Today, the media and certain professional fields regard the peri-urban as a repellent space lacking in qualities, where wasted space and energy, social segregation and landscape uniformity can be observed with unparalleled intensity.
Some, however, defend the idea that this space is much more complex and diverse than these stereotypes would have us believe. From this perspective, it could even constitute a place of adaptability to the economic, energy and climate crises of the twenty-first century.
At this event, we will call this hypothesis into question from a mobility standpoint, by comparing the views of European researchers, artists, elected officials and transportation professionals in order to bring out fresh perspectives on what might constitute sustainable mobilities in the alter-urban areas.

What is green mobility?
Lincoln Paiva: Green Mobility, from a "means of transportation" point of view, maybe understood as cleaner and more efficient vehicles. From a broader point of view, green mobility is a set of indicators involving planning, energy grid, technology, traffic control, infrastructure, and transportation systems providing a better quality of life for people and causing less economic, social, and environmental impact. Green mobility is not a goal in itself. The modern urban way of thinking conceives mobility as a means to provide urban and social development to the population in an ecological way or, in other words, with as little environmental impact as possible. We cannot think of sustainable urban mobility only as the transportation systems (transporting people) and energy. The purpose of sustainable urban mobility is to provide local development.

Your company, Green Mobility, is meant to play a key role in promoting strategies and projects for sustainable urban mobility that combine both private and public initiatives. How does this work in Brazil? In particular, how does Green Mobility operate? 

Paiva: We have been advising Brazilian cities to develop a more sustainable transportation policy and culture. The major challenge has been breaking paradigms about the low, medium, and high capacity transport systems, emphasizing the importance of creating a high-capacity network and not only systems. The cities have been implementing the wrong options, by taking only under consideration the data concerning passenger demand and neglecting socioeconomic issues, therefore leaving thousands of low-income people out of the transport system because of the tariff fees. 



Lincoln Paiva is founder and president of Green Mobility.

Courtesy of Lincoln Paiva

You did research on workers' modes of dislocation in part of São Paulo's service industries. Please describe your research and the specific actions that are being taken by the companies and their workers.
Paiva: The companies are still not willing to invest their money before they have a positive signal from the cities. Regarding projects involving the private sector, it will be important for cities to develop public policies that favor private investments. For instance, for a company to encourage people to go to work by bicycle, the city has to invest in infrastructure such as bicycle parking areas, bicycle paths, and security and also offer benefits so that the workers feel comfortable with the idea of pedaling a bike, exercising, and having a more positive attitude toward using the car less often.

In São Paulo, what types of operational and structural measures, in terms of sustainable urban mobility, are possible in the short and long term?
Paiva: The first thing to do would be to develop a municipal urban mobility plan, based on a more sustainable transport policy with short-, medium-, and long-term visions. Without it, it's virtually impossible to determine an emergency action plan. If you don't know where you are going to, all paths are alike.

Another of São Paulo's current challenges is the disarticulation between the pattern of land use and mobility, as for example the fast-paced construction of high-rise buildings and other large-scale developments. What are the socioterritorial and environmental consequences for the city and its inhabitants?
Paiva: I recently took part in a debate with [staff members of] São Paulo's municipal urban planning company. According to them, São Paulo is not among the most vertically dense cities in the world. I don't agree with the high-density proposals by urban planners, or in other words, the concept of Compact City, which is widely discussed in cities. In developing countries, this has caused islands of poverty and underdevelopment, because urban transport and work aren't dealt with as part of urban and social development, [which] will have to be [done as] part of a project involving several state-level departments. And that kind of cooperation is nonexistent in Brazil.

The World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016 could be remarkable opportunities to set up new paradigms for sustainable cities in Brazil. How are mobility issues being handled in the cities involved? Are there areas for innovation? 

Paiva: There's no innovation as far as I know. Unfortunately, the Brazilian cities will miss out on those excellent opportunities. What we nowadays foresee in terms of transport projects has to do with the implementation of Bus Rapid Transit. But, I insist, that one transport system is not going to solve the problems of Brazilian cities. Public officials do not understand that these two events can attract tourists, resources, companies, investment, and development. Their vision is focused on transporting people. I liked the idea of building the soccer stadium in the eastern zone [of São Paulo], but I haven't seen any project for local development or for the city's transport system. The subway is already there, with capacity for sixty thousand people per hour each way. Aside from the money to build the stadium, there will be no other investment in the transport system.

