São Paulo, an oppressive concrete wilderness.

©Martin Lewicki

An infinite sea of lights

The first time I saw São Paulo, the city showed me one of its most beautiful faces. As the plane came in to land by night, it presented an infinite sea of lights of incomprehensibly huge extent, bigger than anything I had ever seen. “So that’s what a metropolis of 20 million people looks like,” is what went through my head. It was breathtakingly beautiful.

In the city center on the next day, São Paulo transformed itself in my view into an oppressive concrete wilderness. I had never seen such architectural chaos before. Terrain that seemed to have been built on completely at random. Bridges, underpasses, streets, highways, offices and residences crowded together so densely that there was hardly any air to breathe. It is not only strangers who feel they are lost in and positively devoured by this megacity. It is noisy, it is hectic. Pedestrians are pushed around, hooted at, driven from the road. Might is right – that is the rule here.

It is noisy, it is hectic. Pedestrians are pushed around, hooted at, driven from the road.

©Martin Lewicki

A city full of contrasts

Contrasts are great here, and Paulistas are skillful masters of the art of living in chaos. While some survive on the street below, begging ceaselessly for money, above them others take joyrides by helicopter from one skyscraper to another. São Paulo is the city with the world’s highest density of helicopters, ahead of Tokyo and New York. No wonder: driving a car is not much fun in São Paulo. Traffic lanes are more of a recommendation than a strict regulation. Drivers here like to take a serpentine course that is often as rhythmic as a Brazilian swing of the hips. This feels lively, dynamic, restless, a mirror of the hectic city and its people.

Life in chaos

For newcomers to São Paulo, the traffic is extremely confusing. Passengers get thoroughly shaken up in the buses, get warned by shrill beeps in the Metro, and get shooed around the city by taxis. Whether on foot or in a vehicle, I have never really felt safe here, so high is the crime rate and so ubiquitous the threat. The authorities advise against walking any considerable distance after dark, especially in the Centro, the heart of the city. But not even a taxi is a place of safety. Attacks have often been made at red traffic lights. Therefore in São Paulo drivers are permitted to cross red lights slowly at night.

For newcomers to São Paulo the traffic is extremely confusing. 

©Martin Lewicki

Vision of a better tomorrow

Brazil seems to have rosy prospects for the future. Alongside China, India and Russia it is hailed as one of the world’s four most important growth markets. The football World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016 will certainly fuel this boom even more. But is São Paulo ready for it? How will the city cope with the inundation of visitors? How will people get from A to B? These are questions that require urgent answers in view of the present traffic situation.

According to the vision that Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner (Urban Think Tank) drew up for the Audi Urban Future Award 2012, means of urban transport in the future will be instruments of interaction that bring people together. Existing public spaces such as sidewalks and squares will be capable of conversion to a different function in an extremely short time, and will thus adapt to people’s varying needs. The city will become a communicative and flexible space in which the spotlight is not on moving around but on social interchange.

This vision is a stark contrast to the present reality: in the city that is Latin America’s biggest economic hub, everything revolves around transport. In the course of the economic boom, the population of cars has increased by a factor of seven in the last 30 years to more than 7 million. However, the road network has grown by only 18 percent over the same period. In consequence the average commuting time of employees in the greater São Paulo region amounts to about 2.5 hours per day.

Liberdade, the crowded japan neighbourhood of São Paulo.

©Martin Lewicki

The story told by figures like this suggests anything but an oasis of social well-being. What the city really needs are quick solutions that will help it to achieve greater efficiency and therefore a higher quality of life.

There are undoubtedly some positive signs, as a look at the main bus station, Estação Portuguesa-Tietê, shows. Passengers who arrive here and want to continue their journey via Metro have to wait up to half an hour to buy a ticket at the desk, because there are no ticket machines anywhere in São Paulo.

A solution for this is shortly to go into operation. From November 2013 Paulistas will be able to use their fingerprints as a monthly season ticket. The name of the system translates as “the finger of God”. Thanks to the use of scanners, it enables passengers to travel by bus or Metro, provided they have already bought a monthly ticket and their fingerprint was registered when doing so. One step on the path to the future for São Paulo.

Finally, pressure on the road network will be relieved by a new ring road, the Rondoanel.

©Martin Lewicki

Extend, connect and prohibit

The Metro system in São Paulo is one of the most modern in the world, but with only five lines and a network of 74.3 kilometers it is much too small. By way of comparison: the subway network in Berlin consists of ten lines with a length of 146 kilometers. Although it is only half as big as the Berlin subway system, São Paulo’s Metro carries three times as many people – 3.5 million daily. It is not difficult to imagine the crush during peak hours.

Logically, work is being done to extend the network in São Paulo. This is complemented by the overground rail system. In the coming years 160 kilometers of rail routes which were previously used only for freight will be made available for public passenger transport.

Finally, pressure on the road network will be relieved by a new ring road, the Rondoanel, which will be some 30 kilometers outside the city center and is intended to draw heavy trucks away from the inner ring roads through its connections to all long-distance routes.

Since 1997 a special strategy has been in operation to reduce the amount of traffic in the city center. On working days during the peak traffic periods, from 7am to 10am and from 5pm to 8pm, vehicles whose license plates have two specific final digits are not permitted to enter the city center. To make things fair, the “prohibited” numbers are changed daily.

All of this can be no more than a start. When football fans invade the megacity next year, São Paulo will have to come up with further solutions. Even more visions, like those of Urban Think Tank, are required to provide a better quality of life for this restless city of workers. Otherwise the future will be even more “brutal” for its residents and visitors.

The first of February 1995 was the date, when the new Traffic Control Center was opened. Together with the University of Tokyo the metropolitan police they were establishing a system, which is at technologically the cutting edge of what is possible in managing traffic. Since then until now this is a very impressive monument of technology with up to ten meters height of giant displays, thousands of monitors and workstations. It is the heart of the Tokyo traffic management, where all the information gathered on the streets in and around this megacity is coming in, will be evaluated, processed and spread again as valuable information for the traffic participants. A service which is indeed very treasured by everybody who needs to mobile in greater Tokyo.

All the information, which is gathered throughout the area of greater Tokyo is collected within the traffic control center.

www.shifteast.com

“It was the former style to create a huge “centralized” system,”says Mr. Takashi Oguchi, one researcher at the Advanced Mobility research Center at the Institute of Industrial Science, which is part of the University of Tokyo. The scientist there give the project around the Tokyo Traffic Control center the scientific background for the next steps in this development.

