Landuse Transport and Sustainability

+ model ARTICLE IN PRESS
Technology in Society xx (2005) 1–17

www.elsevier.com/locate/techsoc
Land-use, transportation and sustainability

William B. Shore *
City University of New York, Institute for Urban Systems, Room 8204 Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
10016-4309, USA
Abstract
The pattern of urban development strongly affects sustainability—energy and water use, food
production, waste generation and disposal, biodiversity and equal opportunity. So regional planning must
be a tool in achieving sustainability. The traditional urban pattern was a cluster of activities that people do
together (city downtowns and neighborhood centers) surrounded by residences in a density gradient. That
remains the most sustainable pattern. After World War II, the automobile promoted a pattern of scattered
activities and spread out residences. Most other countries resisted the spread and scattered pattern, though
without complete success; the US has only begun to recentralize. Three strategies are proposed to
recentralize: pricing goods and services to reflect sustainable needs, improving the magnetism of cities and
legislating enforceable regional plans.
q 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Keywords: Regional planning; Environmental conservation; Sustainable cities; Pricing environmental assets; Smart
growth
1. Traditional urban areas and current urban areas
When humans begin to build in natural areas, where they build and how they build affect
sustainability:
– How much energy is used

– How much water is taken from the long-term supply
– Available food supply
– Air and water quality
– Biodiversity
– Humane and equitable conditions for all.
* Tel.: C1 212 817 7246; fax: C1 212 817 1511.

E-mail address: bshore@kohudres.kendal.org.
0160-791X/$ - see front matter q 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

doi:10.1016/j.techsoc.2005.10.014
2 W.B. Shore / Technology in Society xx (2005) 1–17
Now, the pattern of development in the US is the greatest threat to sustainability.

Until about the end of World War II (1945), all human settlements followed the same pattern:
activities people did together were in the center and homes circled around them. Picture a steel
magnet as the activity center and iron filings as homes. Close to the magnet, the iron filings
cluster densely; they taper off to lower and lower density as distance from the magnet
increases—to a scattered few homes and, finally, no homes at all where the magnetism ends.
That was the historic human settlement pattern—centers with communities forming around the
centers. Some people chose to give up space in and around their home to be near the jobs and
services in the center—living in high apartments and close-packed lower buildings. Some were
willing to travel long distances to those activities in exchange for more space. Many chose a
compromise between space and access, e.g. small homes close enough together to support
convenient bus service.
The larger the center of activities (the magnet), the higher the density around it and the farther
the homes extended out.
This pattern was created when walking was the only way to travel. It remained when animals
were introduced to carry goods and people and when steam and electric propulsion moved
people on trains. The automobile shattered the pattern.
When people could travel by car, individually and fast over great distances, many simply
moved farther from the center and away from bus and train routes, though they continued to
work downtown. But city centers were not made to handle two tons of machinery for every
worker and every store customer. Cars freed people from having to use public transit, bicycles or
their feet, but not from gathering all in the traditional place. City centers became increasingly
clogged with cars—distressing the far greater number of pedestrians. Trucks moving to and from
factory districts within the city center were stuck behind the lines of cars, raising manufacturing
costs.
But since cars allow people to travel individually, they do not all have to work in the same
place, the city center. Similarly, manufacturers could use trucks instead of trains and were freed
from central railroad yards for goods and from the city center for employees. Goods could come
and go by truck, employees by car. Right after World War II, factories began moving from the
city center to highways outside the city.
As people moved their homes farther from the city center, stores also moved out of
downtown. The first large shopping center in the suburbs outside New York City put a sign along
the highway “We’re here because you’re here.”
When it was clear that factories could draw the employees outside the city center, offices
began to move out, too. Employers expected workers to reach them wherever they located.
As the Interstate Highway system emerged, offices, factories and shopping clustered around
its exits, hotels followed. Even when these resources were located around the same exit, large
parking fields separated them. A car was needed to go from one to the other.
People became so accustomed to the comfort and convenience of the car that they avoided the
city center despite its greater choice of jobs and services—until many city centers in the US lost
their primacy to scattered suburban shopping centers and office parks. No longer were the three
rules of real estate ‘location, location, location’. The car made location all but irrelevant. But the
car itself demanded space. So the post-World War II pattern of urbanization was ‘spread city’—
scattered destinations and spread out residences. People moved farther and farther from the city
center and from each other, not always for country living but because the farther from the city
center, the lower the cost of the home.
W.B. Shore / Technology in Society xx (2005) 1–17 3
Centers of world cities—London, Tokyo, Paris, New York—have remained dynamic, but in
smaller cities, especially those that specialized in manufacturing, the centers became partially
empty, unable to compete with outlying shopping centers and industrial/office parks. Without
magnetism at the center, residents who could move out usually did.
Many cities have lost half their pre-World War II population even as their metropolitan areas
have increased in population.