How can Brazilians improve their quality of life and make healthier cities?
Paiva: São Paulo has got a minority of upper-middle-class and better-educated people, especially youngsters between nineteen and twenty-five years of age, who understand that, in order to improve quality of life, it will be necessary to change the lifestyle that is deeply influenced by North-American consumerism, especially the car as a status symbol. With the improvement of the economy and encouragement from the federal government, a considerable part of the population can afford to buy a car. It's not fair that people have to give up on an asset that was widely promised as a symbol of achievement and status and go back to riding a bus or walking. So, as I see it, the wealthiest population in the city will have to give up driving their cars, because 80 percent of the drivers live less than ten kilometers away from work. However, the city must rethink its mobility strategy, by providing different means of transportation for short distances that can be used instead of the car. Alternative types of transportation are practically nonexistent in São Paulo.

How do you see the relationship between the automobile industry and urban planning and architecture?
Paiva: The automobile industry's vision of the city's future is a false promise in terms of urban planning. It's technological cities like in The Jetsons cartoon: The car talks to the driver, appears to be people's best friend, solves all the daily problems, moving around among glass-enclosed buildings and empty streets. We aren't searching only for more security, technology, or better energy efficiency. The industry will have to accept that its purpose is not only transporting people in a more efficient and environmentally sustainable way, but to offer solutions for the accumulation of cars in the streets, which makes driving itself difficult, slows cities' development capacity, and impairs quality of life. No one wants to slow down car sales, but, in the future, not everybody will own a car and not everybody will be able to drive their car at the same time. The industry needs to understand its responsibility to introduce private transportation as one of the solutions for the implementation of a network of transportation systems in a city. Automobile manufacturers are wasting their time and sources thinking in terms of imaginary cities that will never become real. It is necessary to rethink the current model of individual transportation.

How is climate change influencing public policies and private-sector initiatives in Brazil in terms of urban mobility? What are the main differences compared to other countries? 

Paiva: Brazil could be a leader in this area due to its low rank in the list of countries with the highest motorization rates. In order to reach for that [goal], it is necessary to foster the development of new technologies that would enable a more comprehensive understanding of the public transportation systems and to create new systems oriented toward our own reality.

Mumbai rootstock

Over the last decade Mumbai has undergone a radical process of economic change. The large manufacturing industries, which until the 1980s constituted the base of the metropolis’s production system, have given way to new business and manufacturing entities. Mostly small in size, these enterprises have rapidly spread throughout the urban fabric. These various agents of change have adapted to the city’s giant discontinuous structure, connecting to one another and acting like a rhizome. The transformations occurring in Mumbai, similar to those observed in other major industrial cities across India, from Calcutta to Ahmedabad, provide the context for the work of CRIT, an Indian research group that offers a plural and collective picture, just like the phenomena they observe.

Pleasantly disordered

Grafting itself onto an urban and social landscape whose layers have been built up over the course of generations, Mumbai’s new economic system has generated unusual forms of work, life and movement. Crowded trains and traffic jams have appeared in unexpected places at unusual times, bedrooms have been turned into offices and shanty towns into company networks for branded goods; teachers have become insurance brokers and architects property developers, and so on. Similar changes have affected the morphology of the city: the skeletons of old disused factories have rapidly given way to shopping centers and retail outlets, lagoon areas have become housing developments, old neighborhoods have been replaced by tower blocks of apartments, and large dumping grounds have assumed the guise of outsourcing complexes for foreign businesses. Mumbai has absorbed these new models with difficulty but with considerable generosity, generating a “pleasantly disordered” urban system, an undefined, mutating, rarefied city whose pattern is continually erased and at the same time rewritten by the myriad of players who inhabit it.

High-intensity cities

In Mumbai, the growth and fragmentation of economic activities has given rise to a more intense pace of life and work, linked more to the nature of new practices than an actual increase in the number of people working. The transformation, for example, of a traditional mill for weaving cotton into a business services center with the same number of staff can spark a giant increase in the amount of information exchanged, procedures and controls carried out, as well as the number of people and vehicles coming and going. The authorities have often responded to the system’s changing speed by planning large-scale transport infrastructures. Motorways, bridges and flyovers have thus been quickly overlaid onto landscapes made up of old residential neighborhoods, markets, disused factories and forests. This process has frequently involved forcing large numbers of people to relocate, pushing up the price of land and buildings and increasing land consumption. In turn, each project has generated further demand for new infrastructures, setting off a cyclical process that has turned Mumbai into a place of perpetual renewal.

The determinist paradox

Traditional practices and theories for analyzing and planning cities using deterministic methods and linear projections into the future are based on the assumption that the results are always articulated and predictable. Deriving from this approach, the numerous major “modernization” schemes have been realized using tools and processes that are insensitive to local specificities. In the name of factors such as “efficiency,” “capital” and “the greater common good,” countless requests and claims have been sacrificed, leading to a disavowal of age-old acquired rights. However, the effects induced by such interventions on a complex urban network where many aspects are intertwined—linguistic, physical, social, institutional and economic—have in many cases assumed completely unexpected forms and characteristics. In Mumbai, deterministic projects, programmes and policies have often acted in a completely different way to that which was planned, revealing a “second life” in contrast with the theoretical principles that generated them.