Getting information was the first challenge

Naturally the technical possibilities have been improved in the last 17 years. The first step on the way to a more fluid circle of vehicles through the rush hour was the detection of the traffic. Via cameras, helicopters and patrol cars the amount and density of traffic was detected. Valuable information for sure, but the distribution was only possible via radio. But in regular case the information reached the people too late and too indifferent to avoid a traffic jam or conserve it from becoming worse. To gather information and build a picture of the situation on the streets is one thing. But to manage the traffic is a project, which is way more challenging.

Nowadays there are more opportunities for spreading information. It is an evolution which the traffic control center experiences and bringing it to more impact on the real situation. Ultrasonic detectors are gathering information, which is then spreaded within the network of the Tokyo authorities and in the private sector. “The detectors are allocated to be utilized for controlling the signals as well,” explains Professor Oguchi. “And their information is now also applied for producing 'travel speed' information.”

The selection of what is being viewed on the big screens ist flexible.

www.shifteast.com

The “travel speed” is the main output for the people of Tokyo. This number is an estimate of how fast one can bring a distance behind himself within a certain area. It is a forecast of what is the people expecting on their way to the office. Additionally a special radio channel for the center is sending 24 hours the news about the roads of the Tokyo metropolitan area, thousands of information displays are advising the participants to a good way around the zones with the worst problems and the center is able to manage 7000 traffic lights to give the column of cars the maximum of mobility possible.

Although the information collected from the streets has been improved during the existence of the center. 17 000 vehicle detectors and thousands of cameras are collecting even more information about the traffic on the streets of Tokyo. Together with the huge amount of other figures and data the bureau of metropolitan police, where the center is located in the administration of Tokyo, there is a good picture of the situation on the streets is evolving. 24 hours a day operators are processing the mountain of information to a picture on the big screens and provide the information.

Kind of a business case, but not profitable

And the information is spread and made available for private services: “The calculated 'travel speed' based on the detector information is sent to JARTIC (Japan Road Traffic Information Center, an incorporated foundation) where all japanese traffic information collected by public sectors is collected and processed in an integrated manner,” describes Mr. Oguchi. “JARTIC provides traffic information via internet, TV/Radio program, and also provides to private sectors at certain fees.” Last but not least there is kind of a business case as well in this project, naturally far away of being profitable. Only the administration is able to uphold and develop these huge amount of investments, which is needed for such a system.

A special way to bring the information to the people on the road is the VICS (Vehicle Information and Communication System), which is using the information provided by JARTIC to send traffic information to the vehicles equipped with the VICS onboard equipment. It was introduced parallel to the system of Tokyo in 1995 and is a nationwide system of intelligent traffic management. Via small boxes in every car the system is able to spread the actual information via special FM broadcasts, infrared or radio wave beacons. In this way the “travel Speed” and the additional traffic information is reaching the people in the cars on their way on the roads.

To keep an overview of the traffic in greater Tokyo is not easy. Even with the advanced technology of Tokyo Intelligent Traffic Management System.

www.shifteast.com

For sure the era of navigation systems and smartphones is bringing new opportunities to the Tokyo traffic management center. Nearly every car in Japan has a powerful navigation on board and a countless amount of apps are offering navigation services for the country. This is not only a way to bring more detailed information in the car. Future and more connected systems can be used to gather more information about the situation of and around the car. The problem is not the technology itself than questions of laws and standards, which are slowing down the speed of this evolution. And Professor Oguchi is looking forward to a paradigm change: “I personally hope that such kind of systems as the 'traffic control center' would become more decentralized, more flexible, and more resilient for any unexpected incident such as earthquake or tsunami disasters.”

The next big effort will be to guide each car individually through the labyrinth of highways, expressways and the innercity roads of Tokyo. The goal is to go into the navigation through the car systems itself, through smartphones and the traffic information boards on the roads. Every car should get a specialized and optimized route for every trip through the city. If this information is received by a critical number of participants there will be an impact of the traffic situation as a whole. But this will need a more close connection between systems like the VICS and other navigation systems in the car or on smartphones and other devices.

From information to warning

That could lead to further ideas like showing each car possible dangerous situations around the corner. Even in this case the first steps are done. For example a pedestrian walks over the road and the car which intends to turn into this street in a few 100 meters is given a warning about what happens around the corner. This is a possibility which could bring a more decentralized cloud system, which Mr. Oguchi is favoring.

Maybe in less than ten years it could be possible to leave the hands of the steering wheel while entering the Tokyo area and being driven by the car itself to the destination guided by the information of the Tokyo traffic control center. The time which is needed to go to work and back again could be used way more productive than guiding a car through stop and go. The technology is already there, problematic is the implementation such powerful systems in the widespread and versatile infrastructure of a modern city like Tokyo.

Even in this ideal of a more efficient future traffic jams will happen. A density of more than 5000 people within one square kilometer in a city of more than 12 million inhabitants in the greater area is not the framework to guarantee a fluid circulation of cars 24 hours a day. But it could help to reduce the pollution of the environment, raise the productivity and the quality of life for the amazing city of Tokyo.

A room full of television screens, telephones, computers, and other electronic gadgets is used to monitor real-time traffic flows in the metropolis. A total of 868 kilometers of streets and avenues, which comprise some seventeen thousand kilometers of individual lanes, are monitored by a combination of cameras and people.

© Ligia Nobre

 

 

According to CET, its daily work is currently performed by 2.400 traffic agents, known as marronzinhos. Thirty of those agents, known as Ponto Avançado de Campo, or PACs, are equipped with binoculars, a special radio, chronometer, and sheet notes; stationed high atop buildings in strategic locations, they are constantly sending information to the traffic command center. In addition to a fleet of 1,084 CET vehicles traveling the streets, there are also 350 monitoring cameras and 582 controlling radars in a city with more than seven million vehicles and more than eleven million inhabitants.

© Ligia Nobre

Sociologist Bruno Latour in his 1998 book Paris, Ville Invisible introduces two different modes of “visualization” of the city of Paris: the panopticon and the oligopticon. The former is related to the conception of panorama, totalizing surveillance and paranoia. In contrast, the latter, the oligopticon, “is not what sees everything, but what sees a little bit,” he writes; it follows the threads, a series of connections.

© Ligia Nobre

Latour is interested in types of connections, in trajectories of human and nonhuman actors in space and time, and not in total visibility. Dichotomies like local and global, close and far, small and large are replaced by types and numbers of connections—“distributing the local, localizing the global.” In this sense, CET’s traffic-flow command center is not a “big room” but a local room. The multiplicity of “oligopticons” in our everyday experience tells us that São Paulo is made of visible and invisible cities.

© Ligia Nobre

Thanks to CET for hosting my visit to the traffic command center on August 6, 2012, in the context of the Audi Urban Future Award 2012.

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.