2. Urban form and sustainability
It would seem that a scatter of homes through the countryside would be closer to a goal of
living with nature than dense cities are, but compare the sustainability of spread city with the
traditional centers and community, the steel magnet surrounded by iron filings.
2.1. Energy
Dense cities use less energy than suburbs and rural areas mainly because residents drive less
but also because people inhabit less indoor space than is typical in individual homes, and less
heat is lost per stacked-up housing unit. There is greater opportunity for co-generation, using the
waste heat from electrical generation. Several studies have found that the higher the density, the
lower the per capita energy use.
2.2. Water
Scattered development depends on ground water, which is only slowly replaced—and

Americans are drawing down that resource seriously. City water typically comes from surface
reservoirs, replaced with normal rainfall. In times of drought, use of water is readily monitored
and controls can be established. By contrast, when suburbanites depend on ground water, each
user is competing with neighbors during a drought, further mining the system.
Water would sink into the ground for re-use in the suburbs and exurbs (the more scattered
outer development), but most homes are surrounded by grass, not by native plants; typically,
much rain water runs off suburban grass into streams and rivers and into the sea.
2.3. Food
Most cities grew from farm centers, surrounded by fertile land. As suburbs and exurbs grow,
food and fiber crops are replaced by ornamental crops, and farmers retreat farther and farther
from the cities. All metropolitan areas in America have increased their urbanized area far faster
than they have increased their population and households since World War II. There are two
effects on sustainability: food for urban residents must be shipped longer distances (energy cost)
and some of the best farmland is taken out of food production. To make up for the reduction of
fertile land, farmers use more water and more fertilizer, gradually poisoning both the land and
the water and drawing down the land’s long-term capacity to produce.
2.4. Air and water quality
Motor vehicles are the major source of air pollution, and vehicle miles of travel (VMT)
increase sharply with the spread and scatter of metropolitan areas. Vehicles also pollute streams
and rivers, leaving gasoline and oil and bits of rubber on roads, which wash into the nearby
water.
Because a great deal of electric energy is lost in transmission, extended power lines mean
more generation is required, with consequent air and often water pollution.
And those green lawns require heavy doses of fertilizer and pesticides; much runs off into
streams.
2.5. Biodiversity
Human life depends on the whole array of plants, animals and insects that are part of the
ecosystem. But humans are destroying the habitat needed by a wide range of those species, and
the world is losing species rapidly. We do not know how many species can disappear without
severe loss to human living conditions but we know that the ecosystem is in intricate balance,
and that balance is disturbed by the pattern of metropolitan growth.
Habitat destruction is happening rapidly in suburbs and exurbs. Wildlife continues to abound
but only those species that can ‘suburbanize’: deer, Canadian geese, raccoons, groundhogs, rats,
mice. Suburban wildlife is out of control because natural enemies are unable to survive in the
suburbs, driven away by the habitat changes. They require a large area where all of the plants,
animals and insects they need for survival can thrive. Many city parks have healthier ecosystems
than the partially rural exurbs that surround cities. Though there is still land enough for humans
to cohabit with a wide range of other species, developers have ignored nature’s needs by
scattering buildings and extending roads, cutting the open land into pieces that do not conform
with the needed habitat.
2.6. Humane and equitable communities
In metropolitan areas in which most of the jobs have left the city center and scattered around
the edges, city residents without cars are left with reduced economic opportunity. The US
government established a fund to provide transportation from city residences to suburban jobs,
but this assists a small number of unemployed. Furthermore, even those assisted do not have the
freedom to look for a better job that has scattered somewhere else in the metropolitan area
because their transportation is to and from their job, not likely to be walking distance to any other
jobs they might want to seek. Higher education close to jobs offers a way to up, but they are not
together in spread city.
When there are fewer jobs and services in the center, city living has no attraction. So those
who can afford the suburbs have little reason to subject themselves to city crowdedness—there’s
little payoff of easy and inexpensive access to jobs and services. That leaves mostly poor people
and new immigrants isolated in many cities; the isolation further reduces their opportunity to get
into the economic mainstream of America. Those left in the cities are stuck with inferior services
and high local taxes, without much government or business help. Cities with large percentages of
low-income households have little political clout, and there are few businesses to help. What
most old cities miss is illustrated by what some remaining businesses provide. For example,
Prudential kept its headquarters in Newark through the City’s darkest days. It paid $8.5 million
in taxes in 1971, employed nearly 1500 Newark residents, about 45% black and/or Hispanic,
headed the United Community Fund and United Hospital Fund drives, built and managed low-
income apartments and built middle-income cooperative apartments.
3. Accommodating growth in a centers-and-communities pattern
Small metropolitan areas can efficiently grow around a single business center that offers
metropolitan-wide activities, with neighborhood centers offering day-to-day services like
groceries and hardware. But very large metropolitan areas need a variation.
