How would you briefly describe the hypothesis you write about in your book ‘Planet of Slums’? And how did you get to this conclusion?

My book, inspired by UN Habitat’s ‘The Challenge of Slums’, is a critical reading of that report’s footnotes; that is to say, of a vast literature on housing, employment, and public health in the cities of the developing world. In every region, however, research yields three major findings:

First, the frontier of informal housing – that is to say the availability of unoccupied land that could be seized by the poor with some hope of eventually receiving state recognition – has closed. ‘Classical’ squatting is now largely confined to highly precarious and hazardous sites; and thus ‘free’ land is no longer a significant variable in urban growth. The urban poor must now purchase sites in legal or illegal markets, or become renters in the slum.

Second, governments in the developing world compound the housing crisis through slum removal and the displacement of poor urban dwellers to peripheries. With the major exception of China, governments destroy slum housing faster than they build replacements. As the poor are pushed further from urban employment centers, the cost of transport soars as a proportion of family’s expenditure of time and income.

Third the unregulated ‘informal’ economy that now represents a majority of jobs in sub-Saharan African cities, and most Latin American and South Asian cities as well, has now reached the threshold of what economists call total ‘involution’. Too many poor people are competing with one another in a relatively limited number of survival niches: as pedicab drivers, porters, street vendors, house cleaners, rag pickers, casual laborers, and the like. The marginal return on intensified effort declines dramatically. As a result, urban youth increasingly find livelihoods in subsistence crime which simply redistributes poverty, or turn toward identity politics that ration informal niches on the basis of loyalty to a sectarian party or gang (excluding competitors).

Based on the experience of the 1980s when urban in-migrants literally worked miracles in building urban lives with informal resources, the World Bank assesses development needs on the assumption that cities, even in the absence of public policy, will provide the poor with opportunities to improvise shelter and employment. This premise is no longer tenable. As UN Habitat has emphasized, the ‘state must come back in’ with massive social investment, especially in slum peripheries.

Mike Davis is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California in San Diego, USA

© Tao Ruspoli (Director, Mangusta Productions)

If in your opinion the next step in urban development is slums, what do you think is the next step in mobility?

The crucial next step is the drastic reduction of the need for physical mobility through the decentralization of public investment, jobs, cultural resources, and education. No transport mode, even in science fiction, can solve the gridlock of present evolving urban patterns.

At the Audi Urban Future Initiative we do research on the future of urban living and mobility. Imagine we want to write a recipe: Could you give some suggestions for the different megacities in the world to save themselves from a future of ‘slumation’? What is it important to consider?

Let me define the principles, however strange, that are the foundation of my thinking:

All things urban (or rural for that matter) revolve around the creation of livelihoods and the mobilization of human capacities. The job crisis, not climate change, is the single greatest threat to our grandchildren’s future. Global capitalism has unequally industrialized the world at the expense of more than one billion urban-dwellers left outside the branded, formal economy. The peripheral poor constitute a surplus humanity – expelled from the countryside but exiled from urban hopes – whose existential condition rebukes all the towering edifices, mega-museums, and palaces whose images fill the architectural press.

Economic growth in the profound sense is not the accumulation of objects but the realization of every person’s capacity to contribute creatively to the social good through membership in a productive collective such as hospital, factory, farm village, childcare center, university, symphony orchestra, and so on. Thus the true measure of development is not GDP per capita but the degree of integration of the population into educated, caring and socially meaningful vocations. Given the inherent productivity of cooperative and self-managed labor, full employment would be expressed in a diminishing proportion of the working day devoted to obligatory labor and the increasing time that is genuinely free and social.

Dharavi in Mumbai is often described as Asia's biggest slum.

© Franziska Queling

In urban terms, these goals translate into the substitution of public space and communal consumption for private wealth. The city (source of 80 percent of total carbon footprint according to UN Habitat) is the only solution to its own environmental problem, at least to the extent that we are willing to share and enjoy wealth in common. To find such templates we must go back to that astonishing era, roughly from William Morris and Patrick Geddes to the Bauhaus and Vkhutemas (the Russian design school established in 1920) when the radical modernist imagination was passionately engaged in experiments to create alternative urban commonwealths. Those of us in wealthier cities or especially campus communities are surrounded by the detritus of these dreams: bungalows and garden housing, district heating and solar power, great libraries and parks, ‘neighborhood unit’ planning, case-study houses, and so on. We have to imagine how they might be reintegrated into their original holistic visions as democratic habitats now centered on decentralized employment and low-carbon social consumption. In any event, only utopias now realistic.

In terms of responsibility: Who would have to do what?

Support the redistribution of wealth that is the essential condition for sustainable, democratic urbanism. The modest starting point is progressive taxation in support of egalitarian public services.

Looking into future again – what do you think people in megacities will wish for in 20 to 30 years?

What they’ve always wished for: decent jobs and better opportunities via education for their children.

Last year, the Audi Urban Future Initiative was hosting an award with architecture offices from all over the world including Boston/Washington, Mumbai, São Paolo, Istanbul and the Pearl River Delta in China. Could you imagine the individualities in the future scenarios of those cities?

Contemporary monumental architecture is rather like graffiti. To be recognizable each signature must be larger and louder than the last. The inevitable result of this visual arms race is a congested skyline, half generic and half bizarre, usually in violent contradiction with natural landscape and the classical laws of proportion and perspective.

Great cities start from the bottom up, with the striking individuality and complexity of their neighborhoods, and are ultimately crowned by their parks, plazas, and infrastructures. City governments should provide incentives for residents to tinker at the micro-level with homes, apartments, stalls, and streets. Improvised housing often creates incomparable collages: the challenge is to provide lifeline services like sanitation, electricity, libraries, clinics and schools to communities, not to massify housing according to some simple formula.

In contrast, corporate and state tinkering with the urban landscape on a large, transforming scale needs to be severely regulated by design review and subject to public referendum. The form of the city, in other words, should be democratic public property. Would public opinion preclude such icons as the Lloyds Building, the Pompidou, Guggenheim Bilbao or the Shanghai Tower? Perhaps. But it would also politicize development and design issues in a way that creates a critical, informed public rather than simply feeding the culture of corruption that characterizes the relationship between local/regional governments and developers in most countries, rich and poor, New York or Mumbai.

In the real world, of course, these priorities are stood on their heads. Neighborhoods are redeveloped or displaced almost at will and without a vote if you just think of the mass destruction of Beijing’s traditional alley and courtyard-focused housing to clear space for the Olympics. Meanwhile big banks and hedge funds can erect virtually anything they propose, provided the dimensions and impacts are truly monstrous enough.

So, when we hear the term ‘world city’, or for that matter ‘community redevelopment’, we should all pull out our guns, because someone is coming to steal everything unique, quirky and self-made in our built environment.

Mike Davis, Professor of history in San Diego, at work.

© Tao Ruspoli (Director, Mangusta Productions)

How do you personally live mobility? What do you drive on which occasion?

The campus where I teach is 160 kilometers from my home, so I spend four hours each work day in my car. I have no transportation alternative and if we moved closer to my job then my wife’s drive would correspondingly increase. Although only 5 per cent of Southern Californians have extreme commutes comparable to mine, millions spend an hour driving each way to work.

The underlying problem is the mismatch between jobs (concentrated in the coastal zone) and the supply of affordable single-family housing (located in inland valleys and desert fringes). Freeway construction, most planners now concede, just subsidizes sprawl and obligatory dependence on the automobile. Rationing mobility via toll lanes and transport demand management, moreover, discriminates against working-class commuters in the absence of transport alternatives such as are available in London or New York.

Southern California, moreover, still lives in the shadow of the notorious decisions after the Second World War in Los Angeles to sell off its streetcars and close down the Pacific Electric Railroad – once the largest such system in the world. A visionary land-use plan that would have prevented sprawl and concentrated suburban population growth in denser nodes (thus recapitalizing the interurban rail system) was over-ruled by a revolt of realtors and developers. The California Department of Highways abandoned its original plan to leave broad freeway medians for mass transit, as well as an ingenious proposal to build a separate freight freeway for heavy-duty trucks.

