Urban Planning (ISSN: 2183–7635) 2018, Volume 3, Issue 2, Pages 1–20 DOI: 10.17645/up.v3i2.1247 Article The City of the Future Garry Glazebrook 1,* and Peter Newman 2 1 Department of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, NSW 2007, Australia; E-Mail: [email protected] 2 Curtin University Sustainability Policy Institute (CUSP), Perth, WA 6845, Australia; E-Mail: [email protected] * Corresponding author Submitted: 31 October 2017 | Accepted: 5 March 2018 | Published: 24 April 2018 Abstract Limiting global warming to 1.5 °C will require rapid decarbonisation of the world’s electricity and transport systems. This must occur against a background of continuing urbanisation and the shift to the information economy. While replacement of fossil fuels in electricity generation is underway, urban transport is currently dominated by petrol and diesel-powered ve- hicles. The City of the Future will need to be built around a different transport and urban paradigm. This article argues that the new model will be a polycentric city linked by fast electric rail, with local access based on autonomous “community”- owned electric cars and buses supplemented by bicycles, electric bikes and scooters, with all electricity generated from renewables. Less space will be wasted on roads and parking, enabling higher accessibility yet more usable public open space. Building the cities of the future will require national governments to accelerate local initiatives through appropri- ate policy settings and strategic investment. The precise way in which individual cities move into the future will vary, and the article illustrates how the transformation could work for Australian cities, like Sydney, currently some of the most car dependent in the world, using new financial and city partnerships. Keywords 1.5 °C agenda; decarbonisation; future city; information and communication technology; public space; transport Issue This article is part of the issue “Urban Planning to Enable a 1.5 °C Scenario”, edited by Peter Newman (Curtin University, Australia), Aromar Revi (Indian Institute for Human Settlements, India) and Amir Bazaz (Indian Institute for Human Settle- ments, India). © 2018 by the authors; licensee Cogitatio (Lisbon, Portugal). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribu- tion 4.0 International License (CC BY). 1. Introduction reliance on oil towards electrically powered vehicles and systems, powered by renewable energy (Newman, Beat- With more than 50% of the world’s population living in ley, & Boyer, 2017). cities, and urban areas now accounting for more than The timescale for this transformation is very short. 70% of global CO2 emissions and creating more than Indications from the IPCC AR5 Report (IPCC, 2014a) are 80% of the world’s GDP, solutions to global warming that we have at best four decades to substantially re- will inevitably involve cities reducing their greenhouse duce greenhouse emissions from all sources. The IPCC “footprints” (IPCC, 2014a). This will apply both to the 1.5 °C agenda is now suggesting we will need an even long-established cities and to the rapidly expanding cities faster transition. This article is attempting to overview such as in Asia, the Middle East and Africa (Moriarty how cities will need to manage this transition to the City & Honnery, 2013). A key component of this will be re- of the Future which features the removal of all fossil fuels duced CO2 emissions from urban transport, which is in the passenger transport arena. currently dominated by private cars using fossil fuels. The move to renewable energy in the generation of This will require a transformation of our transport sec- electricity is now underway in earnest (Newman, 2017a), tor away from so much reliance on cars and away from and there are indications that global coal consumption Urban Planning, 2018, Volume 3, Issue 2, Pages 1–20 1 has peaked and started to decline (IEA, 2017a). In con- aged by appropriate policies at national, state and local trast, emissions from the transport sector and use of oil- level. It then looks in detail at how they could apply in based fuels continues to rise though at a reduced rate Australian cities using Sydney as a case study; currently at a global level and in many cities and nations it is now Australian cities are amongst the most car-dependent decoupling from economic growth (Newman, 2017b). and transport emissions intensive in the world and they There are a number of indications that trends in the are also experiencing rapid population growth which en- transport sector are beginning to change: ables them to demonstrate rapid transformation. The article looks at the history of urban transport and • Per-capita car usage in many cities and countries how it is now changing suggesting a new urban paradigm is now falling, and there is a growing trend to re- is emerging; these trends are used to create what could duced car dependent urban forms with a growth be The City