Tokyo and Paris have grown subcenters, clusters of related businesses or services that can be
linked to the principal metropolitan center by fast rail but can operate separately much of the
time. Subcenters also attract housing as a magnet attracts iron filings. Subcenters are smaller
magnets than the metropolitan center, so the density of housing in and around the subcenters is
not likely to be as great.
Cergy-Pontoise, a subcenter of Paris, is an example. Just 30 min from the center of Paris,
20 min from the in-city subcenter of La Defense by fast suburban rail and national rail or
motorway, near Charles de Gaulle airport, it has 3500 companies, 50,000 dwelling units, a
university with 10,000 students yet has a quarter of its area in parks and open space and is a
distinct community.
With such subcenters, the metropolitan pattern becomes like the night sky—stars and planets:
the large metropolitan center surrounded by dense housing, the subcenters orbiting around it,
linked to the metropolitan center by fast transit, and themselves attracting housing but less dense
than the primary center’s. Both the metropolitan center and the subcenters have neighborhood
centers orbiting around them with their own magnetic fields of housing. Some subcenters around
Paris and Tokyo are surrounded by open countryside but still have fast access to the center. By
siphoning off growth to subcenters around the regional center, with subcenter development
tapering off into open country, natural areas and farmland can be kept near all metropolitan
residents.
After World War II, the United Kingdom tried to decentralize London by greatly limiting
development in a green belt around the developed City and suburbs. They planted new towns
around the outside of the green belt. The new towns were to be self-contained, not part of the
metropolitan London economy. But the towns were small, with little choice of jobs or workforce
or services. So, many residents ended up traveling through the greenbelt every day to benefit
from the metropolitan economy in or close to the center. The new towns were planned
communities but unplanned subcenters of London.
A large metropolitan area that grows by subcenters provides a safety factor in case the central
city suffers a disaster. Large firms in the regional downtown can maintain an office and records in
an outlying but rail-linked downtown. After September 11, some Lower Manhattan firms did
find subordinate office space outside Manhattan, but few, if any, chose an outlying downtown.
The center-subcenter arrangement might well be as secure as any possible pattern. A large
isolated office campus in the countryside would be hard to secure, as would offices clustered
around an expressway interchange or in a spread out office park in a sea of asphalt covered with
cars.
In 1983, Regional Plan Association surveyed 12 corporate headquarters in the New York
Metropolitan area, four on large suburban campuses, four in subcenters and four in the regional
center, Manhattan. Employees in the Manhattan headquarters used by far the least fossil fuel
getting to work though they spent the longest time traveling; those traveling to campuses spent
the least time but the most fuel; subcenter executives spent a little more time getting to work than
those going to campuses, clerical workers spent the same amount of time and together they used
3/4ths as much fossil fuel getting there as those going to campuses. Visitors to the offices
traveled much less distance to Manhattan and subcenter headquarters than to campus offices.
4. Reshaping American metropolitan areas
New York has some subcenters in a pattern pursued by Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit
planning group that proposed a galaxy of subcenters in the 1960s and has pursued that goal ever
since. Stamford, CT, White Plains, NY, and New Brunswick, NJ, have followed the Regional
Plan proposal. On Long Island, just east of New York City—flat land that absorbed rapidly built
suburbs after World War II until it is now ‘built out’—the County Executive has belatedly
decided that its 1.4 million residents need a downtown in the center. Regional Plan had designed
a downtown for the County 40 years ago when the land was vacant. Since then, all the elements
of a downtown have migrated toward the center of the County, but these elements were built
separately, so they are each surrounded by huge parking fields and must now be connected by
transit as well as pedestrianways. Elsewhere in the US, some suburban shopping centers have
added office towers, hotels and entertainment but the combined downtown elements do not
magnetize a community because they are still along highways and surrounded by asphalt, not by
a density gradient of housing.
There also is a movement toward traditional walking-scale neighborhoods, called New
Urbanism, and a movement toward ‘Transit-Oriented-Development’—clustering a few
businesses at suburban railroad stations with somewhat dense housing around that. There is
strong public support for purchasing open space to stop new building in open country, even if it
adds taxes. A number of old city downtowns are attracting households without children,
particularly the lively centers of New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston but recently
smaller metropolitan areas—Minneapolis, Denver, even Cleveland.
So there is some movement back to centers-and-communities, but these are relatively small
victories, and we are losing the war. By far the most urban growth is scattered through the
countryside, multiplying the urbanized land per household. For example, New Jersey, which has
pioneered with a State Plan that calls for recentralization and has encouraged Transit-Oriented-
Development, nevertheless lost 90,000 acres of farmland and forest to subdivisions, office parks
and cleared lots in the 5 years 1995–2000, according to a Rutgers University study. That was the
same rate of countryside invasion as the previous decade, and there is even faster invasion of the
forested areas of the Highlands, from which much of the State’s drinking water comes.
Returning to the traditional urban pattern of strong neighborhood, city and metropolitan
centers in the US will require policy changes.