Is there any change in sight?

Over the last generation investment in mass transit has favored the most expensive but politically prestigious modes. Los Angeles’ new subway and light rail systems are very popular but have had negligible impact on car use or traffic congestion. Certainly fixed-rail works well in dense corridors or between major nodes like airports and downtowns, but on the whole the region needs thousands more high-capacity buses running on dedicated rights of way.

Given the genial climate and flat residential topography, a million more residents should be able to travel safely to work or school on grade-separated bikeways; instead unprotected bike lanes on busy arterial streets simply increase the bodycount of dead or seriously injured cyclists. Car-sharing is finally arriving here, but it’s impractical for long daily commutes and too expensive for the working poor because an old car is still cheaper in LA than anywhere else on earth.

The most excruciating transport problem, however, is not congestion or mode mix but the rapidly deteriorating condition of road surfaces. The future is now old in Southern California. The entire freeway system built in the 1950s as well as thousands of miles of contemporary surface streets need replacement or repair. Patchwork no longer suffices and the costs of restoring life to old infrastructures will dramatically constrain spending on next-generation mobility.

There live more than a million people in Mumbai's slum Dharavi.

© Franziska Queling

And how do you live urbanity? Do you live in a city or outside? And what are your reasons?

I must make a confession. In California there is an invisible line that separates the beach culture and the city from the semi-civilized far suburbs and rugged backcountry. I grew up in a town where we considered ourselves ‘Westerners’ not beach boys, worshipped Steve McQueen, and hated surfers. My existential orientation is thus toward mountains, deserts, and big skies. I’ve spent a lifetime off-road in the wild hidden places of the West, preferring geology to architecture, ghost towns to big cities.

On the other hand, my wife is a chilanga from Mexico City, mega-urban to the core. We moved to San Diego in order to be close to her family, now relocated in Tijuana, the most culturally dynamic and anarchistic city on the West Coast. We live in a largely military and Mexican-immigrant neighborhood (‘Golden Hill’) just east of downtown San Diego, a block from our younger kids’ wonderful, largely Latino public school. We don’t need a yard since one of the greatest American urban open spaces – Balboa Park – is only a 20-minute walk away. But we do have a deck on our garage roof with a wonderful view of ocean sunsets and the myriad city lights of Tijuana, only 14 miles away. Living on the border in a more or less unique twin-city, bi-national metropolis is the best possible perch for thinking about the future of cities.

What is the place that means most fun to you in a city?

I love harbors (real working ports) and old cinemas. When I was a kid in San Diego, there was a water taxi system to take sailors back and forth from downtown to the naval base on North Island. My friends and I would save our nickels and dimes so we could ride the harbor taxis then spend the rest of the afternoon in one of the great downtown movie palaces.

The classical cinemas have long closed, but the harbors remain. I’ll never understand why tourists would prefer an expensive day in Disneyland over the free and more thrilling drama of Los Angeles’ port at San Pedro. But then again, I’m addicted in a very nostalgic way to the spectacle of big machines, great bridges, oil refineries, and the old industrial world in general.

Probably all of us have seen videos of the demolition of a high-rise building: the whole surrounding area is cleared, and water sprinklers are positioned at the edges. A warning signal sounds – and shortly afterwards the building implodes, collapsing like a house of cards. When the dust has settled, a huge heap of rubble remains, and excavators get moving, carrying away the debris in weeks of patient work. It is true that ingeniously calculated explosions are the most usual method of bringing down large buildings. However, they are far from being a fully perfected method, as what matters in demolition is not only destroying a building, but also avoiding damage to those around it. And because skyscrapers are only built in places where a certain population density has been reached, they rarely stand on their own. Demolition in the middle of a megacity is therefore like open-heart surgery.

The young German designer Jan Meissner designed the Urban Mining/Reconstruction (UM/R) robot system, which can dismantle buildings in the middle of a city center.

© Jan Meissner

Urban Mining

The young German designer Jan Meissner realized this and designed the Urban Mining/Reconstruction (UM/R) robot system, which can dismantle buildings in the middle of a city center. His scheme is based on several robot units which are placed on the roofs of buildings. Their arms can drill, chisel, do oxyacetylene cutting and gather up rubble; and when CAD data of the building are input to the demolition robots, they can even calculate autonomously what has to be done and where. During the work, the roof of the building is secured by a modular frame in which a textile reinforced with aluminum prevents rubble from plummeting to the ground. Modular chutes through which it can fall safely are placed at the corners. The rubble does not simply pile up at the foot of the building, but is automatically pre-sorted into components such as glass, concrete and steel before being shredded. These raw materials are then loaded onto trucks to be transported to recycling centers where they can be put to other uses.

The UM/R-System is based on several robots which are placed on the roof of buildings. The rubble is automatically pre-sorted and can be reused.

© Jan Meissner

Jan Meissner hit on the idea for this project in a completely pragmatic way through taking an interest in modern cities: “The owners of buildings often create living accommodation and working space quickly and practicably, but at the expense of the quality of life. At the same time the arteries of traffic grow along with the number of inhabitants in a city, displacing the last peaceful spots. What results is a structure that grew in a more or less chaotic manner. From today’s point of view this structure has to be reconsidered and adapted for the future.“ Especially in city centers, where residents already suffer from noise and air pollution, dust-generating implosions of buildings can only be the last resort. The alternative is costly and time-consuming, as for example the dismantling of the Deutsche Bank Building in New York demonstrated. This 172-meter-high building had been severely damaged by the collapse of the adjacent World Trade Center. Even if it had stood in an area free of other structures rather than in the heart of New York, it would not have been possible simply to let it collapse because of contamination with poisonous substances caused by the destruction of the twin towers. Deconstruction took a total of seven years and cost 75 million US dollars.

The UM/R robots can drill, chisel, do oxyacetylene cutting and gather up rubble; and when CAD data of the building are input to the demolition robots, they can even calculate autonomously what has to be done and where.

© Jan Meissner

It is not surprising then that the preference is to leave these giants in peace, or to modernize them over decades through alterations. But it is desirable that urban planners are not forced to admit defeat. As Jan Meissner says: “How to make cities fit for the future is something that I leave to the urban planners; but with UM/R I am placing a means to achieve this in their hands. As I am relying on what is technically possible today and rearranging it, my system is not a utopia but a pragmatic approach to solving a major social problem of our time – our living environment and quality of life.” This impressed members of the jury for various German awards for young designers, for example the leading Lucky Strike Junior Designer Award and the prize for young designers awarded by the Verband Deutscher Industriedesigner (Association of German Industrial Designers, VDID). The jury statement praised his work as follows: “UM/R‘ is the result of attention to an urgent problem of cities worldwide. What makes this solution convincing is that it is a complex system with many well thought-out components that takes people and the environment into consideration.”

Harvest Energy

In megacities of the future, raw materials and energy will be more in demand and more valuable than ever before. And the reduction of noise and air pollution remains an important subject if an urban environment with a high quality of life is to be maintained. This makes the Teco Rep technology of the Japanese construction company Taisei Corporation especially attractive. In connection with this technology for dismantling buildings, its developers talk of up to 90 per cent less dust, a noise level 20 decibels lower, and a reduction of CO2 emissions of up to 85 per cent. Moreover, a building can not only be taken down while preserving a handsome façade – energy is actually created during the demolition work. This principle can be seen for example in the dismantling of the Grand Prince Hotel Akasaka high-rise, a building at the heart of Tokyo with a height of 138.9 meters. The work began on one of the top stories: while hydraulic supports bore the stories above, wall cladding, the floor and even the support structure were removed. Electric cranes inside the building carry the rubble down – and the force of gravity enables the resulting kinetic energy to be converted to electricity. Meter by meter the hydraulic supports lowered the cleared-out stories; while this happened, the façade of the building remained intact until the very end. Thus the giant simply disappeared. More quietly than he came.