Taking your nose away from the screen

In contrast with the deterministic approach, the work ofis based on a subtler look at urban conditions, centered around understanding the complexity of claims and networks. Observing Mumbai, and the contemporary city in general in its hic et nunc, is like watching a film with your nose pressed up against the screen—all you can see is just a few pixels (a metaphor used by Salman Rushdie in his novel Midnight’s Children). Exponents of CRIT maintain that it is therefore necessary to take a diversified view and come up with processes of intervention with fluid edges that allow for the movement, transformation and osmosis of the various factors. It is a practice that needs to be tactical and fairly agile, where necessary, in order to bring about a radical change of direction.

This text is based on a conversation between Guido Musante and CRIT.

The article was first published in DOMUS, issue 959.

Pearl River Delta: the world's biggest city

The Pearl River Delta, or simply PRD, is probably the largest metropolitan system in the world. In order to describe it, in 1990 Rem Koolhaas came up with the idea of the “generic city,” a city without history that develops at random and requires no maintenance: “If it gets too small it just expands. If it gets old it just self-destructs and renews (…) it [the generic city] can produce a new identity every Monday morning.” To observe and describe the reality of the Pearl River Delta today, as presented by the local research group NODE, also means to identify a number of elements of the contemporary city in toto, because there is something of the “generic city” in every city.

Numbers

Spread over an area of 41,698 sq km, the Pearl River Delta has a resident population of just over forty million people, which swells to sixty million if one considers the floating population. Having grown exponentially over the last thirty years—at the end of the 1970s the resident population was around two million—this enormous mass of people live almost entirely in a gigantic metropolitan network that incorporates centers such as Guangzhou (around twelve million inhabitants), Shenzhen (ten million), Dongguan (eight million), Hong Kong (seven million) and another six cities with populations of over three million. Another important node in the system is Macau, a far less populous city (with around 500,000 inhabitants), but equally important for historic, symbolic and economic reasons. Closely interconnected (the average distance between them is no more than an hour’s drive), the principal urban centers of the Pearl River Delta are the gears of a territorial macro-device with a high demographic, productive and infrastructural density, and together these centers constitute the driving force of China’s economic machine.

Histories

The Pearl River Delta is part of the Guangdong region, an area also known as Lingnan, or “south of the mountains.” Its particular historic and geographic conditions differentiate it from the rest of China, and are neatly summed up in the ancient Chinese saying: “The mountains are high, the emperor is far away.” However, even if the emperor is far away, the sea is nearby. Lying at a point where the silk routes of land and sea converge, over the centuries Guangdong has represented a door open to “the world.” As a result, the region has historically been a great laboratory of experimentation for new economic and urban forms, distinct from those of the rest of China but often conditioned by central government. Cut off from the West for over half a century after the Chinese Revolution—except for the two colonial enclaves of Hong Kong and Macau—Guangdong began to reconnect with the world after Deng Xiaoping initiated economic reforms in 1978. Since then, 150 years of Western industrialization and urbanization have been compressed into thirty years of high-speed growth.

The biggest factory in the world

The PRD’s development is encapsulated in the story of Shenzhen. Little more than a fishing village at the start of the 1980s, with 10,000 residents and a low income per capita, Shenzhen was transformed by Deng Xiaoping into China’s first Special Economic Zone: a “Hong Kong of the People’s Republic.” Its population was initially estimated at one million, but in over three decades it has increased to ten million. At the same time the manufacturing volume and GDP have expanded and are now the highest of all Chinese cities. A similar situation has occurred in the nearby city of Dongguan. Across all the manufacturing areas of the PRD, known as “the biggest factory in the world,” working conditions resemble those of early Western industrialization: long working hours, low wages and high social pressure. The case of the Hua Qiang Bei district (China’s No.1 Electronics Street) is different. Here the crossbreeding of industry, commerce and housing has given rise to a vital and changing urban system with “efficient congestion.”

Identity vs. infrastructure (Balance is more)

The factory-territory of the PRD has been equipped with a hefty transport infrastructure to move goods in the most rapid and efficient way. The creation of a new “fluid” identity has been facilitated by a top-down planning process, aimed at removing history and local identities. But there is also energy of a different kind in the Pearl River Delta, such as the strong connotations of the two ex-colonies of Hong Kong and Macau. At the same time, the pressing demand for equilibration and sustainability in the system is accentuated by increasing social unease. The exponents of the NODE group hope that by overcoming the production logic of “more is more” and the symmetrical problems of “more is less,” it may be possible to usher in a new era of “balance is more,” a graduated equilibrium between identity and infrastructure.

