholarly work to consider what our notions and ideas regarding transport are. One could assume that what really matters with such an eminently practical issue as transport is not what we think about it, but rather a physical reality, a set of things and systems in the world. However, such an assumption regarding the analysis of locomotion in our society could hardly be more misplaced.

The modern movement of persons and goods can only be explained and understood if we also look into the minds of the people using such systems. Even if this fact is often overlooked, transport is, in its essence, a cultural phenomenon, a product of the mind, which develops in any specific situation from a particular perspective. Transport planning and transport behaviour (including, of course, the purchase of a particular type of automobile) depend on an image, an idea in the minds of people—which is often quite far removed from reality.

Indeed, the relative rigidity of transport systems in the face of significant changes in the world comes partly from the fact that this is an area where little reflection takes place. When the present work begins with a consideration of the images in our minds regarding transport, it is expressly with the purpose of establishing a reflective relationship with the people (the cultural actors, as it were) in the area of transport.

Attempts to place transport in an integrated relationship with people and human culture in general have been made only rarely in the past. Many may even ask what the two have to do with each other. Transport is judged to be simply a technical factor with which we are confronted. This in any case has been the attitude found in planning activities over many years. Separated in official planning processes from its most important accompanying issues—namely, how we live in and plan our settlements—and even more from the question of what transport might ideally offer to people in their efforts to live together, transport has been handled as an isolated issue for decades. Therefore it is indeed unusual that this book investigates the question of what the continual growth in the movement of people and goods really has meant for our common life—particularly in urban areas.

In approaching the question of the images we carry in our minds regarding transport, it is first essential to look at the terms being used. How we think is, of course, influenced by the terms we use, and often we don’t pause to examine the history of such terms. The terms “Verkehr” (transport or traffic) and “Mobilität” (mobility) used today in Germany in public debate have a central significance in the current culture, but only a relatively short history in the manner they are now used.

In the nineteenth century in Germany, the word “Verkehr” was used principally to refer to the interaction of persons with one another in exchange or social relationships. It was only in 1900 that the word acquired its current meaning of the transport of goods and persons. It was so defined for the first time in the Brockhaus encyclopaedia in 1909. Thus we see that the term “Verkehr”, so important today in German parlance, first acquired its current meaning in the Wilhelminian period. The term “Mobilität” does not even appear in the first German dictionary published by the Brothers Grimm, the “M” volume of which first appeared in 1885 in the addition prepared by M. Heyne. With the word “mobile”, one most probably thought of the military, which might be mobilised in the sense of being put in a “ready to march” status. The term “mobile” as used in Germany today was apparently derived from the final two syllables of the word “Automobil”. This occurred first in the 1970s and took on the meaning of driving around in a car. The Duden Dictionary of Foreign Words published in 1974¹ translates “Mobilität” only in the sense of mental agility, the frequency of movement from one domicile to another, or movement between social groups (sociology). Even today, a clear definition of the term is lacking. In the field of transport, mobility typically refers either to the frequency of daily trips (probably by automobile) or the number of kilometres an average person travels in a year. Other proposed definitions—which certainly would be of more intellectual value—such as that proposed by Eckhard Kutter (viz., mobility is the ability of persons to reach the largest possible selection of different potential activities or facilities in a given amount of time) have not come into general use.

In any case, the term mobility acquired enormous popularity very quickly and was used in Germany particularly by the automobile club ADAC to push back against the growing strength of the environmental movement. This finally went so far that at the beginning of the present century there was a serious and intensive discussion about whether a “right to mobility” should be included i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• 2 What We Think About Transport and Urbanism
• 3 House, Street, Network: Small-Scale Organisation and Urbanism
• 4 Transport and “Social Space”
• 5 Bridges in the Archipelago: Creating New Networks
• 6 What Are Examples of New Transport Planning in Germany and in Europe as a Whole?
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index