The Quality of the Urban Environment

Essays on "New Resources" in an Urban Age

Harvey S. Perloff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317397311
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

The quality of the environment in which people live, work, and play influences to no small degree the quality of life itself. The environment can be satisfying and attractive and provide scope for individual development or it can be poisonous, irritating and stunting.

The papers in this volume, first published in 1969, are concerned with the urban environment – in which the majority of Americans live – or, more accurately, with the environment of urbanites, for the concern extends to outlying areas where urban dwellers visit and play.

The chapters aim to provide a better understanding of the natural resource elements in the urban environment, and will be of interest to students of environmental studies and human geography.

1

A framework for dealing with the urban environment: introductory statement

Harvey S. Perloff

Dean, School of Architecture and Urban Planning University of California, Los Angeles, and Associate, Resources for the Future

A framework for dealing with the urban environment: introductory statement

Harvey S. Perloff

The current interest in the quality of the urban environment is in large part a convergence of two other evolving public concerns. One is a concern with the quality of the natural environment—the quality of air, water, land, wilderness areas, and other resources. The other is a concern with the development of our urban communities—with all the matters coming under the rubric of more traditional city planning, but recently refocused to a special concern for the human beings in the city. The quality of life of all the people who are clustering into urban communities is clearly influenced by what happens to both the natural and the man-made environments in direct interrelationship with each other.

Our capacity to deal effectively with the enormously complex problems of the urban environment—problems that become more complex with each passing year—will certainly be much increased if we can sharpen our concepts, clarify the nature of the problems, improve our measurement tools (including the measurement of alternative proposed solutions), and be inventive about new institutional arrangements to cope with new situations. The present paper merely points, in an introductory vein, to some conceptual and measurement issues that deserve attention within such a policy-oriented probing of the subject.

We know from experience that it is difficult to make much progress in the realm of public policy and co-ordinated public-private action unless there is fairly substantial common ground of understanding and agreement as to just what the public interest is and why group action is called for. This is true whether we are talking about cleaning up the rivers, improving mass transportation, or eliminating slums (or, for that matter, providing financial aid overseas). The importance of such common ground is particularly great where most proposed solutions involve governmental restraints on the use of private property and the making of profits, or the imposition of extra costs on private groups, or the expenditure of large sums of public money. In spite of the fact that some people see the United States as increasingly subject to creeping or galloping socialism, it takes quite a bit of doing to get the necessary public backing to enable a governmental agency to impose limitations on private activities.¹

The rationale on which public action is based—and the breadth and depth of its acceptance—thus has a great deal to do with the ability of governments to carry out a coherent set of policies over a substantial period of time. This normally calls for rather broad social concepts which in their very essence point to the objectives involved, the nature of the problems or difficulties, and the kinds of solutions which would seem to follow logically. Concepts of this type are sometimes rather vague and at times might even have contradictory elements within them. They can also linger long after the situation has changed. But whatever the difficulties and dangers, such broad social concepts tend to play an important role in providing a foundation for public policy and action in given matters.²

In dealing with problems that are as numerous, diverse, and complex as those involved in the quality of the urban environment, there is a clear gain if we can have concepts that serve simultaneously a simplifying and unifying role，since they contribute to the development of a common ground of understanding.

I would like to suggest two concepts that can play such a simplifying and unifying role with regard to the quality of the urban environment. One is an extension of the meaning and scope of natural resources, to encompass what I have called “new resources in an urban age.” The other is a view of the urban environment as a contained (but not closed), highly interrelated system (or subsystem) of natural and man-made elements in various mixes.