This text is based on a conversation between Guido Musante and Doreen Heng Liu (NODE).

This article was first published in DOMUS, issue 960.

The Copan Building, designed by architect Oscar Niemeyer (1951–1966), offers an extraordinary perspective, both about and inside of downtown São Paulo.

© Ligia Nobre, 2008

Since the early nineteenth century, São Paulo has been the hub of economic activities in the state and the country, with direct implications on its territorial formation and demographic dynamics.¹ For economist Alvaro Comin, in Brazil and other developing countries, this "strategy of hyper concentration produced high levels of regional inequality, as well as deep internal inequalities in these central spaces."²

During the last century, São Paulo’s population multiplied several times. The country’s urban population increased from 31 percent to 81 percent between 1950 and 2000. During that period, the country’s population increased threefold, the city of São Paulo fivefold, and the São Paulo Metropolitan Area (SPMA) seven times over. Currently, about twenty million people reside in the thirty-nine municipalities of the SPMA, including approximately eleven million in the capital. The metropolitan area is nearly 8,000 square kilometers, and the city encompasses an area of some 1,523 square kilometers. The city that accounts for about 12.5 percent of national gross domestic product, but only 5 percent of the country’s population, presents a sharp contrast between wealth and poverty.

Map of São Paulo.

© Urban-Think Tank

Inequitable living conditions between high- and low-income groups in São Paulo defines the conflicting relationships within its territory, making this metropolis one of the most unequal places in the world. São Paulo is marked by a strong pattern of isolation and segregation between individuals from different social groups. The urban dynamics of São Paulo are the result of the relationship between the distribution of land uses and inhabitants’ diverse everyday practices. Living, work, education, health, leisure, culture, commerce, and urban fabric have very distinct configurations according to the region and one’s socioeconomic situation. Unequal conditions establish networks of mobility and accessibility to urban spaces and goods and services; these conditions define different scales of socioterritorial distances and proximities.³

Distances and Proximities

Founded in 1554 by Jesuits, São Paulo operated as a small trading post for centuries. The city grew rapidly from the nineteenth century onward, driven by the wealth generated by coffee exports and, following the abolition of slavery, the work of a new urban labor market (mainly Italian, Spanish, and Japanese immigrants) in the early republican period.⁴ Urbanization and modernization became important in Brazil in the early twentieth century and from the 1930s onward, with the rise of industrialization (due to the international economic crisis and drastic reduction of export crops). São Paulo played a key role in this change, with an intense process of migration from the whole country, mainly from the Northeast and Minas Gerais. Since then, its territory has been settled in terms of class segregation: “the central region, intended for the elite and a place of urban interventions, and outside it, on flood plains and basins along railway lines, a city without rules that received the poor, where budding industries were set up.”⁵

Until the 1920s, São Paulo grew along with the tram system. The main transportation mode was collective and on tracks. The city in the early 1930s, with 888,000 inhabitants, had a tram network with a linear extension of 258 kilometers (accounting for 84 percent of the city trips made in collective mode), four times bigger than the current metro extension.⁶ However, the tram system gradually declined until it disappeared in 1968,⁷ replaced by the road system for the car-based model and the buses as the predominant mode of collective transportation.

In the 1950s, São Paulo established itself as the leading financial center and largest conurbation in the country through a developmentalist process based on the automobile industry in the metropolitan area. It was the period after World War II, when President Juscelino Kubitschek promoted the motto: “fifty years in five" of a "Modern Brazil." Brasilia, which was founded in 1960, was the new federal capital, and São Paulo was described as the "city that cannot stop." The ring road model became the guiding principle set by both the Plan of Avenues (1930–1938), conceivedby engineer Prestes Maia, who later became the city’s mayor, and the Program of Public Improvements for the City of São Paulo of 1950 directed by New York City planner Robert Moses. Along with the popularization of car manufacturing, the ring road defined the mobility structure⁸ and the continuous peripheral expansion of the city, which continues to this day. As urban planners Raquel Rolnik and Danielle Klintowitz have emphasized in a recent article (here, translated from the original Portuguese):

"The processes of restructuring roads provided the physical infrastructure for the real estate expansion and the increase of circulation for the middle classes—for consumption, leisure—through the increasing of speed and flexibility led by cars. At the same time that the collective transportation model facilitated the opening of low-income housing settlements in the metropolitan periphery, providing a suited mode of transportation toward a dispersed and low-density expansion."⁹