5. Strategies toward recentralization
If the public were persuaded that global warming, depletion of water, soil, minerals and
energy are significant threats, it would be easy to make the case for recentralization. But
Americans do not seem to be aware of these threats or do not care what happens to their offspring
or expect that ‘they’ will come up with a technological fix. Because the public does not seem
ready to change, Congress and the President are not ready to propose strong policies to achieve
sustainable urban areas. Two bills are being debated simultaneously in Congress: an energy bill
that promotes fossil fuel use and the Climate Stewardship Act, which would do the opposite.
Until a strong majority is persuaded that sustainable practices are essential and that
recentralized urban areas are an important step toward it, three other strategies might promote
recentralization.
5.1. Getting the prices right
There is general agreement, politically right and left, that the price system is a way to allow
the freest consumer choice and most efficient production. The trouble is, current prices ignore
sustainability—i.e. the future costs of today’s decisions. The value of soil, water and minerals
that are being depleted, the disintegration of the oceans’ productivity, the likely damages of
climate change, the loss of environmental services from habitat destruction and from the ravages
of invasive species resulting from loss of biodiversity—none of these costs is reflected in current
prices. Current prices do not even reflect the certain rise in the price of energy, minerals and food
as production limits are reached.
In addition, taxpayers are actually subsidizing production and consumption of products and
services that reduce sustainability. For example, those couples living in the new mini-mansions
sprouting throughout metropolitan suburbs and exurbs are subsidized substantially by tax
exemptions for their mortgage interest and their real estate taxes—subsidies far greater than low-
income households receive for housing. The result is high energy used to heat and cool a great
deal of space per person, more land covered and lots of water, pesticide and fertilizer runoff from
sweeping lawns.
The pattern of development is shaped in large part by fragmentation of local government on
the outskirts of cities. Where these local governments control land use and are responsible for
raising school taxes, the municipalities have usually made their decisions on a financial basis—
attracting factories, offices and stores that do not send anyone to school and resisting housing,
especially for moderate-income households, that do have school children. The result is long-
distance commuting by car to scattered jobs the suburbs have attracted from homes pushed far
away by suburban zoning. Minneapolis—St Paul Metropolitan area and the Meadowlands across
the Hudson River from Manhattan have instituted tax-sharing programs among the
municipalities. That allows rational land-use to be considered ahead of school taxes.
Transportation subsidies distort development the most—movement of both humans and
freight. There have been a few studies of the out-of-pocket taxpayer costs of driving—
money spent on patrolling, building and repairing roads beyond what road-users pay in
taxes. Brookings Institution calculated that only 58.9% of highway costs were paid from
motorist-based charges [1]. That means that gasoline taxes and other fees for vehicle drivers
would have to be increased more than two thirds to pay their way. Analyzing the “Federal
Highway Administration Cost Allocation Study: Final Report” (1997), they found that autos
contribute 70% of their cost, single-unit trucks weighing more than 50,000 pounds pay only
40% (but lighter trucks pay 150%). The large subsidy to large trucks gives them a price
advantage over railroad and waterborne freight movement. A 1994 study of New York State
(1991 data) by Komanoff Energy Associates found that 35% of funds spent to provide for
trucks and cars were paid from general funds, not motorists—so road users of New York
State should be paying 50% more taxes and fees than they do. Because trucks do greater
damage to roads—over 50,000 pounds, they do 10,000 times the road damage of a 3500
pound car—they are subsidized even more than cars, and ocean and air freight are heavily
subsidized as well. The result is not only more transport energy used than shippers might
have been willing to pay without the subsidy, but also—because the price of goods is
lowered by freight subsidies—more goods are produced and imported, with attendant
environmental cost. It is puzzling that a nation losing manufacturing jobs to other countries
would, as the US does, subsidize freight from overseas.
A 2001 calculation: worldwide, “.governments intervene in the marketplace to create $860

billion in perverse subsidies,” those subsidies have a demonstrable negative effect both
economically and environmentally [2].
None of this includes the tremendous environmental costs of transportation—air and water
pollution, habitat disruption and a large contribution to global warming. Nor does it include the
cost of lost time from road congestion (calculated at over $14 billion in 2005 in New York
State—not the worst congested part of the US), according to the nonprofit Community
Consulting Services. They also estimated the environmental cost of travel in New York State in
2005: $38.6 billion, including health and other damages of air pollution, health and productivity
losses from noise, vibration damage to roads and buildings, and accident costs not paid by
insurance [3].
A team from the University of Minnesota estimated dollar values for some of the unpriced
impacts of driving, based on others’ studies as well as their own analysis [4]. Adding the cost of
air pollution’s damage to health, other damages of air pollution, noise (calculated from the
lowered value of homes near noisy roads), time lost in congestion and accident, fire and robbery
costs paid for by the public, the dollar value of these was set somewhere between 3.4 cents per
vehicle mile and 23.5 cents—most likely about 7.3 cents. For a car that gets 25 miles per gallon,
that ‘most likely’ 7.3 cents would add nearly $2 a gallon were vehicle owners to pay the
environmental and social costs. And that does not include the environmental cost of habitat
destruction diminishing biodiversity or the cost of pollution generated in producing vehicles and
their fuel.