For years, visions of the future home have been in circulation. They tell us that the refrigerator will realize of its own accord what needs to be bought and will order it via Internet, ensuring that the supply of fresh milk never dries up. The windows will shut themselves if it gets too cool outside or starts to rain, so that the room temperature that you set for your home remains constant and you never need to think about it again. Solar energy will be stored during the day so that we can use it at night in the form of electricity. And of course electronic devices will communicate with each other. They will check whether the lights are still on somewhere, or if the television was not switched off, or the baby is sleeping peacefully. Things that sounded utopian only a few years ago are already possible today, showing us the huge potential of so-called smart buildings.

The Headquarters of the Masdar Eco City Project

Smart buildings are modern, intelligent structures that are much more than just spaces for living and working. Energy efficiency, ambient assisted living and the Internet of things are the decisive future issues, both in private living space and in public buildings. Years or even decades will pass before smart buildings are no longer the exception but part of normal life, as it is extremely difficult to modernize old structures in line with the latest know-how and to fit them with an intelligent network. Here it seems to be easier to build again from scratch and include state-of-the-art technologies in the plans from the very start.

A wrong approach: the planned city

Due to ecological pressure and motivated by the desire for political prestige, shortly before the financial crisis in 2008 a few highly ambitious projects were initiated in the Middle East and Far East. They can be grouped under the heading “zero-emission cities”, meaning cities built on unoccupied sites according to the latest ecological and technical criteria, as shining examples of carbon neutrality. Ironically one of these eco-cities is being constructed in the oil-state Abu Dhabi: “Masdar”, a kind of research lab for the post-oil age. Then the financial crisis came along, and the construction boom ground to a halt even in the United Arab Emirates. Private investors pulled out, and the car-free, visionary eco-city turned back into a dream, which is not expected to become reality until 2025 – rather than in 2016, as first intended.

The Headquarters of the Masdar Eco City Project

The planned city of Dongtan in China has met a similar fate. Here, only 15 kilometers from Shanghai, the ecological know-how of the all-powerful state was to be demonstrated – in time for Expo 2010. Carbon-neutral, car-free and energy-efficient, with a well-planned scheme of garbage disposal and good air quality. By the year 2050 this little Chinese idyll was supposed to have a population of half a million. In 2009 the project was stopped without specific reasons being given.

The Dongtan Eco Project in China

Masdar and Dongtan are powerful arguments showing that perfectly thought-out and planned cities with intelligent buildings and traffic systems can hardly be put into practice. Especially not if this is done top-down, without the involvement of the people who live there. Cities are organic entities, depending on many external factors that evolve dynamically with their population and the residents’ needs. The fact that a city cannot be planned in ideal terms has been evident for more than 50 years from the example of Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. This planned city was built out of nothing in the interior of the country, hundreds of kilometers from civilization. It would presumably have declined to a ghost town long ago if the government had not been established there and kept it alive. Amidst Oscar Niemeyer’s futuristic buildings and enormous empty spaces, a lively cultural scene has still to emerge in this city.

A new approach: get the residents involved

The city of the future with its smart buildings has to be made from the bottom up. It needs existing structures and the people who live in them. The inhabitants of a city understand their problems best, which is why they should participate in urban development. This is the argument of Joi Ito, head of MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The people who are affected have to be included in solutions to problems of urban planning so that they will accept the results. “You have to let people design their own things. From Cambridge you can’t produce a solution for Detroit. Planned innovation centers also fail to work, as the costs are too high,“ says Ito. Instead of this, the creativity of the residents should be encouraged and innovations promoted. According to Ito this is how the best solutions arise.

This sounds utopian, but it is not the wrong approach. In order to meet people’s needs and wishes in respect of living space, they have to be defined in the first place. You have to ask people what they dislike, what they wish to have. Fresh milk at home at all times, a constant room temperature, individual and autonomous indoor lighting or an emergency call in case something happens. Is that what we need? A smart building can certainly do all of these things. The example to show this is iHomeLab, a research laboratory at Lucerne University in Switzerland. This lab looks at people’s needs and develops appropriate solutions to make domestic life more comfortable, secure and energy-efficient.

iHomeLab is a project of the Lucerne University of Applied Science and Arts

© Lucerne University of Applied Science and Arts

A smart building is much more than just a place to live. In future it will be a kind of personal assistant that makes life easier for us. “On the one hand, intelligent buildings are simply houses and apartments. In the near future, however, the smart buildings will mainly be functional structures such as office blocks, airports, rail stations, hospitals and hotels, which are already equipped with a lot of technology. Here, incorporating intelligence is a smaller step,” explains Alexander Klapproth, the head of iHomeLab, in an interview with swissinfo.ch.

For example, an electronic visitor pass could show visitors the way through a hospital or office building. For the home, iHomeLab has developed a device that knows when an elderly person has fallen down and autonomously sends an emergency signal. This goes to a relative first of all. If this person cannot be contacted, the signal goes to an emergency call center. It is then possible for the person who has fallen to communicate directly with the emergency service so that an initial diagnosis can be made. This is one of many scenarios that the “Internet of things” makes possible. Devices communicate independently with each other and can handle complex transactions such as ordering groceries when the refrigerator is empty, or taking over the organization of our diary in order to make or cancel appointments.

But if buildings are intelligent, monitor people permanently and take decisions on their own, does that pose a security risk for us. “We have to consider how we can make the systems reliable? How can we ensure that the building is still safe when there is a problem in the system – something that can always happen? And how can we intervene again manually?”, as Alexander Klapproth comments to swissinfo.ch.

In our series on smart buildings we are going in search of intelligent buildings and plans for the urban environment. We will consider not only visionary possibilities, but also the risks and problems that accompany them. It is admittedly convenient if fresh milk and fruit are always in the refrigerator, but many people go to a supermarket because they enjoy shopping there. Besides, shopping is a social activity at which people interact. What would life be like if we could manage everything from home? There would be no reason to leave your own four walls and meet other people outdoors – not an attractive scenario.

It is not only the idea of printing buildings from concrete that sounds as if it comes from a film; many of the projects currently presented on the Web also look visionary and futuristic. The design and architecture blog Dezeen recently devoted a print-on-demand publication to the subject; the section about buildings printed in three dimensions presents seamlessly intertwined constructions (by Universe Architecture) and one that is closely based on bone structures (by Softskill Design). What the projects have in common is a strongly conceptual way of thinking with new architectural forms. But how realistic is this in fact, a building made entirely by printing?

Professor Berok Khoshnevis researches the subject of printing in concrete at the University of Southern California.

©2004 Volker Corell, Los Angeles

The best man to answer this question is Professor Berok Khoshnevis from the University of Southern California; for more than ten years he has been researching in the field of “contour crafting”, and promises that one day he will be able to produce buildings that are ready to occupy within 22 hours. Youtube videos show how his robots can already build man-high walls, with full automation and at a constant speed; on a photo three members of his team stand smiling on a beam printed from concrete. Khoshnevis says: “Within one year we will print small buildings. The issue is logistics-related. Currently we build inside the lab. If we build a whole house, we cannot build anything else. Or we have to demolish what we build. Currently this is not logistically easy for us. It is also cost-prohibitive.”

Through "Contour Crafting", light methods of construction that save materials could shape our buildings – and the walls would nevertheless be stable, as this photo from Khoshnevis’ laboratory shows.