A view of Istanbul looking toward the Bosphorus.

© Memed Erdener

Forty-three people died in Turkey in one weekend

I no longer hold my mother’s hand. I’ve grown up. Yet, although I do not have my mother’s hand to hold anymore; I do check the skies as I walk along the pavement, in case an air-conditioning unit attached to the façade of a building falls on my head, and I never trust cars in traffic even if the lights are green for pedestrians. My behaviour is not due to fantasies I have conjured up, accidents occur quite frequently, and further examples can be given: On a weekend in July of this year, on the roads of Turkey, forty-three people died in car crashes. Let’s repeat, in one weekend, forty-three people died in traffic accidents. And if you consider that the greatest number of cars, public buses, minibuses, and trucks in the country exist in Istanbul traffic, you can perhaps imagine the aggressive chaos that prevails on the roads of the city.

According to a report in Zaman dated 23 July 2012, the state of driving schools in Turkey is deplorable. At these schools, where there is virtually no government oversight, it is apparently possible to receive a driver’s license without even having to take the practical driving test—at a small cost, of course. According to another report in the same newspaper, the number of traffic accidents has risen.¹ Considering that 41,828 people have died since the beginning of clashes in 1984 in the civil war that has been continuing with the Kurdish guerrillas,² it is clear that more people die on the roads of Turkey than in the civil war.

Typical traffic jam in Istanbul.

© Memed Erdener

Typical highway in Istanbul.

© Memed Erdener

Minibuses in Istanbul.

© Memed Erdener

Dolmuses are shared cabs.

© Memed Istanbul

People and cars

When, on 18 June 2012, three lanes of the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge—one of the two suspension bridges, the other being the Bosphorus Bridge, that connect the two sides of Istanbul, or, more specifically, Asia and Europe—were closed due to repair work, the queues of stationary cars extending for kilometers created some interesting scenes. Drivers, suffocated by the traffic jam that didn’t budge for hours, got out of their cars to organize football matches on the broad, unused swathes of asphalt; skaters skated around and between the cars stuck in traffic; while some others simply gave up, parked, and took a nap. The municipality, in contrast, only thought of temporarily cancelling bridge tolls to allow the traffic to flow on the twentieth day of this chaos and set up portable toilets for people who spent a significant time in the traffic queues along the motorway.

The chaos that went on for days along the motorways that lead to the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge, also known as the Second Bosphorus Bridge, served to strengthen the position of government officials who want to build a third bridge across the Bosphorus. The chaos was a setback for those who oppose the third bridge because they believe that a third bridge would worsen the traffic situation in the city, not improve it.

However, a refreshing piece of news is that the number of passenger cars per capita for Istanbul is quite low when compared to other European cities. The figure for European cities is around 350 to 400, whereas in Istanbul the figure was 137 for the year 2009. According to the Turkish Statistical Institute, there were 1,775,335 passenger cars in Istanbul in December 2009.³ The projection for the year 2023 is 4,335,882 passenger cars, or 252 vehicles per capita. In other words, there is still a long way to go in terms of owning private cars. I hope that this piece of data does not further delay the public transportation infrastructure investment Istanbul needs.

In light of these figures, it is useful to look at the passenger volumes of vehicles in traffic: On average, private cars have 1.57 passengers; service minibuses have ten passengers; and public buses have thirty passengers. A comparison of private car and public transport ratios between Istanbul and the leading cities of the world shows that Istanbul and New York, for example, have similar figures. I can’t help but wish that the two cities were similar in terms of the income of their citizens as well.

The Bosphorus Bridge, also known as the First Bosphorus Bridge, is one of two suspension bridges that connect the European and Asian sides of Istanbul.

© Memed Erdener

Bosphorus Bridge traffic.

© Memed Erdener

 

 

Ferries at Uskudar Port in Istanbul.

© Memed Erdener

By 2023, 22 to 25 million people in the city

The population of Istanbul was 11.6 million in 2006. According to the Turkish Statistical Institute’s data from late 2009, the population has risen to 12.9 million. By the year 2023, projections suggest that the total population of the city of Istanbul will be between twenty-two and twenty-five million, if current dynamics and trends continue.⁴

As the economic and cultural production generators and, even the politics of Turkey, with its surface area of 780,000 square kilometres, become increasingly centered in Istanbul, it seems impossible to control its growth, and produce urban tumors in the process. The city expands continuously: It gets more crowded as it waits for the great earthquake that strikes once every one hundred years. It is almost as if the city is waiting for its executioner. The mood of the wait is such that some regard the presumed great destruction as some kind of salvation for the Istanbul of unplanned, illegal, and crooked development. This strange example reminds me of those masochistic football fans who, when their team is already down three to zero, exclaim, “I would just love it if we conceded the fourth, and the fifth.” I don’t know whether this is akin to a desire to be reborn from your own ashes, or an emulation of the sad and pessimistic refrain of an arabesk song.

A few square meters of green

Strange but true! Concrete-city Istanbul does have institutional norms for urban green areas like other leading cities of the world. The institutional norm for Turkey is ten square meters per person, whereas in Amsterdam the figure is forty-five-and-one-half square meters and in Stockholm eighty-five-and-one-half square meters. According to environmental experts, the active green area per person in Istanbul at the moment is three square meters.

Following the 1999 Gölcük earthquake, in which 17,480 people died and 23,781 were injured (its epicenter was 70 kilometers from Istanbul), the Istanbul municipal government took the precaution of designating a series of vacant areas where people could gather in the event of a probable Istanbul earthquake. One such gathering zone was an empty lot in Mecidiyeköy, one of the largest, most densely populated districts of Istanbul. Today, there are two skyscrapers on that lot; they are called the Trump Towers.

Istanbul's Taksim Square is a major mobility hub, tourist attraction, and historic site of both conflicts and celebrations.

© Memed Erdener

A slightly improved public transport network

Despite the recent opening of the Kadıköy-Kartal underground line on the Asian side of the city and the introduction of a metrobus service along the motorway connecting the two continents that today carries thousands of people, the public transport network is still insufficient and has not prevented regular, widespread traffic congestion across the city. The disorganized and often even illegal nature of residential construction, as well as infrastructural problems that are laid bare in the most striking manner every time the city receives heavy rainfall, are among Istanbul's other major problems that demand urgent attention.

Subway entrance in Istanbul.

© Memed Erdener

A crowded subway platform in Istanbul.

© Memed Erdener

People wait at a tram station in Istanbul.