Extending the Concept of Resources

For a very long time—in fact, for many centuries—natural resources have been thought of essentially as the elements of the natural environment needed for the production of certain basic commodities (farm, forestry, fishing，water, and mineral products) and, to a much lesser extent, of certain services (especially recreation and water transportation). My colleagues and I have described elsewhere³ the slowly changing meaning of natural resources (“the resources that matter”) as the nation’s economy has evolved from an agricultural to an industrial base and, more recently, as tertiary activities have grown in importance. The ever greater capacity for substitution among natural resource commodities (through developments in science and technology), the increasing elaboration of commodities so that the economic value of the “first stage” is a small part of the total value added, and the fabulous growth in the demand for services have all joined to reduce the relative importance of natural resources commodities. The extent of this reduction is suggested by the fact that contribution of the so-called natural resources industries to GNP has declined from a third of the total in 1870 to some 11 per cent roughly a hundred years later.⁴

In the process, the concept of natural resources has been broadened somewhat. Thus, in recent decades, the notion of “amenity resources”—particularly as it reflects a special juxtaposition of climate, topography, coast and seashore, etc., especially attractive for the location of economic activities and family living—has been incorporated into the resources concept. Similarly, there have been increasing references to “open space resources,” i.e., open areas, particularly on the outskirts of cities, that offer breathing space and recreation possibilities for city residents.

The time has arrived, however, to rethink the basic concept of natural resources in a more general way so that it has the greatest possible relevance to our own day and to the foreseeable future.

At the core, the more traditional commodity resources and the newer environmental resources ultimately yield services to consumers; to use the jargon of economics, they enter the individual’s utility function. However, the newer environmental resources are much more subject to externalities than are the commodity resources: the activities of all kinds of production and consumption units—whether family, business firm, or governmental—may generate either direct or indirect external effects on other units. This is the case when a firm emits wastes into the air or into streams, when one building cuts out the sunlight from other buildings, when planes roar over a residential section of the city, when a car adds to the congestion on a highway, or when a great new subdivision uses up a beautiful open area on the edge of town. In each case, costs or “illfare” are imposed on others. Analysis of the newer resources thus forces us to face up to a basic defect in classical economics: the assumption that the utility functions of individual human beings are independent of one another. Actually, resource economics has been concerned with this issue for some time, but now the questions of externalities and of collective goods must be brought front and center.

It has long been accepted that, in a socioeconomic sense, natural resources are those elements of the natural environment that have a use to man, and are therefore in demand, but whose supply falls short of the demand. Thus, as developments occur in science and technology, new resources (uranium, for instance) come continually into being; or existing resources greatly increase in value (for instance, with advances in construction, vertical transportation, and communication technology, airspace becomes more valuable), while others pass out of use. Where an element of the natural environment is in demand but supply is either plentiful for all or cannot readily be packaged for individual ownership and exchange, we have the case of a “free good” which is not considered a natural resource in the socioeconomic meaning of the term.⁵ In almost all earlier economic texts, the classic case of a free good was fresh air. While in technical economic terms fresh air remains a free good, in a social accounting sense this is no longer the case in cities, where it entails large personal and group expenditures. If the meaning of natural resources is to be tied to the basic concept of features of the natural environment that are in relatively scarce supply, then it becomes necessary to invent a new category for those elements that, although they are in relatively scarce supply, still are not subject to individual ownership and exchange. This category would usefully serve to distinguish fresh air from, say, sunlight. The concept of free goods will clearly require rethinking.

Because natural resources have been associated with basic commodities important in national production for so long, there has been a lag in general appreciation of the extent to which the scarce elements of the natural environment today are of a non-commodity character. It takes quite a wrench in thinking to get away from the commodity view of natural resources and to be able to include in the resources category such elements as relatively pure air and water, three-dimensional space (including airway space, radio-spectrum space, city land, and underground space) and valued amenity features of the natural environment. Yet, in our crowded urban age, these are resources that count.

In trying to absorb the new resources elements into our conceptual scheme of things, and yet retain the major features of the more traditional interpretation of natural resources, there has been a tendency to associate these new elements almost exclusively with qualitative aspects of the environment and interpret this as essentially important for consumption rather than production. While the qualitative and consumption considerations certainly must loom large in any view of the newer resource elements, the quantitative and production aspects must also be seen as significant. A more complete view of the newer resource elements is provided most readily when we see them in terms of an extension of the basic natural resources concept—that is, when we accept an uninhibited interpretation of “needed elements of the natural environment that are in relatively short supply.” This becomes particularly salient when we begin to grasp how different the whole production process is in the United States today compared to the past. Thus, less than 30 per cent of the labor force is engaged in commodity production and the proportion continues to decline.⁶ The service industries loom increasingly large. The recreation and education industries, for example, will soon pass farming in importance in both labor force and GNP terms. Project these trends another generation and the picture of the economy has very little resemblance to the one that was pertinent when the early conservation movement in the United States first gathered momentum.