© Berok Khoshnevis

However, it is certainly realistic. The way it works – printing in layers, with pipes and electrical installations integrated – is extremely well demonstrated in a video by the young German designer Sebastian Bertram, whose dissertation was concerned with the subject of printing in concrete and who has already received awards such as the Mia Seeger Prize for this work. The video describes not only the technology but also why we will use it: because of increasing urbanization. Since 2007, for the first time, more people have been living in cities than in rural areas – in 2011 the world’s cities had a population of 3.6 billion, according to calculations by the United Nations. By 2050 the figure could reach 6.3 billion, as a UN study published in 2011 estimates – a number equivalent to the whole population of the world in 2002. And all these people need somewhere to live. In industrial nations above all, where the value of labor is high, concrete-printing robots working to a large extent autonomously could erect buildings cost-effectively and at great speed.

From a leveled wasteland to a ready-to-occupy house within 22 hours: a video by the young designer Sebastian Bertram illustrates the principle.

© Sebastian Bertram

Knowing the risks

But is a fast-working technology like this a gain for cities – or possibly a danger? The architects of Superpool live and work in Istanbul, a city of 12.48 million inhabitants that is changing by the day. New buildings appear, old ones disappear; roads became larger or smaller, or suddenly lead to nowhere. In 2012 the Superpool duo, Selva Gürdoğan and Gregers Thomsen, took part in the Audi Urban Future Award, in the context of which they worked on the question of mobility in Istanbul. In addition they took part in the European Union research project Tailor Crete, which aims to examine the opportunities offered by building printing. Gurdogan and Thomsen are convinced that “there is always a need for users to handle new technologies creatively and carefully; the same is valid for concrete printing. Of course in a quickly changing city with quite complex dynamics like Istanbul, the implementation of a new construction technology that is under development can be tricky, but definitely needs to be supported.”

Printed houses can be freed from conventional methods of building; the first experiments provide a foretaste of the new variety of forms.

© Berok Khoshnevis

Like Berok Khoshnevis, who in a TEDxOjai lecture refers for example to earthquake-resistant domed structures in Iran that could be built at extremely low cost using concrete printers, Superpool highlight the opportunities that this technology makes available to architects, and comment that CAM (computer-aided manufacturing) is already placing tools in architects’ and designers’ hands, just as CAD (computer-aided design) has already done for a long time: “Concrete printing will open new doors to the architectural landscape, adding new parameters that architects need to deal with, while it will also respond to the rapidly changing cityscape. The strongest need for the concrete printing technology would be to provide cheap (sometimes even temporary) housing of basic-to-good quality, for example to provide emergency housing.” In wider terms they see building printing as a technology that is part of different stages of architectural design and manufacturing. Superpool believe concrete printing has great added value if it used to make different parts of a building on various scales and in various sizes. For example, a start could be made by producing only individual components by concrete printing and then combining them with other methods of construction and materials. The conclusion that the architects draw in design terms is therefore: “Concrete printing can give rise to completely new characteristics where craftsmanship and ornament are concerned.”

Concrete printers can operate autonomously, which makes them attractive for space travel. In a cooperative project between the USC and NASA, the idea of robots printing roads was considered – something that would also be possible in cities on Earth.

© NASA/NIAC/USC University of California

Shelter is a basic need

Building printing has not yet been fully developed; nevertheless, Berok Khoshnevis already calculates that one day it could save up to 25 percent of construction costs through making planning easier, up to 30 percent of material costs, and up to 55 percent of labor costs. His prediction on the basis of these calculations is: “I think the effect on the appearance of low-income housing will be significant.” The architects at Superpool, too, expect that building printing can have big effects on the appearance of poor districts in megacities all round the world, as its primary aim, they believe, is to increase the quality of construction in poor neighborhoods – which are present in every city around the world: “It can have an immediate positive effect on the lives of millions of people that now occupy slums and live under very harsh conditions.” In the opinion of the designer Bertram, on the other hand, “Concrete printing is only worthwhile when labor costs are high – that means in industrialized nations.” He also draws attention to the fact that highly qualified people are required who can operate the concrete printers, and that only a specific mixture of concrete is solid enough to be constructed several meters high. “An alternative would be to use lignin, for instance, a by-product of paper manufacture. If this were a construction material, buildings would ultimately be recyclable.”

Building printing will therefore not make its mark on the face of modern cities in the immediate future. However, Khoshnevis adds this thought: “Whether it’s our clothing or our mobile phones, almost everything is made by industrial production today. Constructing buildings is the only exception here.” When it is eventually possible to apply the technology on a large scale, it will present urban planners with completely new challenges: city quarters will then be able to grow rapidly, and according to greatly varied, individual influences of their residents. Because if you print your own house, you can also concrete the access paths and roads.

Tokyo is the area with the highest density of population in the world. But the growth there is slow.

© Morquefile-Photos

When looking at the research of the United Nations, one fact is evident: The world population is streaming into the urban regions. In the year 2050 the urban population will reach the amazing number of 6.3 billion people. That means 72 percent of the population worldwide will be living in urban areas. Managing these masses of people will be a critical challenge for a lot of less developed countries.

The difference in population growth between the less developed and the more developed regions of the world is an interesting fact. Whereas developed countries will only gain 100 million people up to the year 2050 (from 1 billion to 1.1 billion people) in urban areas, the less developed countries will gain round about 2.4 billion (from 2.7 billion to 5.1 billion). Where the urban population is growing fastest, there are the fewest resources for managing this growth.

China is getting four more cities with a population of more than ten million people. The city Tianjin will be one of these with a population of 11,9 million people.

© Morquefile-Photos

These figures don’t say only that the existing megacities will be much bigger than today. In the future there will be many more huge cities on the earth. By the year 2025 the number of urban regions in which more than 10 million people are living will grow from 23 now to 37. In China alone the number of these megacities will rise from four to seven in the next 12 years. The area of Mumbai will grow in population from 22.7 million up to 32.9 million in 2025, and the city of Lagos in Nigeria will grow in this period from 11.2 million to 18.9 million people.

These megacities demonstrate the difference between the developed and the less developed nations. While cities in the so-called Third World will face a massive growth of population, those in Europe and the United States will grow more or less moderately. Paris, the capital of France, will gain 1.6 million people in this period, making a population of 12.2 million in 2025. The population of the urban region of Greater Tokyo will only grow by 1.5 million people. Considering that nowadays 37.2 million are living there, this city is facing a period of moderate expansion.

The city of Paris, as a developed area, is facing a slow growth of 1,6 million people within the next 12 years.

© Morquefile-Photos

With regard to these figures from the United Nations, whose research was published in the latest report on World Urbanization Prospects in spring 2012, the need for solutions for urban mobility is evident. More people will live in urban regions in 2050 than the total world population in 2002. There are more of us every day, and we are living more densely in highly populated areas than ever before. To face these challenges, we need new approaches, new ideas and new initiatives.

Wanted: an environmentally friendly means of transport that needs no parking space. Found! The solar scooter from California.

© Solar Electric Scooter INC.

We always want everything to happen quickly. The journey to work, too, is supposed to go off without a hitch. Without waiting times, without stress. Then work is over, and it’s time to go home, catching a bus and then a train. But mobility at the touch of a button is not always possible, especially on the final meters before reaching the destination. Instead commuters stand at the rail station or some other traffic hub, and wait – and wait. Transport planning often falls down on the last stretch before we cross the finishing line. There is a gap.

It is light enough to fit under your arm, to go everywhere with you, and it’s stylish too: the electric longboard.

© Boosted Boards

Höweler & Yoon Architecture, the winners of the Audi Urban Future Award 2012, recognized this gap and used the phrase “last mile” to describe the phenomenon. Research on the Boston City Dossier in Ingolstadt was concerned precisely with the question of how this gap can be closed: What means of transport can handle such short distances quickly, needs no parking space, and moves without damaging the environment and without effort? On the west coast of the USA, the decides to fill the gap might already be out and about on the streets. They are called the Electric Longboard and the Solar Electric Scooter.

The ideal way to cover short distances: the electric longboard by Boosted Boards.