© Memed Erdener

Armed men and the dead own nature

Following the rapid growth of Istanbul, many military zones that were originally on the outskirts of the city are now in the city center. The end of the Cold War, the transformation of Lenin’s USSR into Putin’s Russia, and the near impossibility of carrying out a new military coup d’état in present-day Turkey means that the barracks positioned within the city have lost their raison d’être. That’s good news. Another good thing is that all of these places are closed to investment and the insatiable construction industry of Istanbul; and almost all of these sites are located within green areas and forests.

A general overview reveals that the few remaining green areas within the city limits of Istanbul are either military properties or cemeteries. In poetic terms, the green areas of Istanbul belong either to armed men in uniforms or the dead. To bury the dead in the ground and to return them to nature and to find them a place in the shade of a tree in such a crowded city is perhaps not a great problem for this century. But what about the tanks hidden among the trees, the bombs and the rifles buried in the ground? For whom and what are they there?

The people of Istanbul have to reunite with nature and fresh air. The ruling power, thirsty for profit, has chosen to build skyscrapers in the very few unbuilt areas where the people were supposed to gather if the probable Istanbul earthquake struck, and they are fully aware of the profit capacity of the green areas that belong to the military. Housing Development Administration (TOKİ)⁵ and the municipalities are working quietly but determinedly to acquire these last green areas remaining in the city. Korhan Gümüş, an architect who forms city watch groups—local coalitions of citizens, municipal authorities, and experts—to guide urban planning in Turkish cities, engaging in a participatory process to ensure the safety and health of their communities, explains that, “Assigning new functions or preparing projects won’t be enough to recover military areas for the city. A mission-oriented, self-governing institutionalized approach which can mobilize diverse sources of energy is required. However, this is extremely difficult with the centralist bureaucratic administrative model in power at present. Thus, the only option it comes up with is privatization. Whereas the municipalities must learn to collaborate with institutions of specialization and to design processes and administrative structures open to participation.” ⁶

If we do not want to see huge buildings on the green areas where children should be playing, we have to act now. We have to break down the barriers erected in front of our imagination. We have to make a miracle in the city possible. We no longer want shopping centers. All power to the imagination!

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.

Politics and Dynamics of Development

The PRD’s boom in the past thirty years is not coincidental, as it must be understood in a historical perspective. The PRD lies south of Wu Ling (Five Mountains) and the area is thus called Lingnan (South of Mountains). During imperial dynasties, far from the reach of the emperors, it never carried much geopolitical significance. This status, in turn, created the environment for the somewhat anarchic Lingnan culture. In fact, local leaders perceived the area’s marginal status as an advantage, as it allowed them to exercise experimental policies even though they were unsure of the outcomes. For example, if an open trade policy failed, it wouldn't impact the rest of the country. Historically, Lingnan has always been a place where those in power adopted a make-the-most-of-it attitude. Lingnan culture has long been the forefront of experiments of a more open framework of politics, trade and culture.

The geopolitical marginality to the central government afforded Lingnan a chance to look outward for development and trade opportunities. A dense network of waterways and proximity to the South China Sea were Lingnan’s advantages. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during the Western Industrial Revolution, Guangzhou (Canton) had fully integrated into the global industrial chain as the gateway to China, making it the first and biggest trade portal of China. Trade and industry made the PRD the pioneer of international trade of its time.

The PRD was an early beneficiary of China’s economic reform program. In 1979, two special economic zones were established there, in Shenzhen and Zhuhai, and Guangdong was given permission to open up to foreign investment as well as to private business before other parts of China. The PRD has since become “the world factory” for electronic products, garments, toys, machinery, and other products.

The PRD’s role as the transformation lab of China still holds true today, a search for “PRD, testing ground” in Baidu, China’s answer to Google, yields many results: PRD to be testing ground for “national price reform,” “clouding computing in China,” “environment protection demonstration area,” and “financial reform,” among others.

Industry and Infrastructure

Infrastructure has always played a key role in the development path of the PRD. Historically, waterways and roads connect harbors and townships, laying the basic groundwork for the early business prosperity of the region. The region’s early infrastructure network radiated from Guangzhou, which took center stage in business and political activities.

Shortly after the economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, investments from Hong Kong flowed into the PRD, long before China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Real estate, clothing, machinery, electronics, food, textile, and chemicals were the developed industries. To aid the booming industries, infrastructure assumed a significant role in the region. A popular saying from the time expresses the direct connection between economic growth and mobility infrastructure: “In order to get rich, one must lay a road.”

This boom resulted in the fast growth of megacities like Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Dongguang. At the same time, as foreign investment from Hong Kong and Macau focused on small- and medium-sized enterprises, many production facilities were also erected in small townships throughout the PRD. These new developments required a networked system of road, rail, and waterway.

Pearl River Delta roadway infrastructure.

NODE Architecture & Urbanism

Today, the government invests in large-scale infrastructure projects such as airports, railways, and harbors in the region, hoping that transportation improvements will attract foreign investment. The advancement of infrastructure underpins the building of a number of new towns. The equation looks like this: transportation + industry = new town and new population. In practice, this model may not always work: For example, Nansha district in Guangzhou, where eight-lane roads were paved and a harbor was opened before any industry arrived, is struggling to attract companies and professionals. Another example of infrastructure preceding development, is Shenzhen’s Dayun New Town, which is meant to spring up around the stadiums built for the 2011 Universiade, where new residents and high-tech and creative industries will enjoy the convenience of roads and public transportation constructed for the international student sports competition. If and how this plan will be realized is unknown.

Nonetheless, as the region continues to profit from industry, more and more residents become participants in the region’s mobility complex. Automobile enjoys enormous popularity. Shenzhen, for example, with over 2 million automobiles, scores second on a nationwide ranking of car ownership, and it is city with the highest car density (based on number of cars/length of road ratio) in China. The airports are well integrated into the mobility system, as one can, for example, easily travel from one of the region’s five airport to neighboring cities, and check in a flight in the “remote terminal” in one city before traveling via a comfortable bus directly to the airport in another city.

Pearl River Delta railway infrastructure.

NODE Architecture & Urbanism

Daily Life and Mobility

Each of the major cities in the PRD exhibits diverse characteristics of culture. Guangzhou, celebrating a history of more than two thousand years, has long been the center of Cantonese culture, where a laid-back lifestyle with various fine schools of cooking is to be found. The modern Guangzhou provides a number of important cultural and academic institutions. The Guangzhou Triennale, for example, is a much-acclaimed event in the Asian art world.

Hong Kong, marked by its colonial past, is the most Westernized of China’s cities, and it lives up to its claim to be “Asia’s World City.” There, local Cantonese culture blends with the glare of a high-profile financial world, resulting in contrasting speeds of everyday life: the hectic life of office workers in megaskyscrapers is juxtaposed with people living in low-rise houses and carrying out traditional businesses. Hong Kong also boasts high-quality higher education and hosts a number of world-class cultural events every year.