of the Future and how it can be imagined to in transit and active transport modes, which have help with the 1.5 °C agenda. much lower emissions per passenger-kilometre (Goodwin & van Dender, 2013; Mittal, Dai, & 2. Brief History of Urban Transport Shukla, 2016; Newman & Kenworthy, 2015); • Electric cars are beginning to gain market share Whilst there have been many changes in technology in and are poised to replace petrol and diesel- the last few centuries, especially in fields such as informa- powered cars over the coming decades. Provided tion technology, medicine or manufacturing, it is a curi- their electric energy is derived from renewables, ous fact that the technologies which currently dominate this promises a substantial reduction in emissions urban transport are all essentially products of the 19th (IEA, 2016); century—the tram, train and especially the car (New- • Self-drive or autonomous vehicle technology is man, Kosonen, & Kenworthy, 2016). Whilst modern ver- also emerging rapidly. This provides an option to sions of these modes are more developed in many ways re-think the current paradigm of urban transport, such as safety and comfort, they are little changed in which is based on privately owned automobiles the key characteristics (capacity, effective speed), which and which has grown to dominate most of the determine how they accommodate urban travel and world’s cities, especially since 1950 (Carlin, Rader, also how they shape our cities (Newman & Kenworthy, & Rucks, 2015). However as discussed later, un- 2015, 1999). thinking application of autonomous vehicle tech- In contrast, all of these modes represented a major nology to simply replace current vehicles on a one- leap forward over previous transport technologies (walk- for-one basis will not produce significant benefits ing, horse drawn vehicles) when they were first intro- except in the area of safety. duced. Indeed, in many respects our current transport systems have gone backwards in recent years. Cars and This article looks at how these emerging trends could freeways which can only handle around 3,000 passen- combine to generate a radical transformation not only of gers per lane per hour have come to dominate longer transport technologies and travel behaviour, but of the distance travel over rail-based solutions, which can han- way we build and live in our cities. It suggests that the dle ten times that movement in the same space. Mean- growing need for urban accessibility can be solved by a while the very success of the car has led to rising traf- combination of: fic congestion, and with it slower speeds, both for the cars themselves and for any other vehicles (trucks, buses, • The emergence of a poly-nucleated urban form, trams, bicycles) caught up in the congestion. Thus urban combining a strong city centre with strong sub- efficiency as a whole has declined, notwithstanding the centres, allowing accessibility to be maximised but apparent improvement in personal mobility. travel minimised; • Increased investment in high capacity electric rail 2.1. The First Rail Age transport links for trips to urban centres and for longer distance travel in urban areas, with a con- Prior to the industrial revolution, most urban travel was comitant reduction in investment in general pur- by foot, with typical walking speeds of 3–4 km/hr. The pose roads and freeways; rich could afford horse-drawn travel options, allowing • The large-scale replacement of private automo- those speeds to be tripled. Bicycles also for a time pro- biles by jointly-owned and operated self-drive ve- vided quite an increase in personal mobility. But it was hicles, which combined with bicycles and small the train and the electric tram which first revolutionised scale electric scooters and cycles could cater for urban travel, and they transformed cities from Europe to dispersed travel as well as feeder trips to centres America to Australia in the late 19th century. and public transport nodes. The radical increase in speed made possible by these modes, combined with their high capacity, meant that The article examines how these trends could emerge, public transport came to dominate urban travel pat- their potential benefits, and how they could be encour- terns in many major cities around the world within a Urban Planning, 2018, Volume 3, Issue 2, Pages 1–20 2 few decades. While every city has its own unique his- • The basic transport technologies spread very tory, geography, topography and urban economy, these rapidly around the world; technologies were applied almost universally in medium– • Each city utilised the technologies somewhat dif- sized or larger cities, and tended to have similar impacts. ferently, based on their previous history, geogra- “New World” cities were much younger and in most cases phy, economy and culture; smaller and lower density than their European coun- • Rail systems both spread housing development terparts when these technologies arrived.