Environmental Defense, one of the world’s largest environmental advocacy organizations,
has just begun publishing a newsletter called Envestors update, “to communicate the message
that the marketplace can help protect the environment.”
Ignoring these subsidies and environmental and social costs encourages individual decisions
that promote sprawl and limit recentralization. Households moving far from their jobs to get
cheaper housing is one example. They would not find the total package of housing and travel
cheaper were they charged the real costs of driving—further, their house would cost more if the
environmental damage of its location were included in the price, e.g. the habitat interruption
caused by scattered homes in open countryside and the extra cost of serving it with electricity
and mail.
If we are going to leave the urban pattern to the sum of individual decisions, sustainability can
only be improved if we get the prices right. Putting dollar values on environmental assets is
being done world wide—by other nations and the UN—but was prohibited by Congress in the
early 1990s when the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the Department of Commerce had begun
to do it. Congress asked the National Research Council to study the value of environmental
accounting and tell them whether to continue the Bureau’s activities. The report, Nature’s
Numbers, strongly recommended continuation [5]. It has not happened. As a result, our Gross
Domestic Product celebrates the price paid for goods sold but not the cost of assets decreased,
and in individual decisions, those environmental assets are ignored.
We are edging into pricing environmental assets. The ‘cap and trade’ system of regulating air
quality begins to price the capacity of air to absorb wastes by allowing a polluting business to
buy the right to pollute from a business that is reducing its waste stream into the air. While cap-
and-trade experts say this has nothing to do with valuing environmental assets, it does put dollar
value on the asset of air’s capacity to absorb wastes. A second current movement toward putting
a price on a formerly ignored cost is road pricing by time of day with tolls adjusted to congestion,
recognizing the value of time wasted by highway delays. This movement is racing ahead,
impelled, in part, by states privatizing highway expansion. The European Union, where gasoline
taxes already are several times those in the US, is trying to get the price of travel even more
closely aligned with the full economic and social costs by using weight-distance user fees which
would replace but be higher than current gas taxes.
5.2. Strengthening the magnetism in city center
With the rapid increase in households without children, the high density of city living is less
of a deterrent—if living at high density is rewarded. The cities that offer rewards of arts,
continuing education, entertainment, the best health care and good retailing—particularly those
cities that have not lost their office jobs—seem to be attracting residents again. A recent book
found “elements of downtown or near-downtown revivals” in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston,
Memphis, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Portland, OR, and Vancouver, BC. And among the new
residents, “people under 40 for whom the suburbs hold no appeal [6]”.
The Smart Growth Network—the US Environmental Protection Agency with a number of
environmentally oriented non-governmental organizations—recently wrote this:
“Recent trends in the global economy—industrial clustering and specialization, diversifica-
tion of the workforce, reintegration of work and home—are placing a premium upon community
character and quality of life. Companies are on the move and being drawn to communities that
offer a good quality of life. Why? First, companies realize that their workers want to live in
communities that offer reasonable commutes, a vibrant social life, environmental amenities,
housing and transportation choice. To retain and attract their employees, companies must locate
in such environments. Second, business is increasingly conducted beyond the boardroom—in
cafes, restaurants, health clubs, public spaces, etc.—places where people can come together,
converse, share ideas and network. The suburban office park, filled with buildings and cars, but
with few destinations, is becoming an outmoded venue for conducting business. Lastly, the
private sector in the new economy equates competitive advantage with the ability of being where
the action is and to them the action is in urban or town centers. Although technology frees them
to locate anywhere, it is proximity to suppliers, a workforce and networks that is drawing
business to the central business district (CBD).”
“The emphasis on place presents enormous opportunities for communities to capitalize on
their quality of life assets and to employ them as a tool for economic development. Doing so
requires communities to think of quality of life as a commodity that can be cultivated and
managed. Communities need to make strategic decisions that improve rather than harm livability
and make them lucrative places for business, and labor to locate. The new economy values
distinctive places that have the talent, technology and infrastructure to sustain competitive
advantage. Talent is attracted to sociable communities—places with destinations, public and
civic spaces, environmental amenities—where they can come together with colleagues and
friends either through planned or chance encounters. Aside from communication
infrastructure, the new economy demands physical infrastructure that reduces the cost of
business. This means buildings that can be quickly reconfigured and constructed, housing of
varying types and costs, development patterns that are predictable, and transportation systems
which increase mobility [7].”
To achieve this attractiveness for the new economy, many cities require some redesigning.