The young city of Shenzhen was able to transform itself from a village of 26,000 people in the late 1970s to a thriving metropolis of fifteen million in 2012; in the process, it has created its own “Shenzhen Dream,” which is modeled on the American dream. Young, aspirational people come here to pursuit their dreams in all areas—career, love, and family. With the average age of its population at about thirty, it’s easy to understand why “pursuing the goal with all one’s might” is deemed the motto in Shenzhen.

Pearl River Delta waterway infrastructure.

NODE Architecture & Urbanism

In the PRD, mobility in daily life takes various forms. Intercity commuters live in one city and work in another, and an increasing number of people have businesses and homes in multiple cities. Intercity highways make most cities easily within reach of one another. Express trains connect the major cities, and a super high-speed railway system, part of China’s ambitious plan to connect cities throughout the country with high-speed rail by 2040, is being built.

Within the boundaries of cities, mobility options vary for people of different income levels. Workers live close to the factories, and they take the bus to the city center to do shopping on the weekend. White-collar workers may use public transportation or drive a private car, depending on which gets them to their destination with greater speed. Some white-collar workers rely solely on taxis, which are plentiful and relatively cheap. Due to the high level of traffic, it is generally considered dangerous to ride a bicycle more than a short distance in the PRD’s cities.

Pearl River Delta aviation infrastructure.

NODE Architecture & Urbanism

In the run up to Universiade in 2011, Shenzhen launched a green transportation scheme curiously nicknamed “BMW,” which stands for bicycle, metro, and walk. The middle class embraced the idea during the Universiade period, and many continue to participate in its efforts to reduce the number of cars on the roads on any given day. This shows an emerging class of residents that places value on the environment and seeks to pursue a healthier lifestyle and a lighter footprint.

In almost all PRD cities, except for Hong Kong, the public transportation system’s intermodal connections are not always well planned, which means that changing from one modality to another can sometimes be a frustrating experience. The concept of “seamless mobility” appeals to those who desire better efficiency and physical comfort. Shenzhen government has already partially addressed this problem and plans to increase bus and subway train frequency in order to reduce the interchange waiting time to no more than five minutes.

Population and Integration

A look into the population structure in the four key cities of the PRD reveals the region’s open secret of success: The factories are largely powered by people from other provinces in China, or migrant workers. Portraits of this class don’t always have a positive tone: In Dongguan, according to a 2004 report in the Washington Post, most of the millions of migrant workers were eighteen- to twenty-two-year-old women, who toiled at assembly lines for more than sixty hours a week for wages that amount to about $120 per month. According to standard practice, most live at their factories in company-provided dormitories and eat in company cafeterias—and hand back one-third of their pay for food and lodging. Many of these migrant workers live in the PRD for years to earn enough money to start their own small business or simply to provide for the coming years, and then return to their less developed hometowns, which are usually villages.

This large, floating population is most easily influenced by changes in the industry. Many now-defunct companies had problems meeting their payrolls before they shut down, leaving workers unable to collect months of back pay. In Dongguan, at the beginning of 2009, Phonex Satellite Television reported that millions of migrant laborers, most from China’s underdeveloped rural areas, loss their jobs and had to leave the city, thanks to the global financial crisis.

Pearl River Delta "floating population" statistics.

NODE Architecture & Urbanism

Recent years, however, have seen the fate of workers far improved. Policymakers in the deep inland areas of China have made efforts to boost their own industries—many of them in the export sector. The migrant workers are welcomed at home like never before. For example, a report in the Economist notes that, “Officials across the county have been busying themselves with what until three or four years ago would have been an unthinkable task: persuading migrants to stay in Jintang after the new-year festivities rather than go back to the coast. They hold meetings with migrant-worker representatives and offer tax breaks and help secure loans for those wanting to start up businesses.” Factories in the PRD have to make attractive deals to compete for workers. A 2012 report in Southern Metropolis Daily reveals that basic income in most Dongguan factories has increased to at least $200 per month, and lodging and cafeteria situations have also proved.

Transitional Challenges

The success of the PRD in recent decades is based on a rather simple logic: Ensure the best production pipeline, best transportation pipeline, best personnel pipeline, and the result is massive profits. But the formula isn’t full proof. Challenges are arising in all the areas where the PRD once counted on easy success: production, transportation, and personnel.

Production orders are moving away from the PRD and to inland China. There, local governments offer attractive bargains to manufacturers of foreign brands in order to encourage them to open facilities in their cities, where labor costs are still relatively low. Land transportation infrastructure in areas like Chengdu and Chongqing are in place to welcome the new industries. With this, a tide of migrant workers will move from the PRD to work near or in their hometowns.

Furthermore, with the advent of a “Third Revolution,” a term used by the Economist to describe the digitalization of manufacturing that allows for flexible production, offshore competition in terms of labor costs may become nearly irrelevant. The Boston Consulting Group reckons that in areas such as transport, computers, fabricated metals, and machinery, 10 to 30 percent of the goods that the U.S. now imports from China could be made at home by 2020. The PRD must face the inevitable coming of an age of post-industrialization and consider what other forms of production it can offer.

When companies relocate, all of the factory spaces and ancillary spaces (dormitories, recreational centers, and so on) are simply left behind. The concrete jungle of roads and bridges, once congested arteries for the transportation of goods, will seem be free of traffic in time. The massive building of infrastructure, production space, and living quarters in the past two to three decades has been so extreme, that there is not sufficient land left for any large-scale future development.

Hong Kong may well remain a global financial center in the future, thanks to its robust business infrastructure. But the capacity of other PRD cities to attract domestic and foreign business investment is not yet clear.

The social integration of the PRD population is still a considerable challenge. Over the course of its thirty years, Shenzhen has produced both economic miracles and a large middle class, with the majority of its members sporting private cars and living in comfortable apartments. Enjoying a more international perspective (traveling abroad and sending their children to study outside of China) Shenzhen’s middle class enjoys a very high living standard in comparison to residents of other major Chinese cities. The question is how much of the floating population in the PRD cities are going to become permanent residents and seek a higher quality of life as the once-newcomers to Shenzhen did, but in an increasingly competitive environment. The task of social integration seems to have been interpreted by local officials as simply erecting libraries, concert halls, activity centers, and science museums in the cases of young cities like Dongguang. What remains little addressed, however, are education opportunities, higher-skilled job opportunities, and other programs that ensure social integration. Even in Shenzhen, there are calls for certain social processes like public participation to ensure that efforts to build a strong and healthy middle class are addressed through broad consensus. This leads to a question of identity. How will the PRD perceive its own identity, and how will that identity be perceived by the outside world? It helps to consider these complex challenges through the lens of mobility. As the success of the PRD has been heavily based on infrastructure to enable the efficient movement of goods, is there a way to reimagine mobility as, perhaps, a means to activate the creative potential of people and foster new kinds of material and cultural production?