© Boosted Boards

The trend to green awareness encourages inventiveness. Fund-raising websites are real treasure chests for creative projects, and they have brought forth such jewels as the electric skateboard and the solar scooter. They enable fast, green and individual mobility on the last meters to the destination. The motto is “don’t push, drive!”. A few manufacturers in the USA have taken up the call and developed electrically powered devices. Whether they are used for fun, or as a genuine substitute for a car, bike or whatever – the owners can decide this for themselves, but one thing is certain: the scooter and board can go uphill and downhill, almost weightlessly, driven by battery power.

The Electric Longboard by Boosted Boards from the USA, for example, is advertised as the lightest form of electric transport. And that makes sense: It is the first-ever skateboard with a miniature electric motor and brakes, designed for daily use. Even for skaters’ stunts the motor is not a drawback, but an aid to getting up speed. The longboard arose from a “last-mile” situation as described by Höweler & Yoon: The inventor of the Boosted Boards prototype was studying at Stanford University in California. He made the first board as a fast and pleasant means of covering the last meters from the car park to his seminar room. With his friends Matt and Sanjay he founded the “Boosted Team“ and now sells the boards online for everyone.

From the car park to the university seminar: On the west coast of the USA, the electric longboard simply zooms around Höweler &Yoon’s “last-mile“ problem.

© Boosted Boards

The two inventors behind Solar Electric Scooters from California, Mike Donnell and Tony VanMeeteren, hit upon their idea in a similar way: “We got frustrated with ourselves for using our gas-eating trucks to travel a few miles to the grocery store,“ says Mike. “That's just stupid and we were not ‘talking out talk’. So we decided to get an electric scooter to run around town, and Tony said, ‘let's put a pv panel on there and see if we can charge the battery.’" This was the genesis of a solar-powered scooter that consumes no petrol and uses up no parking space. Because so many people asked them about their scooter, today they sell it via their website. Mike and Tony’s business is motivated by both environmental and social commitment: Part of the money is donated for a good cause. “We believe that we can save our planet and it will take many people doing many little things,“ is Mike’s explanation of the guiding principle of the company.

The last meters home from the bus: The solar-charged electric scooter is fast, and it’s fun too.

© Solar Electric Scooter INC.

It remains to be seen whether an electric skateboard and a solar scooter really have what it takes to fill the “last-mile“ gap in the mobility chain. In urban traffic they would surely represent a new dimension in switching mobility modes. And because they need so little space to store and to take along, they can easily be integrated into existing transport systems. So let’s simply try them out, and see whether they can really make the last meters into a highlight of our journeys.

As light as a feather, emission-free, electric-powered, and no need for a parking space: the electric longboard.

© Boosted Boards

Joseph Lim from Jakarta, Indonesia

What brought you to Jakarta?
When I came to Indonesia for the first time in the 1970s, it was family roots first of all that brought me here. After some time I found this country so fascinating that I became a regular visitor. And as Jakarta, being the capital city, is the first point of call, of course, for exploring this enormous country, I ended up here again and again.

My relationship to the capital city is rather ambivalent, however. Like many large Asian cities in emerging markets, Jakarta is monstrous. The whole metropolitan region has a population of about 28 million, which makes it the most populous urban region in the world after the Tokyo area. I have seen for myself close up how the city has changed in a short time ... with all the advantages and disadvantages of this growth.

A common traffic in Jakarta

© Joseph Lim

What are the disadvantages of this drastic change in the city?
When I first came here I traveled around the city in so-called becaks (bicycle rickshaws), but they disappeared from the streets long ago. Cars are dominant today. In the past, street traders walked through residential areas and drew attention to themselves by calling or blowing a trumpet, and when the ice-cream man cycled past, every kid in the neighborhood knew about it of course. When change happens, then naturally a certain element of heritage and history is lost. It is therefore important to recognize which heritage is worth keeping, even as times change.

Unfortunately the Indonesians are hardly alert to this, however. That makes me all the happier when I still find part of that heritage here in this gigantic city. I can make journeys of discovery in narrow streets away from the eight-lane main roads and shopping malls. Jamu (women who sell traditional Indonesian herbal medicines) still walk around there wearing batik sarongs to offer their wares, the oil seller calls out “Miinyaaakk” (oil) at the top of his voice, and the owners of mobile stalls selling noodle soup bang their soup ladles on the wood of the cart.

Nevertheless, modernization has brought a lot of improvements in its wake. The standard of living as a whole has risen, the level of education has been raised, and society is opener and more confident than before.

Small traffic in a big place

© Joseph Lim

One of the city’s biggest problems is traffic. What are the reasons for this in your opinion?
In Jakarta about 230 cars and 900 motorbikes are newly registered per day. In 2012 the sales of new cars in Indonesia rose by an unbelievable 25 percent and reached a new record figure of more than 1.16 million. On top of that 7 million mopeds and motorbikes crowd the streets.

The reasons for the boom are low interest rates on loans and the opportunity to pay in installments. Due to a new regulation in 2012, which imposed a minimum deposit of 30 percent for car purchases and 25 percent for two-wheeled vehicles, the sales of motorbikes and mopeds fell by 12 percent. And the rising middle class increasingly prefers to buy a car rather than a moped anyway.

Unfortunately investments in infrastructure are not rising in step with the growth in traffic. Moreover, in a country plagued by nepotism, the solutions that are implemented are not necessarily the best ones, but rather those that most benefit a small elite. At the moment investment is concentrated on road widening, new flyovers and urban highways. However, these measures only bring temporary relief and cannot compensate for the enormous increase in traffic in the long run. Solutions have to be found that reduce the volume of traffic. Prohibitions on driving according to whether a car has a license plate with an even or an odd number, or restrictions at certain times that only allow cars with at least three persons inside to use the roads, are unfortunately not a complete answer. The rich just buy more cars in order to have an option whatever happens. If necessary they pay a small sum of money to take extra passengers along in order to fill up the car. As these passengers are often children, they learn to earn money this way instead of going to school.

A bus ticket costs just 3.500 IDR (0.36$)

© Joseph Lim

What solutions to the traffic problem do you see?
Jakarta must be the only megalopolis on the planet that does not have an efficient system of public transport. Construction of a “Mass Rapid Transit” (MRT) or a monorail system has been under discussion in the capital for almost 20 years, but only this year was a start made on truly implementing it. We will have to see how well this system is accepted from 2016, when it goes into operation. It will be one of the city’s biggest investment projects, and there are already warnings about a network of corrupt officials, contractors and building companies who will carve up the project amongst themselves.

In 2004 a BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) was introduced. This scheme means that buses run at regular intervals under the name Transjakarta and pick up passengers on special lanes (busways), but a maximum of only 80 passengers per bus can be carried. The BRT currently has more than 670 buses, and at 172 km is the longest such system in the world. It transports over 130 million passengers per year (360,000 per day), and the tickets at a price of 3500 IDR per journey (0.36 $) are subsidized by the state. The BRT will be an important component in developing traffic systems and needs to be extended further.

Rail traffic from the suburbs into the city needs to be improved through new, attractive trains and the ability to use it anytime, anywhere, as in the Tokyo metropolitan region. At present some 450,000 passengers per day use almost 700 routes that have been established. The combination of MRT, monorail, BRT and rail traffic to the suburbs has the potential to remove the greatest traffic problems in the long term.

However, the city’s traffic planners are not getting involved with the most environmentally friendly participants or with environmentally friendly options: pedestrians, cyclists, users of car sharing, bike sharing and so on. These alternative forms of transport, which come into their own for short journeys in particular, need to be promoted. The only plans are to convert the 15,000 noisy, orange-colored bajajs (three-wheelers) to greener gas power, a proposal that has been greeted with protests by the bajaj drivers because of the costs.