After World War II, most cities tried to respond to the competition of highway-based suburban
development by copying it—cutting wide swaths through the urban fabric or engineering
existing streets to maximize auto flow. Now, cities are being guided back to designs that fit their
primary function, to bring people (not cars) together. A principal guide is Project for Public
Spaces (www.pps.org), a nonprofit organization that grew out of the research of William H.
Whyte, Jr on how people use urban spaces. Cities throughout the world, but principally in the
US, have learned from PPS how to organize the public to look at their neighborhoods and city
centers as places they want to inhabit and then design those places for convenience and for the
pleasure of people on foot. PPS has even persuaded city traffic engineers that moving cars should
not always be the prime purpose of streets. The New Jersey and New Hampshire Departments of
Transportation have engaged PPS to help them broaden the range of considerations in planning
the movement of people and freight to include the human habitation through which travel
arteries run. The current jargon is “Context-Sensitive Design” and “traffic calming.”
A recent study by S.B. Friedman & Company of new clusters of activity around transit
stations “found that a rider’s decision to walk [to the station] is affected by a ‘pleasant walking
atmosphere’—defined as an interconnected network of streets (with sidewalks) and a continuous
architectural fabric, with stores next to the station”—not parking lots or parks [8].
Recent reduction of crime in cities certainly facilitates downtown renewal, but after decades
of losing out to the suburbs, city centers may need a large jolt to reverse the downward cycle.
One large office building or arts center may not be enough, and few entrepreneurs are able to
invest in a moribund downtown alone. Under that circumstance, assembling a coalition of
investors willing to make concurrent commitments—“if you do this, I’ll do that”—would be
needed to turn the downtown around. This requires cooperation of the national, state and local
governments, business and important institutions like universities and hospitals. They should
come together and agree on what each party will contribute. Johnson & Johnson did that to
renew the City of New Brunswick, New Jersey, where their world headquarters is. They started
an organization that included members of the nearby neighborhoods as well as business and
institutions. They got the State government to build a new road into downtown, the federal
government to subsidize a hotel, the City government to fix up the main shopping street, Rutgers
University to put its art school and art center in an empty department store and build a new
medical school downtown, the County government to enlarge a downtown hospital. Johnson &
Johnson built new offices downtown for a subsidiary corporation. When all of that happened,
Johnson & Johnson built the new headquarters downtown. Each made a commitment because all
the others did. It required all of their contributions to renew a very rundown center.
Buffalo, NY, which has been beset with large job losses, this year, received an American
Planning Association award for doing much the same. “Overall, the [downtown] plan—and the
process of planning—have done what any good plan must do: alleviate the uncertainties that
inhibit private investment,” according to Bradshaw Hovey, who was involved in the plan and
reported on it for the Planning Association [9]. “Blue Cross of Western New York plans to build
a new headquarters for 1200 employees. A developer will build a new mixed-use project on a
Theater District site long underused as surface parking. Bass Pro Shops will build a 250,000-
square-foot Outdoor World in a shell of Buffalo’s historic Memorial Auditorium,” Hovey
reported. In addition, three new medical campus facilities, a new US courthouse and several
housing projects will be built.
5.3. Arguing the case for enforceable regional plans
But even these two strategies will not stop the scatter through the countryside. Nor will the
many effective local efforts at environmental protection, led primarily by non-governmental
organizations. For example, in the New York Region, the Wildlife Conservation Society works
with local officials to design a development pattern that will preserve the animal and plant life
that was there before development. But there are 780 local governments in the New York
Region, each with land-use authority. Only a regional plan could shape the area into centers and
communities.
Opponents of regional planning argue that it would be expensive economically and socially
because a regional plan runs counter to what most people have chosen in their individual free-
market decisions. That is not necessarily true. Free market choices people make individually do
not always add up to choices they might make as a community and cannot make as individuals.
For example, some people would choose to live in an apartment or on a smaller lot IF there were
a reward for giving up space in and around their home, i.e. if giving up living space would result
in shorter trips to where they want to go often. (Many people responding to Regional Plan
Association questionnaires said they would choose to live at higher density if they could be
closer to their work and services they needed.) In spread city, a household gets no benefit from
giving up housing space. Everything is scattered at a distance, reachable only by car. So the
households that would choose higher density to be near their jobs and other activities or to be in a
lively place often cannot get it in the open market. They must work politically with other people
to agree on a plan that would achieve the pattern they would choose. The families that would live
in an old city if it had good schools, adequate parks and safe streets also must get that through
community decision-making; they cannot attain it alone through the market. A regional plan
helps to achieve that—as Portland, OR, demonstrates.
No one has arrayed the full panoply of problems resulting from the current plan-less spread
and scatter. Were all the problems presented, a majority might well decide that their individual
decisions were not adding up to a satisfactory condition. The Smart Growth Network argues the
case for better urban planning, but the coalition has refused to define ‘smart growth’ and has not
arrayed all the reasons to adopt it that might mobilize a broad coalition of support.