The city of São Paulo is divided into five zones: center, north, south, east and west. The southwest vector concentrates the economic elite, employment and work opportunities—with a combination of industrial and service-oriented economic activities—and the largest public investments in road infrastructure and the metro. The historic downtown area, which was a prestigious place until the 1950s, gradually lost its economic and demographic importance for the elite, becoming a “commuting territory”—a very lively area occupied by diverse popular activities and groups. The urban primacy of the business and financial center, and associated large-scale urban interventions and real estate speculation, migrated to Paulista and Faria Lima Avenues in the 1960s and 1970s, and Berrini Avenue-Marginal Pinheiros from the 1990s onward. Both avenues are near high-income and middle-class residential neighborhoods and not far from the Congonhas City Airport. The most recent relocation occurred following self-segregating spatial strategies of the local elite, including large gated residential developments, corporate office buildings, shopping malls, and hundreds of thousands of square meters of parking spaces. Geared toward the interests and operations of a "world city," São Paulo, today, tends to push even more of its lowest-income residents to the edges of the metropolis, due to the high cost of living and skyrocketing land prices.¹⁰

The cable-supported bridge in the Berrini Avenue-Marginal Pinheiros area (south zone) was inaugurated in May 2008, as both a synthesis of the “world city” scenery and a new symbol of São Paulo. 

© Ligia Nobre, 2008

High-income residential buildings nearby the Berrini Avenue Business Area (south zone), which recently saw a real-estate market boom. 

© Ligia Nobre, 2012

The Bandeira Bus Terminal was implemented at the bottom of Anhangabau Valley in downtown São Paulo, connecting the city’s north-south axis.

 

© Ligia Nobre, 2008

Due to a combination of buses, illegal land uses, and autoconstruction, the occupation of peripheries has sped up since the 1940s. Millions of low-income residents and migrants live mainly in the east and south zones of the city, at a distance of more than forty kilometers from the center of São Paulo. It was a clandestine model, with the state’s consent, as a form of solving the housing problem at low cost, without urban and civil rights, without or with precarious urban infrastructure, far away from their places of work. In the 1980s, the periphery-center pattern of urbanization changed considerably. The emergence of condominiums in the suburbs, and, at the same time, the expansion and densification of cortiços (tenements) in the central region, besides various areas of favelas (settled in stream edges, hillsides, and margins of dams), shuffled the position of social groups in the city. Different social groups now lived in close proximity, but they are separated by walls and security equipment. A paradigmatic case is the neighborhood of Morumbi, with favelas and luxury condominiums side by side. In the last decade, the peripheries have changed, as they no longer correspond to the images of rarefied occupation and desolation of thirty years ago. There are completely new territorial configurations, with large private investments, such as supermarkets and shopping malls, as well as public facilities, such as hospitals, the Centers for Unified Education (CEU), and more urban infrastructure. However, these physical improvements have not affected the unequal social stratification of the metropolis.¹¹ The contemporary metropolitan territory is much more heterogeneous and complex, with ongoing contradictory and conflicting processes.

Paraisópolis Favela in the Morumbi neighborhood of the city’s south zone. 

© Ligia Nobre, 2008

Social housing and self-built constructions in the east zone. 

© Ligia Nobre, 2008

A low-income residential neighborhood in the east zone. 

© Ligia Nobre, 2003

The three main business centers and road infrastructure in São Paulo.

© Ligia Nobre, 2012

People waiting for the train during evening rush hour at Vila Olimpia Train Station/ Marginal Pinheiros in the south zone. 

© Ligia Nobre, 2012

Congestion: Conditions and Consequences

Every inhabitant of São Paulo has to be a strategist to commute, as they must negotiate time, money, comfort, traffic jams, stress, and living and working conditions. Income level is the main variable related to mobility (i.e. the lower one’s income, the lower one’s capability of geographical and social mobility).¹²

The number of daily trips in the SPMA is approximately 38.1 million.¹³ In São Paulo, walking trips account for approximately one-third of daily trips, public transportation accounts for one-third, and private transportation for one-third. Of the walking trips in the SPMA, 88.5 percent are associated with short distances and 5 percent are due to the high cost of public transportation. The survey does not count walking trips if they are part of a journey that involves any other means of transportation—a symptom of the nonsystemic view of urban mobility and pedestrian patterns in São Paulo.

The private car is still the priority form of transportation in São Paulo. Its use has been growing exponentially since the 1950s; in the last five to ten years, automobile ownership has been made possible for more people through easier access to and availability of credit. It is no coincidence that the automobile industry accounts for approximately 20 percent of Brazil’s industrial gross domestic product. In 1997, the municipality implemented a system of license-plate control, known as rodizio, that forbids 20 percent of the registered cars per day to circulate in the “central zone” during peak weekday hours between 07:00 and 10:00 and 17:00 and 20:00. Still in place, the system actually had a reverse effect for reducing the number of cars. Mainly middle- and high-income residents bought a second car, which allowed them to keep a car for private daily use. The current total fleet is of more than six million vehicles; about 800 new ones are registered everyday.