The main traffic artery is closed to cars and motorbikes on Sunday mornings from 6 am to 10 am

© Joseph Lim

How do you travel around the city yourself?
My means of getting around in Jakarta have changed fundamentally. Whereas a car with driver was the usual means at first, now I mainly travel on the BRT buses. Otherwise I do short journeys on foot, and only resort to a taxi for longer distances. Sometimes I organize things so that I group several trips togethere on one day, so that it makes sense to hire a car with a driver.

I try to avoid driving in Jakarta as far as possible because it consumes time and energy, and is not environmentally friendly. The last time I arrived in Jakarta it took me 2.5 hours to get from the airport into the city. At best you can cover this distance in just under 30 minutes.

When I have appointments or meetings, I try to arrange them locally so that it is possible to get there using the BRT. I usually go shopping, take exercise, go to the cinema or out for a meal within walking distance, as I live in a very central location. For the future I am considering getting a bike so that I can cover longer distances, too, without a car. When you walk and cycle here, you become aware of how little consideration is given to these traffic participants in urban planning.

The main traffic artery is closed to cars and motorbikes only on Sunday mornings from 6 am to 10 am. Then, for once, the city thinks about its pedestrians and cyclists, who completely take over these streets until there are hold-ups here too ... welcome to Jakarta!

Personal details:

• Name: Joseph Lim
• Profession: designer, art director, creative consultant, fashion editor
• Age: 46
• Places of residence: Berlin and Jakarta

About the city:

• Population: 9.5 million in the city, 28 million in the metropolitan region, the largest metropolitan region in Southeast Asia
• Population density: approx. 14,494 persons per km² in the city
• Motorized vehicles (2011): over 13 million in the metropolitan region
• Traffic mix (2011): approx. 9.8 million motorbikes, 2.5 million cars, 581,290 trucks, 363,710 buses
• Length of the public regional rail network: 125 kilometers

Passengers wait patiently at the escalator of a Metro station in Taipei.

© Johanna Wittmaack

Imagine that the inhabitants of a city of 2.65 million people¹ try to get to a different part of the city, all within 12 hours. What picture does that conjure up in your mind? Gridlock, noise, panic? None of these words describes what happened at New Year 2013, when the Taipei Metro carried 2.06 million passengers. This record-breaking achievement was no coincidence; it was possible because the people of Taipei have gained confidence in the tightly-knit network of public transport over a period of years.

The Metro alone operates 10 lines with 102 stations, and criss-crosses the city with a track network that is 112.8 km long; in two years a further 30 kilometers are scheduled to be added. The trains run every five minutes from 6 am until midnight, and later of course when special events such as New Year celebrations are taking place. The good basic infrastructure is one of five important factors for the high acceptance of the public transport network in Taipei. A second factor is the design of the multimodal stations. Some of them have been converted into little green parks above ground; and all stations have in common a guidance system that is easy to understand, even for tourists. The third factor is difficult to manage, however. “It is important that people in Metro stations treat each other with respect,” explains Jason Chang, professor at the National Taiwan University and an adviser to the Taipei City Government on transport policy and development. “You can see that this works in Taipei from the fact that, for example, passengers waiting to board the Metro patiently line up in the places suggested by white markings on the station floor, even during peak hours.” And it really seems to be true that users of the Taipei Metro are unusually relaxed and helpful: When a group of western tourists stands whispering at a ticket machine and discusses which ticket to buy, a businessman who is hurrying past suddenly stops and offers help in English. And when a group wants to take a photo on the platform, another passer-by spontaneously offers to take it for them.

Decide for yourself

Even at 10 pm the Metro stations in the centre of Taipei are busy.

© Johanna Wittmaack

The group needed no help buying tickets by the way – use of the machines, with instructions in several languages, is self-explanatory. They calculate the fare according to the distance traveled and issue a coin, which is registered at a barrier at the start of the journey and inserted into a similar barrier when leaving the station at the destination. For residents of Taipei it is even easier: they can use the EasyCard payment system – the fourth reason for the high acceptance of the public transit network in Taipeh. EasyCard is an electronic payment system introduced in the year 2000. Its chip can be linked to ID cards, for example, and used to pay parking fees or fares on local trains too. At the start and end of the journey, you hold the EasyCard at the reader on the barrier. The price is automatically calculated and deducted. When passengers transfer from the Metro to a bus (or from bus to Metro), they even get 50 percent discount with the EasyCard. For ten years Jason Chang and his team have been carrying out trip-cost analyses in terms of time cost, safety, and environmental impact for all modes; this has resulted in Chang’s vision for the future of the payment system: “One day it should be possible to buy a ticket and switch free of charge between different public transport systems for an hour. Because the most important thing is that people are given choices about how they move around. By offering them dynamic information and what they should pay for in real time, you can help people make a smart choice.”

Always up to date

Navigating your way through Taipei with the help of real-time information is by no means a vision for the future; the bus network already provides this capability today, and thus illustrates factor five in the high acceptance of the public transport system. The 1100 buses on the 163 lines of the Tele Point 2100 system do not run to a timetable – they operate by means of intelligent directions. Each bus continuously transmits GPS and GPRS signals to the network control center, which evaluates them instantly and sends information back to the drivers, so that they can maintain the ideal distance apart from each other. If an accident happens along a route, the drivers can inform each other by means of an emergency button. Thus all the following buses have an early warning and can take a diversion. The purpose of the system is not to be at one of the 145 bus stops at a certain time, but to serve them at time intervals that are as regular as possible. To give the passengers maximum scope for planning, the LED displays at the bus stops are updated every 20 seconds; apart from that you can check on the Internet at any moment the latest positions of the buses and the time they are expected to take to reach any chosen stop. Especially on the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) routes, where the buses have their own lanes, now totalling 60 km, public transport is therefore more attractive than traveling by car or moped.

In the shopping district, the best way to get around is to walk. Nevertheless, many vehicles are parked at the roadside.

© Johanna Wittmaack

As people nevertheless still wish to have individual modes of transport, in 2009 the government introduced eleven central public bike stations. The people of Taipei took advantage of them straight away, and now there are 64 stations with 2196 bikes for hire. Each of them is used ten times a day on average – and can be paid for by EasyCard, of course.

Able to learn

Taipei’s centrally organized network of public transport has one great advantage: It learns from the data that it collects. Real-time data about the buses is collected, for example, and used to learn more about the actual traffic situation in the city and to adapt the network better to the demands made on it. In recent decades it has proved possible to significantly reduce the volume of traffic in Taipei by consistently expanding public transport; the level of environmental pollution and noise is falling, while the quality of life improves. This is expressed most clearly in the smile on Jason Chang’s face when he is asked how he prefers to travel. “By BBMW, Bike Bus Metro Walk – what else?” On New Year’s Eve, fortunately, 2.06 million other inhabitants of the city thought just the same way as Jason Chang.

What will be different in the future, in your opinion? What will spatial and urban planning have to take into consideration?

We have to distinguish between growing and shrinking cities in different parts of the world. In Germany, for example, and several other European countries, factors such as demographic change are leading to a decline in population. This has an effect on cities in these regions, which will face completely different problems in comparison with megacities. When we look at Europe, for example, we see certain processes of growth that are only related to certain regions. In these places the population is growing in spite of the fact that the population as a whole is shrinking. Whereas in other regions there will be a double decline: the natural process of declining population plus emigration. This is a doubly negative process, from which differing conditions for traffic within these regions will result.

Can you give us a specific example of how traffic will change?

The volume of traffic, i.e. tailbacks and other traffic problems, will decline in the areas with a falling population. At the same time there will be more exchange, and thus an increase in commuting. The reason is that the people who remain in these areas will no longer find jobs – there will be even fewer jobs than today. For these regions the question arises of “How can I handle such commuting distances?” This development will lead to changed behavior and changed needs in relation to transport.

In comparison to this, how does the future look for big cities and densely populated conurbations around the world?