Environmental protection and improved opportunity for low-income residents (discussed
above) are the strongest but not the only arguments for recentralization. In addition,
1. With central destinations, there is an alternative to traffic congestion not available without
them, i.e. public transit. Regional Plan Association studied the conditions that encourage
people to use transit instead of driving. A large, strong downtown surrounded by housing in a
density gradient was the condition that attracted the most people to choose bus or rail to
work. High housing density near jobs and services allows people to walk to work. In 1995,
about 25% of Manhattan residents did; nearly a third of all Manhattan trips are on foot. In
spread city, distances generally are too great for walking along roads not designed for people
on foot or bicycles, and people are not going to the same places so they cannot ride together
even when highways become jammed.
2. When the general public uses public transit there is good service for those who cannot drive
or should not drive, including people too poor, too old or too young. In spread city, the old
and young are immobilized by the spread and scattered pattern. Distances are too great for
walking, roads are often too narrow and dangerous for biking, and too few people are going
to the same place to ride together in a bus. The number of accidents involving drivers over
75, per mile driven, is very high “What happens to older people when they stop driving in the
US?“ This was the question that spurred a new study by the Surface Transportation Policy
Project (STPP) that examined travel behavior of the 65C population, based on recently
released data from the Federal Highway Administration, the National Household
Transportation Survey of 2001 (NHTS): 21 percent of the 65C do not drive, and “61% of
older non-drivers stay home on a given day in more spread-out areas, as compared to 43% in
denser areas. More than half of older non-drivers use public transportation occasionally in
denser areas, as compared to 1 in 20 in more spread-out areas.” With an expected increase in
the 65C population from 35 million today to 62 million by 2025, these issues will grow.
Teen-agers too young to drive may also be immobilized, or their parents spend hours driving
them places [10]. For working people, the cost of operating a car had become a major burden
even before gasoline prices rose, according to STPP studies—and that does not cover the full
public costs of their driving.
3. Money is saved by using and maintaining the tremendous investment already in the cities
rather than letting city buildings and infrastructure deteriorate because higher-income people
have moved out. New construction outside the cities also is less expensive in a centers-and-
communities pattern than in a sprawl pattern. Florida contracted with James Duncan &
Associates to compare actual public costs, capital and operating, of eight patterns of
development [11]. Costs varied from $9252 for the central city development to $23,960 per
unit in the most spread and scattered development with a range in between for those less
spread and scattered. Even developments along highways cost over $16,000. (All in 1989
dollars) New Jersey has a State plan that tries to promote centers-and-communities. A
Rutgers University study found that, by following that plan instead of allowing sprawl, the
State and its cities and schools could save $1.3 billion in water and sewer lines, roads and
electric lines and save $400 million a year in operating costs. Several studies are cited in Joel
Hirschhorn, “GROWING PAINS: Quality of Life in the New Economy” [12]: (1) The US
Office of Technology Assessment estimated that sprawl adds 10–20% to infrastructure costs
(1995). (2) In South Florida, infrastructure costs of $10.5 billion over 20 years could have
been reduced to $6.15 billion [13] (3) In the next 20 years (from 1999), Rhode Island will pay
an extra $1.5 billion, 29.6% extra, for infrastructure as well as lost property taxes—54.6%
more in cities, 14.8% in suburbs [14]. (4) “Local governments spend $120 million extra a
year [15]. (5) Looking at all US studies: Compact growth uses 45% less land, 25% less cost
for roads, 20% less for utilities, 5% less for schools [16] (6) The US Housing and Urban
Development Department found very similar numbers in ‘State of the Cities”, 1999.
Downtowns are efficient places to do business, especially as business becomes more complex
so a wider range of experts and administrators must get together frequently. Travel in large
downtowns may be slow, compared to driving among outlying offices, but downtown there
are many more people within a square 15 min.
4. Centers of activities contribute to a sense of community—whether they are the large
metropolitan downtown, smaller city downtowns or neighborhood and suburban centers.
People using the centers live around them and identify with them. Even if they drive there,
once in the center they get out and walk and see each other face-to-face. More people live
close enough together so they see their neighbors. They use transit more and meet at transit
stops. By contrast, in outlying subdivisions, households live on large lots, are in their car
when they leave the house and, with the scatter of jobs and services, probably go different
directions from their neighbors—or their spouse, for that matter—to work, to shop, to
recreate, to pray. They share little with their neighbors—except a common interest in
keeping out new homes because they will bring too much traffic. “Community is of
significant value to cultural conservatives, for very good reason. Without it, there are few
mechanisms to uphold morals and maintain standards of behavior. .If you do not know your
neighbor, why should he care if you disapprove of his misbehavior? Historically, transit
helped foster community, just as the automobile helps undermine it. The reason is that when
most people took transit, they normally walked from their homes to the bus or streetcar stop.
Other people from the neighborhood were doing the same, and as they walked and at the car
stop, they met face to face. .In contrast the automobile works to isolate neighbors [17].”