Surrounding the downtown São Paulo area, the Elevado Costa e Silva, an elevated highway known as "Minhocão,” or "big earthworm," was built in the 1970s during the dictatorship period. Connecting the east and west parts of the city, it is paradigmatic of the conflict between the metropolitan scale of road infrastructure and the local scale of urban territories—a conflict that degrades adjacent residential neighborhoods.

© Ligia Nobre, 2012

The cable-supported bridge, completed in 2008, is in the Berrini Avenue Business Area of the city's south zone; here, looking toward Roberto Marinho Avenue and the Congonhas City Airport. 

© Ligia Nobre, 2012

The two express highways, along Tietê and Pinheiros river basins, define the west and north borders of the “restricted central zone,” and connect the city to the regional and federal network of roads. About half a million vehicles use the highways on a daily basis, including individual cars, buses, and trucks. Cargo transport and logistics (loading and unloading, parking, and routes), and their environmental impacts, are directly related to the activities in the city. A restricted rodizio system has also been implemented for trucks (according to their dimensions) in specific zones of the city. According to a 2009 Urban Age survey, about “20 percent of all daily truck trips either originate from or are destined for the SPMA and around 45 percent of the trucks circulating in the state of São Paulo cross the SPMA."¹⁴ Intended to reduce traffic congestion, a larger regional ring-road infrastructure, known as the Rodoanel, was built, in part, as an attempt to redirect traffic flows not destined for the metropolitan area.

The average time spent in traffic in São Paulo per day is two hours and forty-two minutes, which means that people living in São Paulo spend twenty-seven days per year stuck in traffic jams.¹⁵ The daily average of congested roads in the city is 118 kilometers during morning and afternoon peak hours.¹⁶ The average speed of traffic was 19.3 kilometers per hour at peak time hours, between 2000 and 2008.¹⁷ Today, the average is between 14 and 17 kilometers per hour. Everyday, about three million people commute to work from their homes in São Paulo’s east zone to its central-southwest area, mainly by combining bus and metro, spending more than fours hours in traffic under crowded and precarious conditions.

The SPMA’s 436 kilometers of mass-transit systems¹⁸ are at the limit of their operational capacities, due to a lack of integration between the different transport modes, lack of overall planning and institutional integration at the metropolitan and municipal levels, governance problems, the structure of subsidies and taxation, lack of investment in infrastructure, conflicts of interests, and patterns of urban land use.

The current municipal collective transport system is the result of governance changes made between 2001 and 2005, a time that saw the implementation of an interconnected system of state (metropolitan buses, subway, and CPTM trains) and municipal services as well as the introduction of an electronic “single ticket,” or bilhete unico, that is based on time instead of a fare based on the number of connections or the distance traveled. The bus services are operated by private companies and divided in two subsystems: the structural (buses by medium- and large-sized companies or consortia) and local (microbuses by smaller companies and cooperatives), with a fleet of 14,937 vehicles¹⁹ that operate along 1,347 lines under the management of municipal public-private company SPTrans. There are still few designated lanes for buses (with some elements of the bus rapid transit system in operation). The bus system faces problems of overloading, delays, and inadequate responses to demand.

A bus lane on Santo Amaro Avenue (south zone) toward downtown and Bandeira Bus Terminal.

© Ligia Nobre, 2012 

Most public transportation competes with cars and motorcycles for available street space. In fact, approximately 80 percent of the lanes are dominated by single-occupant, private cars. The average time spent traveling via mass transit for the six million passengers per day is 2.13 times slower than the individual mode.²⁰

Implemented in 1968 and operating since 1974, the metro network follows the same radio-concentric configuration established by the road system, with south-north and east-west lines crossing at the center of São Paulo. Currently, four lines are managed by the public company Metro and one by the private company Via Quatro²¹; together, they cover a total of 65.3 kilometers, and include fifty-eight stations. With heavy public sector investment, the Metro is the more popular of the two. For both passenger and cargo transport, the railway system²² has six lines managed by CPTM, with a network of 258.6 kilometers in length and 89 stations in the SPMA. However, recent reports have pointed out in both rail lines and the Metro systems an inhumane situation, with daily overcrowding and delays, worsening of maintenance, and more accidents in the last couple of years. New lines started being implemented with monorail system above the ground in the south of the city, close to the Berrini Avenue business area. Both the Metro and train have begun to encourage, if only in a timid way, an intermodal system that incorporates bicycles, with about thirty-two stations that offer a bicycle parking.

Estação da Luz in downtown São Paulo.