If you look at the areas of really big growth, for example megacities in Asia and North America, where growth is happening because people are moving to these places and because there is population growth too, then it becomes evident that the foremost task in respect of mobility is: How can we get individual traffic switched to public transportation? The true difficulty in these regions is to keep control. A lot of roads are being built there, and everyone wants individual mobility. Ideally by car. This is also a question of image, as it was in Europe 50 or 80 years ago. What has to be achieved is to make it an issue in urban planning that people leave their cars and are integrated into public transport systems. However, in megacities we are still far away from such a trend. On the contrary: Traffic is the main topic there, and in these places traffic does not mean mobility but individual traffic.

Where is this going to end?

In many places there are simply endless tailbacks, for example in big cities like Istanbul and Mumbai. Nevertheless, people remain in their cars. What has to be done is to shift at least the share of individual traffic in these growth regions towards public transport. Often this does not work, however, to the detriment of public transport. Of course everyone says “that’s wrong!” Everyone sees the problems and considers: How can I plan traffic sensibly, how can I conceive a system so that a subway, a local train and a bus network operate well and the prices are right? At the same time, the quality of individual mobility and the image mindset that people have are called into question. Regardless of how people move around and in which spaces, the decisive point is having a rational scheme of spatial planning. In Shanghai, a city that I have often visited, there is a strong trend for public transport to decline in favor of individual transport. They have extremely strong urban growth and are building more and more roads, even one above the other, and they are all stuck in tailbacks.

"Shanghai shows a strong trend for public transport to decline in favor of individual transport", says Professor Dr. Gerhard Steinebach.

© Professor Dr. Gerhard Steinebach

Studies maintain that there is a trend away from the car as a status symbol …

In Europe yes, but definitely not in Asia. This situation will remain so in the near future. All the talk from developed countries of “don’t make the same mistake that we made, free yourselves from this status symbol” is well intentioned, but these countries want to and have to go through this development for themselves first of all. “Don’t use so much oil and coal, it pollutes the environment” – to which they reply “Yes, what about our economic growth, how will we achieve that? You are already rich, and we are expected to burn less of the coal that we need for our economic growth, whereas you have done exactly that in the last 50 years to get where you are today.“ And when you continue that way of thinking in regard to status symbols: “So we should do less driving, while you have been driving your luxurious cars for years?“ Of course we should be fair here, and not demand too much. Especially when you see how many horsepower the internal combustion engines have that people in Europe and the USA still drive around with, and how we show off with them.

What about electric cars?

The problem with electric cars so far is that they are not yet suitable for long distances. Perhaps the future – thinking of my own now – will be that we drive an electric car in the city for shopping and chores, use a car-sharing scheme for holidays, and for other journeys an electric bike. That would be a combination that I imagine would be attractive for people with a developed environmental awareness. But that is only my opinion. I don’t know how it would look if you did a representative survey, because when I look at the cars on the road, and see the size and power of what people drive when they want to be somebody, then I doubt that things will change quickly.

Professor Dr. Gerhard Steinebach teaches at the Techniche Universität in Kaiserslautern

© Technische Universität Kaiserslautern

How do you get around at the moment?

I’m a city dweller. My family and I do a lot on foot. This is also a visible trend: reurbanization. In part this has already been statistically demonstrated: A high proportion of the population is migrating back into the city from outside. These people travel more by bike. Ourselves, we still use the car as normal, but we are walking more and consciously leaving the car at home. But here you have to distinguish between cities of different sizes. You can’t make journeys on foot in every city. And you have to feel safe when you walk.

What kind of mobility do you enjoy most?

I used to enjoy driving the car. I am from the generation where it was normal to take a drive for pleasure. We didn’t go for a walk, the way we do today, but went for a drive. That means the whole family got into the car on Sunday afternoon and drove off – without a goal, we just drove around and stopped somewhere when we saw a nice café, and then drove on again. In those days I spent a lot of time repairing cars with my siblings, and took cars apart completely.

So it could be said that you are a car person.

Yes, but when you travel a lot for your job and want to work while you are traveling, you do without the experience of driving. That is why I do long-distance journeys by train. When you are at the wheel yourself, you can’t do anything. In the train I reserve a seat, settle down in comfort, and then I can work, sleep or eat. That is almost ideal. And all the talk about delays is greatly exaggerated. People should compare it with how much delay they have in their cars with all the hold-ups. For pleasure I ride my motorbike, but for me it is not a means of transport, as it is in a city like Mumbai, for example ,where people use it to get to work. Moving on two wheels has gone a step further there than in China, where you see more bikes. There the cultural development goes from walking to cycling to riding a motorbike to driving a car.

As a teacher how do you prepare your students for future urban developments?

The course of studies focuses on the themes of contraction and growth. Contraction especially in Germany and Europe. And growth regions internationally. We ask: Where are the growth processes and what kind of growth processes are they? And when you look at these processes, do they particularly apply to metropolitan regions, here in Europe too, as the number of cars on the road is increasing in spite of the declining population and against all predictions? So we have growth in traffic everywhere. The same is true of the number of vehicles, which is increasing, like the distances traveled: 40,000 km per person per year in the USA, 20,000 km in Asia. As a share of the global travel miles Asia is ahead of the USA, however, because it has more inhabitants.

What will the future planning of space look like in reaction to these growth processes?

It is hardly possible to imagine what this will look like and how planning will work. A great many slums will probably arise at first. Initially they will have to be cleared, and it will not be possible to build subway lines and bike paths as a first step.

The course of study provides future planners with an overview of the whole context, in order to be able to handle the challenges: patterns of settlement, ecology of settlement, water ecology, the construction industry, planning law, economics and statistics. This all has to be regarded holistically if you want to plan or redevelop cities. The key message to the students is the methodology, how to recognize the factors that define urban development. The boundaries are not precise, and the subject has to be approached across the board, involving many different disciplines with advanced knowledge transfer. It is important to realize how economic development is linked to transport and the environment. And the effects of, for example, noise and barriers against noise in climatic terms, because they changes the wind. It is also about the social perspective: Why do certain groups of people live in places that are particularly noisy? Because they want to be there, or for other reasons that have to be taken into consideration too? And what can you do for prevention, how can you change these things? Is it a question of income, or is it about proximity to certain institutions?

In relation to transport you then look at how the traffic situation and the shares of transport modes per person are developing, the share of individual transport as opposed to public transport. The aim is to include it all in an integrated concept for spatial development. Specifically that means: How wide is the road, how wide is the bike path, do you need a tree there, or a green strip between the bike path, the road and the pavement?

The purpose of spatial planning is therefore also to avoid wasting space and to optimize the use of space for everyone. Can you discern a general trend in the way we will handle the problem of space in the future?

It depends what kind of city you have in mind. Big cities ask different questions than small towns, for example: Is there enough space? Do you need alternatives to high-rises, such as tunnels beneath the ground? In my opinion the main problem is not that there is too little space but that growth processes are too fast and too little money is available. When you see how things are developing over time, it is clear that in future we will no longer have the problem that the world will be overpopulated, as we assumed in the 1960s and 1970s. We won’t have to go to the moon because there is no more room here. According to population figures that are already apparent, growth will flatten out in the region of ten billion inhabitants of the globe. This is shown by the birth rate per woman: 2.5 at present. Forecasts suggest a tendency to a normal rate of maintenance, i.e. two children per woman. With a time lag of about 50 to 100 years, as during the Industrial Revolution, this population trend can also be observed worldwide. We can assume that it will stay around ten billion.

"In Shangahi, they have extremely strong urban growth and are building more and more roads, even one above the other", says Professor Dr. Gerhard Steinebach.

© Professor Dr. Gerhard Steinebach

The question is, is 10 billion too high?