What do you think the future of transportation looks like?
I think the future of transportation will be a blend of public transportation, private car ownership, and car sharing. Instead of physically changing our cities, we will be changing our lifestyles because it is not easy to enlarge existing roads or to continue making new roads, especially in the dense metropolitan areas. At the same time, new users, like generation X and Z, have a tendency to share things like houses, apartments, and cars. It is much more economical to do so. These tendencies will be reflected in our transportation systems as well.
Car sharing is more economical than private car ownership. If we look at the numbers in other cities, we see that each shared car eliminates fifteen to twenty cars on the road. Shared cars also help reduce public transportation loads. With a reduced number of cars in traffic, there is also the obvious environmental gain of significantly less carbon emissions. When all these advantages are taken into account, I believe private car ownership will be replaced by car sharing. And I think the change will be faster than what people imagine. In the United States, car sharing has been available for twelve years, and it is growing much more rapidly in the last six years.

Are there many different companies offering car-share services in the United States?
Actually, there are two business models for car sharing in the United States. First, it is business to consumer; private companies offering car-share service to consumers. In the second model, it is nonprofit organizations, like municipalities, that are offering this service to consumers. Similarly, European governments have started promoting car share in order to decrease traffic density in urban regions. Additionally, there is the potential to combine car sharing with electric vehicles. And combine the decrease in transportation density with zero-emission vehicles. This will be a great achievement. Today, electric cars are not cost effective. Once the prices of electric cars are more competitive, they will be very popular.

How did you adapt your business model to Istanbul?
Accessibility is the most important parameter to the success of car sharing. It has to be convenient for the consumer, because everyone wants their cars right in front of their houses or offices. It is not easily achievable in Istanbul, where cars are expensive and the city is very big. You have to be everywhere. With five thousand cars you could set up a very convenient car-share system. Of course, this is a big investment, and it would need some time.

What are the biggest challenges you face in setting up YOYO?
Car sharing is not a car renting business, though many people think it is. It has many components. First, you have to have the technology, and you have to have the e-commerce and m-commerce knowledge, because the whole operation runs on the Internet and on mobile phones. At the same time, it’s a membership club; it’s not just renting a car to somebody and saying “good bye!” You need to have a big customer-relations management with backup and loyalty programs underneath it. And, of course, you have to have a fleet, and operate it. You have to combine all these parts to make it work.

Compared to other places in the world, is there anything specific to Istanbul in terms of attracting customers or alternative models?
In all cities where car sharing is possible, you have to drop the car to the same location you pick it up. Otherwise, the company has to chase the cars, all day long. But I think we found a way to do something different. And we will be implementing it. We will have a system where you can have your car whenever you want. We will bring the car to you, and we will take the car from wherever you leave it. So it is going to be a different value proposition. That’s a difference we will be bringing. This is possible now in Turkey because of the competitive labor market.

In the future, driverless cars will actually provide those services. Do you agree?
This is exactly true. They already started testing driverless cars in small islands in Italy and other parts of Europe. Most likely in the future, we will be using car sharing without the drivers.

Do you have competitors in Istanbul?
Actually, we are the third company setting up in Istanbul. We would like to have competition actually, because then there would be bigger awareness in the market for car sharing. We are fighting against the windmills… car selling companies have been saying to the consumer you have to have the car for prestige and style. Today, what we are saying is: You do not have to have the car; cars are everywhere.

Mr. Çavuşoğlu, thank you for the interesting talk!

Herman Kahn and his colleague Arthur J. Weiner used the name Boswash to identify the urbanized northeast region of the United States in their 1967 study, The Year 2000.² The future of cities occupied a slim portion of their expansive engagement with alternative scenarios in global politics, armament, and other doomsday varieties. Their “demonstration of the new techniques of think tank methods” was understandably less alarmed by sprawl then by the effects of nuclear war; in fact, if anything, in their futurological investigation, high on cold-war anxiety, decentralization of the urban fabric made perfect sense as the first order of defense from all imaginable projectile threat. The geographic area these futurologists nicknamed Boswash corresponded perfectly with the region spanning 600 miles “from north of Boston to south of Washington” described just a few years earlier by French geographer Jean Gottmannn in a similarly period-specific, commissioned report. His eight-hundred-plus-page report written in 1961 famously called the stretch of more and less urbanized territory from north of Boston to south of Washington, D.C. “Megalopolis.”³ And if its first name, Boswash, never really stuck in general parlance (and it was undermined instantly by Kahn and Weiner, who on the same page offered “Portport” as perhaps an even more precise name for the region), the second very quickly transcended Gottmann’s specific use to become synonymous with the urban condition it described, rather than its first and particular geographic manifestation.⁴

Population statistics for major cities within Boswash, a megalopolis encompassing the northeast region of the United States, from Boston to Washington, D.C.

© Höweler+Yoon Architecture

Gottmann’s ability to conceptualize qualitative novelty of this urban condition on a regional scale, the “northern Atlantic seaboard,” has set the tone for all subsequent studies of the American city, and of the region. There have been numerous attempts to update and revisit Megalopolis since 1961.⁵ Kahn and Weiner’s Boswash was predicated on Gottmann’s definition of the megalopolis. Perhaps even more significantly, Gottmann’s French eyes nonjudgmentally saw in it an interesting American reality, a new condition in which “old distinctions between rural and urban” no longer applied. Although Gottmann importantly connected the term Megalopolis to the northern seaboard, a territory covering nearly 56,000 square miles, the term megalopolis was in some circulation before Gottmann’s usage, not only as the name of an ancient Greek city, but in the early twentieth century urban theories of Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford. For both of these theorists, megalopolis was a developmental stage and not a happy one at that; it was a cautionary possible future of American cities. If their development and proliferation went unchecked, such was Mumford’s narrative in The Culture of Cities, the cities declined through a set of predictable historical stages from eolis, through metropolis and megalopolis, to necropolis.⁶

In 2008, the Boston Globe reported that the sum cost of the city’s Big Dig will be $22 billion, when it is paid back by 2038. After years of tunnel and bridge construction corresponding in scale to those larger-than-life dollar piles, a few orange cones are merely a “forgive our appearance” echo of the biggest infrastructural undertaking in Boswash’s history.