 

© Ligia Nobre, 2012 

The city has only two bike lanes, totaling 4.5 kilometers,²³ outside of those found in public parks, and they are discontinuous and in bad condition. Despite the city’s hilly topography, there is a growing popular movement and demand for broader regulation encouraging the use of bicycles as a sustainable, more democratic, accessible, and nonpolluting mode of transportation.

Due to their maneuverability, motorcycles have been increasingly used for daily commuting between home and work, and for messenger services. In the last fifteen years, the number of motorcycles has increased exponentially, with increasingly serious consequences in terms of traffic accidents. The motorcycle’s presence in the metropolis is a direct response to increase in traffic jams and the demands from the “world city” for delivery services, as is the increasing daily use of helicopters, with an estimated 450 privately operated in the city, a number inferior only to New York City.²⁴

Challenges

São Paulo has followed an urbanization pattern driven by the real-estate market, in which government policies and public investments have tended to respond predominantly to those private interests and away from concerns about the public sphere. The provision of public transportation infrastructure per million inhabitants in the SPMA decreased from thirty-eight kilometers in 1967 to twenty-three kilometers in 2002, according to the Urban Age report, confirming the hegemony of public investment for the road system since the 1930s up to today, as well as its very collapse.

Unfortunately, São Paulo is the model of urbanization replicated in other Brazilian cities, and it is the metropolis with the most serious mobility crisis in the country at the moment. A study coordinated by economist Marcos Cintra, from Fundação Getulio Vargas, estimates that traffic jams will cause a loss of 56 billion Reais for the economy of São Paulo this year, or nearly 10 percent of the city’s gross domestic product, including direct and indirect costs.²⁵ The implications are significant for all of São Paulo’s inhabitants, with high crime rates, security issues, problems of public health, pollution, flooding, human-environmental impacts, inefficiency of public transportation, traffic jams, and increasingly long commuting distances.

The city suffers from an immobility that reduces its capacity to produce wealth equitably, a situation that supports extreme socioterritorial inequalities. As urban planner and president of Brazil's National Association of Public Transport, Eduardo Vasconcellos concludes that São Paulo is the failure of the city model based on the car: “Our current formula is the formula for failure.”²⁶ But there is a growing awareness about the need to address issues of sustainable mobility, with studies, proposals, plans, and initiatives for São Paulo and its metropolitan area being produced by different actors.²⁷ However, besides technical and economic decisions, the situation requires political will, excellent governance capacity, and long-term commitments—all in close collaboration with society and in a democratic, participatory process. A systemic mode of thinking and operating that fosters and integrates new modes of mobility and accessibility across the SPMA is the best hope for a cohesive metropolis.

Designers are developing a dazzling array of responses to this challenge. The Web site Newmobility.org lists 177 different approaches to sustainable mobility; these range from bus rapid transit (BRT), car-free days, and demand-responsive transport (DRT) to hitch-hiking, pedestrianization, smart parking, and van pooling. Plug-in electric cars are especially popular with politicians and car companies—but EVs are not a long-term solution. They may be emission-free locally—but a whole system, well-to-tank assessment reveals true costs that include conflict minerals in their batteries and the dirty energy needed to run them.

We once hoped that the Internet would replace trips to the mall; that air travel would give way to teleconferencing; and that digital transmission would replace the physical delivery of books and videos. Technology did enable these new kinds of mobility—but in addition to, not as replacements for, the old kinds. The Internet, by enabling these global flows, amplified resource intensity in the economy as a whole. The rhetoric of a “weightless” economy, the “death of distance,” and the “displacement of matter by mind” sound ridiculous, in retrospect.

The fundamental problem is not that our vehicles burn the wrong kind of fuel. The problem is that our economy, and the systems that support it, perpetuate patterns of land use that render the way we live unsupportable.

Rather than tinker with symptoms—by inventing hydrogen-powered vehicles, or turning gas stations into battery stations—the more pressing design task is to rethink the way we use time and space.

Information network designers are ahead of us here. In the speed-obsessed computer world, they fight against delays measured in milliseconds. They struggle constantly with latency—the delay caused by the time it takes a message to travel between two processing nodes. They also fight attenuation—a weakening of the signal as it travels further from its source. Information is like food: its quality declines as it moves to faraway places. Their solution is to change the word "faster" to the word "closer." They move processors closer to the data and, guided by the "law of locality," they move the vast majority of network capacity to ultra-local uses.

Nature can be an even better guide. The biosphere is the result of 3.8 billion years of iterative, trial-and-error design, and nature, in the words of Janine Benyus, “does not commute to work.” Nature also teaches us that sustainability is the property of a system; it is not a thing to be added to the world. By giving priority to the vitality and health of the places where we live, and acting accordingly, our focus will evolve, quite naturally, from the autobahn to the bioregion.

John Thackara is a member of the jury for the Audi Urban Future Award 2012.