I think it won’t be, although uneven distribution will be a problem. In certain regions the population will be extremely dense. There will not be enough to eat for everyone here, and the spatial and supply conditions may not be right. Nevertheless, people go there, and no-one can prevent that. Despite borders. From a historical perspective this is almost comparable to the migration of peoples that took place in past ages, but for different reasons. So there will be an issue of uneven distribution. In other regions, where space and resources are plentiful, the population will live an affluent life. And then there will be people who want to return, because something is lacking where they are but available on the other side. And like a see-saw it will come back into equilibrium, and then tilt again.

What do you believe will happen in metropolitan regions in terms of urban planning?

Yes, chaos is a suitable word. In his book Planet of Slums Mike Davis has put forward a hypothesis. He says that the trend of immigration to megacities cannot be handled in any other way than through the appearance of slums to an extreme degree. This may be very pessimistic, but much of it is right, because population growth is too high in relation to financial resources. In this respect the question is not even: Should we build below ground or should we build high-rises? For this everything happens too quickly, and many of the affected regions don’t have the money. And even if they had the money, it would not work. In Istanbul, for example, the financing is available: 75% of the city’s spending is invested in infrastructure, especially transport, water supply and sewage. But the population growth in this city is so rapid that it is nevertheless impossible to keep up. They simply cannot build so much. They are constructing the equivalent of 3 km of subway per day, but in fact they would have to build 30 km per day to transport the population. Sooner or later you hit limits, because you can’t dig beneath the city or close streets everywhere at the same time. Then everything would come to a stop and the system would collapse. Here are the limits to development, and you can do the rest on paper or on a computer but not implement it. And in places where the money is not available, there is the added issue of time and speed. This then leads to the appearance of slums.

What are your wishes for future mobility?

First of all, post-fossil mobility, meaning a shift away from oil and coal towards renewable components. This would perhaps promote more the idea that “power doesn’t only come out of the socket, but has to be generated.”

The second thing would be a different approach to space, i.e. “shared space“. By this I mean encouraging different forms of mobility in parallel: cars, bikes, electro-bikes and pedestrians. Perhaps they should not be allowed to move in a chaotic, mixed-up way, in the manner of “everyone goes where he or she wants”. This could happen by means of lines or curbs, or perhaps by then there will be technical ways of signaling. That an electric car can only drive within certain corridors, otherwise the engine cuts out – and all of this controlled electronically. Or there would be even more automatic warning signals,so that I can’t drive in certain areas because of pedestrian crossings, because my car simply stops.

And the third component is even more closely linked to technical developments: a virtually networked city, where I basically influence mobility schemes in the city myself by being able to order mobility at any place using a mobile device. It would show me where the nearest available car is, or the car would be brought to me, or I see the nearest place where I can get a bike. That has to happen with the service included. This means answering the questions: Which vehicle takes me to my desired destination best, or should I just walk there? And how will the things that I buy there be transported, and how can I transport them myself – simply, what options are at my disposal? So everything depends on the availability of Internet, which enables me to call on certain services individually at the moment when I need them. Individuality is the most important thing for freedom of movement, because mobility is often about time pressure, and is often a pure necessity.

Close to heaven: expressways in the center of Taipei

© Johanna Wittmaack

Taipei has a population of 2.6 million on an area of some 270 square kilometers; this means a density of almost 10,000 people per square kilometer. It is clear that a city like this needs an intricately branching and effective road network to prevent traffic from coming to a standstill. Those who visit the city for the first time may walk through the streets in amazement and be swallowed up by all the noise and bustle – and nevertheless immediately feel they have understood something of the city’s traffic system.

The highway leading into the city is accompanied by a second road, built approximately ten meters higher. On the main traffic arteries there are even up to four levels, layered one above the other. The sky-scraping expressways are especially impressive: they are fast routes leading through the city, but have only a few exits. If you miss an exit, you have to drive a long extra distance. In the middle there are main roads with somewhat more turn-offs; and at the bottom are the normal main roads, which branch out into a fine capillary system of side roads and tracks.

A sea of noise and tail lights

Moped riders wait in a zone reserved for them until the traffic lights change to green

© Johanna Wittmaack

Even on the normal roads, however, not all traffic is equal. For example, in Taipei buses run on special lanes. But even in the general mayhem of the public traffic lanes there is a hierarchy: moped riders are permitted to drive up to a zone specially reserved for them at traffic lights. To an outsider, who perceives the trend to smaller and smaller cars in European cities, it looks as if an attractive way has been found of inducing people to use the smallest vehicles possible – a moped carrying one or two persons instead of an almost empty car.

However, in truth the background to this is completely different, as Jason Chang, professor at the National Taiwan University and an adviser to the Taipei City Government in questions of transport policy and development, explains: “In the 1970s there was a significantly high number of accidents in Taipei due to the large number of mopeds and the confusing traffic situation. As a research assistant I therefore worked with a research group that was developing means of prevention. The stopping spaces in front of traffic lights were part of this: although the moped riders have priority, they have to wait for a special green light, for example, in order to make a turn off. We presented the scheme in 1985 – but the rule did not come into force until 1995. And then only because the chief of the Taipei traffic police at that time had listened to the lecture and was enthusiastic about the idea even then!”

Up to four road levels are layered, one above the other

© Johanna Wittmaack

Now the streets of Taipei have become unthinkable without this system, which gives visitors an impressive experience: when the light changes from red to green, it seems as if all hell has broken loose. As if in unison, all the engines roar, the moped riders sprint off, and the cars zoom along behind. A sea of noise and tail lights.

Higher, faster, further?

Could it be that the expressways too were originally built for a completely different reason than to divide the traffic as effectively as possible? “The first expressway was built to connect the first Taiwanese freeway to the city,” says Jason Chang. “But they have not been a success. They do not reduce the traffic during peak times. Apart from that they cut through the city and raise high the completely wrong people: those who drive a car instead of using public transport!” For him the future of traffic is therefore close to the ground, in the buses – and the metro system, which is entirely people-centered. In recent years the government has terminated two projects of elevated expressways in the city while putting bus lane and HOV (high occupancy vehicle) facilities on an expressway connecting city center and residential area.

If you are out and about in Taipei, you hardly notice them, in fact, because drivers do indeed use the lowest, multi-lane road most of the time, even though this involves hold-ups. It is unusual to get a “green wave”, i.e. the chance to drive through several traffic lights one after the other on green. Even outside the rush hour, cars stand in lines in front of and behind you, while mopeds snake their way through the stationary traffic. You benefit from the expressways only on trips to neighboring cities. In view of this, events like New Year’s Eve 2013, when the Taipei metro carried 2.06 million passengers in a single night, make it clear that expressways cannot be the solution for inner-city mobility.

Vision by Höweler+Yoon Architecture, "Shareway On The Platform"

© Höweler+Yoon Architecture

In Berlin and New York, too, traffic moves on elevated routes – however, they have never been used by cars, but by rail traffic. This is precisely the principle to which the architects Höweler + Yoon had recourse when they developed their proposals for the Audi Urban Future Award 2012. Their visuals show, for example, suspended rail vehicles that move through the city and make their mark on its appearance. However, the architects did not merely to take up existing concepts – they aim to make them fit for future needs, as workshops in the course of this year demonstrate.

In contrast to the expressways, their routes high above people’s heads are not made for individual traffic: they link the transport of goods and passengers. Trains will depart from a hub in Newark, according to their vision. Along the way individual modules can split off and use a many-branched network, until finally each part of the train reaches its destination. However, people and goods share the route for as long as possible. This reduces the environmental impact – and the noise of thousands of engines is abolished. If the system is sufficiently differentiated, roads as we know them could become obsolete; Höweler + Yoon have for example proposed a surface that could be changed as required from a road to a lawn.

"Shareway" concept by Höweler + Yoon Architecture

© Audi Urban Future Initiative

In Taipei, by the way, this has already happened – though once and for all. The metro stations have been designed to be as inviting as possible, and some of them have been greened. In contrast to the expressways they do not separate residents on the two sides of the street. They bring them together.