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The independent bus lines—Fung Wah bus, the Bolt bus, and the Mega bus—provide fast and cheap travel, Wi-Fi, and, sometimes, airplane-level comfort, filling both affordability and convenience gaps in Boswash mobility left by rail and bussing establishments. 

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Megalopolis was not an actual place for Mumford and his Scottish mentor Geddes. Their interest and imagination were invested in visions for regional planning in which the dichotomy of the city and the rural context would have been maintained via a networked constellation of reasonably sized and smartly interconnected cities. Thus Gottmann’s particular attribution of the name to the Northeast cities strung together multiply—by the Atlantic coastline, by U.S. Route 1, and, from late 1950s on, by Interstate 95 (I-95)—and importantly to everything in between them, was a retroactive theorization of the condition that American pre-World War II theorists of the city preferred to avoid. Gottmann saw this regional urban entity both as a historical “gateway” and as the “main street” of the United States. Once his report was illustrated and rewritten by Wolf Von Eckardt as the first public-relations guide for its inhabitants and visitors, it spoke candidly of the aesthetic dimension of this urbanized region: “An often gaudy, often dismal ugliness pervades much of the Megalopolis, as it does many an American Main street. There are the beer cans on the highway, the billboards and the jazzy, Disneyland roadside stands and motels. In many of its cities the air is no longer clean. The noise is deafening. The water is polluted. Traffic and transportation are becoming a nightmare. Slums and “grey areas” continue to spread. Yet, despite these much-criticized facts, the crowded people of Megalopolis are extremely fortunate. They form, on the average, the richest, best educated, best-housed and best serviced group of similar size in the world.”⁷ In direct opposition to Mumford, who thought that “in its various and many-sided life, in its very opportunities for social disharmony and conflict, the city creates drama, while the suburb lacks it,”⁸ who warned against bigness and fought for planning, Gottmann celebrated both the size of and the unbounded entrepreneurialism in Boswash, with a sense of inevitability. He saw the region as an incubator of new urbanization and, therefore, for experiments in social relations. He also evaluated the region in terms of “averages” (as in on average the richest and the best educated) because they allowed for the very conceptualization of continuity, at the cost of describing disparities that were then and are now constitutive of the region’s functioning.

The architectural value of Marcel Breuer's 1969 Pirelli Tire building (originally the Armstrong Rubber Company building) and IKEA’s big blue box is now only distinguishable by a few academic architects, who mourn the Breuer across the blogosphere. But if one considers it without nostalgia (or love for architecture), then it would seem that as rubber tire testing and development give way to a giant parking lot, all that really happens is one big box losing out to the other, each equally subject to its era’s dominant flows of cash and citizens. 

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There is a J. G. Ballard science-fiction story about subliminal messages sent at an imperceptible visual frequency from highway billboards. Sometimes, a basic billboard tree, despite all of its Brechtian workings made visible, does the same job.

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Various researchers that have studied the region since Gottmann described its edges in different ways, depending on the type of economic and census information used.⁹ Whether Boswash comprises 124 municipalities, as John Rennie Short included in his 2007 revisit of Gottmann’s region, or 142 counties as the Regional Plan Association counted that same year, is of little consequence to its inhabitants’ capacity to identify with it.¹⁰ Generally associating themselves with the five metropolitan areas in whose orbits they live and operate, whose sports teams they support, and whose smog zones they contribute to, the citizenry of Boswash has grown since 1961 by 17 million, and, although many of those people are in the cities, it is the suburban regions between the urban areas that have densified at a much higher rate since the sixties. Their commute to and from the city centers and between homes and office parks, for business transactions and pleasure, is supported by an outdated “fast” train—Amtrak’s Acela—as well as regional trains, a variety of commuter-train networks, shuttle flights, buses with and without Wi-Fi, and an estimated 24 million cars.¹¹

It is not surprising that someone who owns a house and a two-car garage somewhere in the “grey goo” of Boswash, and equally someone who occasionally drives a car borrowed hourly from Zipcar’s 9,000-car fleet within one of the metropolitan centers of Boswash,¹² might not have enough reason to fire up their regional imagination, or consider their regional identity on a daily basis.¹³ Perhaps equally foreseeable, regional imagination and action in urban and infrastructural planning has not been the norm.¹⁴ The history of this region’s infrastructural development, from dirt to macadam to modern asphalt, from portions of privately owned roads and rail lines to a national infrastructure, describes a painstakingly piecemeal process, especially compared to the network of Roman roads that still vitally crisscross much of Europe, or compared to Germany’s pre-World War II autobahns, which did help to inspire Federal action in the United States. The bitty process by which the infrastructural network in this region was produced was the very embodiment of the American species of private entrepreneurial ingenuity and the political structure that regulated it across 142 counties and twelve states.

Will an app that counts minutes and provides notification of congestion, speed, parking spot availability, delivered onto smart phones or into a car’s GPS, ever seem equally collective as an LED communication?

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When buzzing down I-95, whether along vital suburbs of Connecticut and New Jersey or the dead malls of Baltimore, it is hard to appreciate just how extremely young is the interstate highway system. The Federal-Aid Highway Act was signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956, and the full extent of I-95 projected by this act has not yet been completed. I-95 is, however, 1,917 miles long, and it takes more than three days to drive. If one drove onto the interstate in Maine he or she would have 670 exits to choose from on the way to Florida, approximately five hundred gas stations to fill up at, and at least seventy-seven rest stops to help recover from the drive.¹⁵ Although I-95 may be only middle-aged in human years, much of the infrastructure that networks to it in Boswash is among the oldest in the country. Currently, Boswash, or its expanded Northeast Megaregion, as a 2005 University of Pennsylvania research report called it (including both the urban core and its support zone), loses $13.8 billion in congestion costs, including1.3-billion gallons of gas and 772,000 hours in traffic, annually on its roads.¹⁶ Highway traffic is projected to escalate 86 percent between 2002 and 2025, and the United States Department of Transportation anticipates the region’s trucking traffic to increase at an even steeper rate than passenger traffic.¹⁷ All of this, of course, leads to more road rage, but also greater loss of time and greater pollution, both of air and land.