All this is familiar and yet we have a hard time getting away from the more traditional picture of the “productive plant” or the “economic base” as represented largely by the farms, the mines, and the factories. These are certainly still very important, but the productive plant must now be seen increasingly as a series of interrelated networks of training, research, communication (which is at the heart of an automated plant), transportation, water and air use, and many other processes, together with their capital embodiments, established mainly in an urban setting. Productivity changes are increasingly influenced by the efficiency of the urban “plant” or urban environment.

In the past, when agriculture was at the center of the economic stage, both the quantity and quality of the land and water resources in an intimate interrelationship (as well as the know-how and vigor applied in the production processes) were important to the results obtained. Similarly, when industrialization took hold, the quantity and quality of mineral as well as forest and farm resources were of central importance. Today, even if in a different setting, quantitative as well as qualitative factors are significant (always in an inextricable mix): e.g., the volume of water available for drinking, cooling, and waste disposal; the volume of air for waste disposal; the space available for the movement of planes or trucks; the land available for the construction of efficient industrial plants and for parking; the space available for radio-spectrum communications; and many other similar elements are a critical part of the production picture.

It is no trivial matter to establish the fact that the newer resource elements involve not only highly significant consumption and quality-of-living aspects but also equally significant production considerations. For example, if public annoyance with air and water pollution and traffic congestion should result in severe restrictions on industrial location, extremely heavy costs in industrial waste disposal, or severe limitation on the use of trucks, we may indeed pay a high price in rising costs of production. This is not to suggest, of course, that restrictions may not be appropriate under certain conditions; what is important is that the policy decisions should be made with a full appreciation of the production as well as the consumption factors. For in dealing with matters of the city, we are dealing with the very foundations of the nation’s productive plant.

Once we begin to view features of urban land, air, and water, and space and amenity as significant natural resources, certain well-established principles, long associated with natural resources, come readily into play. These associations are not only significant intellectually (to the extent that meaningful classification is always important in the study of a subject), but also have important policy overtones. In the United States, the concept of natural resources carries certain strong connotations that influence the way in which we tend to approach an item that comes under the resources rubric. These connotations stem both from the impact made by the conservation movement, especially in the first third of this century, and from our experience with the use of our material (commodity) resources. They center on the well-established trinity of “conservation, development, and use of natural resources” and on at least some appreciation of the requirements and limitations posed by ecological considerations. Thus, in the United States, the term natural resources sets up an image encompassing several principles:

1. Resources are part of the national heritage; they should not be used unthinkingly and selfishly by any one group at the expense of others or by any one generation at the expense of future generations.

2. The value that the nation can receive from its resources depends on its willingness to invest in the development of such resources, whether it is a matter of enriching the soil, harnessing river basins or harnessing the atom, or experimenting with the best means for desalinization of water.

3. To get the most value out of the nation’s resources, development wherever possible and appropriate should seek to achieve multiple uses. The multiple-purpose development of river basins comes most readily to mind, but the same principle applies to the use of farm land at the outskirts of cities for open space and recreation as well as for agricultural output.

4. While man has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for manipulatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 A framework for dealing with the urban environment: introductory statement
• 2 Pollution and environmental quality
• 3 The three-dimensional city: contained urban space
• 4 Open (uncovered) space as a new urban resource
• 5 Amenity resources for urban living
• 6 Transport: key to the future of cities
• 7 The value of urban land
• 8 Location, size, and shape of cities as influenced by environmental factors: the urban environment writ large
• 9 Patterns of time and space use