In the name of development, many of the poor in cities are randomly displaced without respecting their present linkages to established urban ecosystems including transportation. For the marginalized, long commutes are not only expensive but also result in a tremendous loss in incomes. The poor have become poorer in cities where they are continuously displaced and live far from their places of work. Building sustainable transportation for urban areas keeping the poor in mind is very critical, as it can otherwise destabilize social sustainability, which in the medium term can be more expensive than financial sustainability. Today, sustainable transportation is being designed with only the middle class and above in mind—a solution with a short-term objective.

Today, urban planners and policy makers need to take a bottom-up approach. They need to look at the future of cities from multiple perspectives—poor, middle class, and rich. Planners must balance the needs of the three, with greater emphasis on the poor and lower middle class (best case scenario), as this will lead to a more sustainable society. Cities have to plan in advance for the influx of migrants and in a holistic way that accounts for future housing, sanitation, water, energy, and transportation needs. Good long-term planning will help the poor in finding their feet in a large city and help them plan their own ecosystem (work, home, and transportation), which can help lead them not into more poverty but out of it.

Today’s public transportation designs are very ad-hoc with no respect toward commuters. Public transportation needs to be viewed as part of a larger chain that links individual transportation, residential colonies, and work and commercial places. These can be designed for long-term basis if there is consistent interaction between all stakeholders. The stakeholders are the residents, future residents, planners, policy makers, and the implementers. This is the only way to ensure a sustainable future for all.

Harish Hande is a member of the jury for the Audi Urban Future Award 2012.

An equitable and sustainable city has policies to ensure that each community within the city has its own identity, scale, and proximity to the necessities of everyday life, including employment, health, education, public spaces, recreation, broadband, and mobility. Local transportation systems (pedestrian, bicycle, car, taxi, minibus) integrate the community; while access to a citywide integrated transportation system (tramway, train, subway) connect the community to the rest of the city.

In the rapidly growing cities of Latin America, the pressures of urbanization create conditions that make the above scenario challenging. The megacity is forged informally, chaotically, and progressively. Informal, and often illegal, urbanization results in inadequate public services, housing of poor quality and in inappropriate locations, difficult access and widespread exclusion. Existing institutions are weak and the rules of conduct unclear. Conflicting priorities exist between the middle class and the poor regarding transportation options.

Ensuring mobility is crucial in making the city of the future more compact, democratic and inclusive, and environmentally responsible and sustainable¹. To achieve these goals, municipal and central governments, the private sector, and the academic community must collaborate:

Urban design and master planning are essential tools for urban development, preventing informality or channelling its consequences.

Trust and consensus between the public and private sectors are preconditions to building strong institutions and encouraging a self-regulated society.


A balance must be struck between the desire for car ownership and its infrastructure and the necessary investment in public transportation.

Municipal and central governments, the private sector, and the academic community must consider ways to develop and implement new policies and practices:

(+) Compact – Urban sprawl and congestion curtails mobility. Cities should strive toward densification through careful planning and renovation. New housing and renovation projects should incorporate amenities, services, and job opportunities. Peripheral settlements need to be integrated into the rest of the city with efficient transportation systems to mitigate sociospatial exclusion.

(+) Democratic and Inclusive – City governments must legalize land titles, provide basic services, and invest in integrated mass-transit systems that cut valuable time and scarce resources spent commuting. Private and public sectors should make access to mobile phones and Internet a reality for all city dwellers, enabling greater citizen participation, job and educational opportunities, and upward mobility.

(+) Sustainable – Rational land use, higher urban density, and a mix of integrated multimodal transportation systems help reduce the energy footprint. Clean energy options lower gas emissions and reduce fuel consumption. Cost-effective transportation improves economic sustainability.

Each city must set its priorities. Mobility affects boundaries and integration, the creation of community, and the possibility of greater inclusion. Mobility in the urban context is closely linked to the quality of life of its inhabitants; it can be a positive key in shaping the city of the future.

Diana Barco is a member of the jury for the Audi Urban Future Award 2012.

The lecture is part of David Banister's current research on five main areas: policy scenario building, reducing the need to travel, climate change, energy and environmental modelling, transport investment and economic development, and rural transport and employment.

• Integrated Railway Solutions for Smart Mobility
• Travel Demand Modelling
• Measuring or Modelling: new methods for surveying travel behaviour and traffic
• Driver Assistance Systems
• Positioning and Georeferencing
• Freight Traffic and Logistics Services
• Road Ecology and Landscape Impact
• Travel and the Built Environment
• Energy Efficient Cities: how much can transport contribute?
• Non-Motorized Transport
• Electro-Mobility and Infrastructure
• Post-Fossile Mobility
• Model Regions for Sustainable Mobility