The escalating traffic congestion is directly linked to suburban life patterns: owning a house and a car (or two), and the spatial and development patterns that have been both capitalized upon and instigated by developers and car dealers across the urbanized landscape of Boswash; it is further perpetuated by the eternally underfunded and inadequate rail system. A mass of potential rail passengers, who remain unconvinced by Amtrak, speeds to work in their own vehicles every morning, or flies in and out of one of the most congested airports in the country. The Japanese Shinkansen and the French TGV average 152 miles per hour and 162 miles per hour, respectively, and Amtrak’s Acela high-speed train runs at an average of eighty-one miles per hour between Washington, D.C., and New York City and sixty-nine miles per hour between New York City and Boston. Archaic tracks, unreliable power, overpriced fares, and inefficient scheduling turn the passengers away, and in a tragically tautological cycle of economic and political cause and effect this loss of passengers results in the lack of political support and funding for improvements for the most environmentally sustainable mass-transportation option—and the most scenic one, even if the scenery were to move at substantially higher speeds. Amtrak’s great hope, $1.3 billion from Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, was in 2009 slated for the repair of several dangerous bridges, stretches of tracks and train vehicles, not for a major overhaul and installation of a truly high-speed train infrastructure for the Northeast (although that might happen in an imaginable future in California).¹⁸ And yet, if ever there were a population that was willing to commute via public transportation, it would be the northeasterners of Boswash, where more than 50 percent of all U.S. public transit riders live.¹⁹ This is to say that, although the dominant narrative of the American dream has been hard to awake from, for the citizens as well as for architects and planners of Boswash, the statistics already speak of alternatives contained in the daily realities of the region.²⁰

Only at a few points along the Boswash transportation spine do the train and the car brush up against one another, making their relative speeds and capacities palpably measurable. 

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Built in 1985, when the interstate I-795 ramp first connected Baltimore County to its surrounding up-and-coming neighborhoods, Owings Mills Mall in Owings Mills, Maryland, is now a vast, fully paved monument to the culture of obsolescence. But not for long: In November 2011, the Baltimore Sun reported that the mall’s demolition is penciled in for 2013, when it will make way for a new retail development, and a fresh wave of speculations on the future of the area.

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Lewis Mumoford’s rather sterile idea of what goes on in the suburb was probably never true. As one of the suburb’s chief historians Dolores Hayden suggests, suburbia has been “the site of promises, dreams, and fantasies. It is a landscape of the imagination where Americans situate ambitions for upward mobility and economic security, ideals about freedom and private property, and longings for social harmony and spiritual uplift.”²¹ It is precisely suburbia’s particular species of “drama” that, at the end of the twentieth century, was celebrated in a number of epic TV shows, from the Simpsons to the Sopranos. Mumford’s ideas about the need for regional planning, however, might be what Gottmann’s Megalopolis needs in order to overcome the choking congestion on one end and what Hayden has called the “culture of easy obsolescence” on the other. The culture of easy obsolescence equally easily sacrifices a picturesque enclave as it abandons yesterday’s shopping mall structures. Two recent studies of the region, from the tri-state Regional Plan Association and University of Pennsylvania, both called for a series of elements already contained in Mumford and company’s ideas about regional networks: fortification of the infrastructural network, preservation of the green support zones, and densification of the urban areas around multimodal nodes. But as long as these kinds of research-based regional optics are relegated to politics and academia only, Boswash will remain merely a hallucination for its population, and, as such, despite its tangible consequences on their daily lives, its complexly intertwined operations will continue to seem irrelevant to its aspirations. As Hayden warns, for “almost two hundred years, Americans of all classes have idealized life in single-family houses with generous yards, while deploring the sprawling metropolitan regions that result from unregulated residential and commercial growth.”²² Don DeLillo’s line from Americana perfectly sums up this dynamic: It may be much “simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams,” and especially so when “reality” is as complex, overlapped, opaque, and multivalent as Boswash’s.²³

But imagine—in a soft whisper again—desiring to live in a Boswash where the public transportation zips down the Northeast corridor at 160 miles per hour and cars are co-owned, parked in a collective garage, and taken out for a ride only on occasion, mostly for pleasure. Of course, when you filled out the early surveys on co-ownership with contempt for the “clueless” researchers, you could not have imagined that it would be so easy. The drive down I-95 is filled with monuments to Boswash’s wasteful era, whose developers and designers’ ideas about progress were at least as destructive as they were productive. Some of those abandoned carcasses of remote office parks and shopping malls, cut off from vital supplies of customers, function as reminders of that simultaneously entropic and heroic version of progress. For some time, garages lingered next to houses, just as ashtrays did in trains and airplanes well after wholesale bans on smoking took hold. And then there are other leftover infrastructures that helped catalyze new collective dreams, the other Americas that were always present even though their mythologies did not seem as profitable in the short now of the twentieth century developer world.

Even the densest metropolitan area (by statistical and perceptual accounts both, and those are often at odds) can be reduced to a skyline from the car.

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Traffic in downtown São Paulo.

© Ligia Nobre

According to a survey jointly produced by nongovernmental organization Rede Nossa São Paulo and the Instituto Brasileiro De Geografia E Estatistica and presented during Mobility Week (September 16 to 22, 2012), 80 percent of Paulistanos consider traffic conditions to be poor or terrible, while 65 percent say that they would leave their car at home if they had transportation alternatives. The survey also shows that, of the goals set by the current municipal executive for public transportation, none of the sixty-six kilometers of dedicated bus lanes planned for the city has progressed beyond the call for bids stage, and twenty-eight of the thirty-eight kilometers slated for renovation have not progressed beyond the call for bids stage, among other shortcomings. While the metro, at 74.2 kilometers distributed over five lines in a territory of 1,523 square kilometers, grows at a slow and insufficient pace, expansion of the car fleet is accelerated by the national economic stimulus policy through tax cuts to the auto industry, increase in household income (especially among the middle class), and easier credit access.

An empty subway car in São Paulo.

© Ligia Nobre

This situation is the result of both a history of public policies directed toward private transportation and a lack of integrated urban mobility planning, as well as insufficient investment in public and nonmotorized transportation and infrastructure. Despite it being required by federal law since 2001 and by the City Development Plan since 2002, the municipality of São Paulo does not have an urban mobility plan. As pointed out in a recent manifesto presented by nongovernmental organizations to the municipal legislative assembly during a Mobility Week event: São Paulo needs transparency. And a first step is the participatory and democratic development of a municipal urban mobility plan—for the short, medium, and long term—coordinated with environmentally responsible land-use planning that’s compatible with municipal, state, and national legislation directives.

Paulistanos need to develop a more strategic governance model, gathering public and private actors, to effectively intervene in the mobility infrastructure of the biggest metropolis in South America, one that is also part of the seventh largest economy in the world. In October 2012, municipal elections will take place in Brazil against the backdrop of weak political debate, a mobility crisis in many cities, and deep socioeconomic changes. The city of São Paulo is in the second round of a mayoral election between two candidates (Jose Serra of the Social Democratic Party, an associate of the current mayor, and Fernando Haddad of the governing Workers’ Party), and it faces an interesting moment: Will voters maintain the status quo, or will they sense the urgency to actively collaborate with the government and encourage it to make strides toward a more sustainable city?