The late George F. Kennan expressed the same theme: “The automobile has turned out to
be.the enemy of community generally. Wherever it advances, neighborliness and the sense
of community are generally impaired [18].” In the wake of the Columbine High School
shootings, The New York Times surveyed a range of social scientists and found much
agreement that: “.the isolation of larger lots and a car-based culture may lead to
disassociation from the reality of contact with other people.”
5. Because spread city scatters everything, it goes on and on without any clear boundaries.
Despite local government authority over land use, spread city residents do not have effective
control over their real environment because they constantly travel beyond their local borders
in all directions. So there is no logical border for a local government. In spread city, people
are governing each other as much as they are governing themselves. For example, the ugly
stores along the highway that they must drive by every day may bother them, but it is likely
that the decision to allow those stores to be located there was made by someone else’s local
government, and they did not have a vote. By contrast, centers-and-communities create a
clear area of common interest that can govern itself.
6. Spread city is ugly. It has no clear shape, and that in itself is ugly. It turns countryside into
driveways every few hundred yards, it requires huge parking fields, wide roads, multiple
garages and cars parked everywhere. Stores along the highways must attract drivers with
large signs because they are driving by at 50 miles an hour.
7. Centers-and-communities are healthy because they facilitate walking and bicycling—while
roads in spread development are often too dangerous, resulting in little exercise. Fewer
vehicle miles traveled equal fewer accidents. Studies on this subject are proliferating. A
website summarizes peer-reviewed studies showing the link between walkable communities
and health: http://www.activelivingresearch. A study based on census data covering 200,000
Americans in 448 metropolitan area counties found that those living “in spread out auto-
dependent areas walk less, weigh more (an average of 6 pounds) and are more prone to high
blood pressure than residents of the most densely populated places [19].”
8. Centers-and-communities offer choice of lifestyle. If activities are together in the center,
everyone has a choice of living at high density near the center or having a lot of space but
living far from the center. New York City is an example of how the magnetism works. People
pack themselves into tiny apartments in skyscraper buildings and pay high rent to be near all
the jobs and services and excitement of Manhattan. Others choose a lot of space but travel a
long time to get to work. Still others choose a small plot with a medium-length commute. In
spread city, there is no way to be near all the places you want to go to often—they are
scattered.
Most people don’t know all those reasons. Their car is comfortable and convenient so they
drive. The more people drive, the more buildings are spread out to accommodate the car. And
eventually, everything is spread and scattered so all trips have to be by car. That process will
continue until more people understand the several benefits of recentralization. While the
sustainable issues are of prime importance, the additional nine reasons to recentralize provide a
basis to enlarge a coalition in support that might get the issue onto the public agenda for debate.
Just as people suddenly became appalled when a person lit a cigarette in a public building,
informed people could become appalled when someone proposes to put an office building or
large store anywhere except in a downtown.
6. Urban practice and sustainabilty: how we build
Though strong cities improve the sustainability of metropolitan areas, they do not live
comfortably with nature. The vast hard surfaces of streets and buildings create heat islands that
make summer temperatures more uncomfortable than suburban locales. Most cities combine
storm water with sewerage, overwhelming the sewage plants during heavy rains so raw sewage
flows into waterways. Even with fewer vehicle miles traveled (VMT) than in the suburbs, autos,
trucks and buses packed into the dense city produce bad air. Few buildings are designed for
optimum airflow so most depend on mechanical air conditioning at all times.
While city living uses less of the world’s critical assets than spread and scattered
development, city performance is hardly sustainable. Cities can be built more sustainable—in
four steps.
6.1. Deconstruction
Sustainable construction begins with preparing the building site; almost all city sites are
already occupied. Instead of bringing in a bulldozer, reducing the structure to rubble and carting
it off, deconstruction takes most of it apart and finds uses for the parts. Recent experience in a
few places suggests that the extra cost to the builder can be matched by the benefits. As the price
of disposing of wastes rises rapidly, the cost-benefit ratio for deconstruction is likely to improve.
To the local community, one benefit is that the money paid out for deconstruction goes to semi-
skilled workers in the vicinity rather than to the far away dumping ground owner and the truckers
who carry the waste there. Another benefit is much less pollution, air, water and noise. Here is an
example of social as well as environmental costs ignored in the construction industry’s choices.
Were the social costs of inner-city unemployment added to the environmental costs of
demolition instead of deconstruction, the cost-benefit ratio of deconstruction would surely be
better.
Deconstruction is no small item. The NYC Department of Sanitation estimates that 60% of
the City’s waste stream is made up of construction and demolition debris [20].
There are obstacles to adopting deconstruction. Building sites often are too tight to
conveniently store harvested materials until they can be carried to a place to be sold. Urban land
for a retail sales yard is expensive and hard to find. Deconstruction takes longer than demolition
and so requires more planning and care than builders usually allocate to this task. Much of the
real benefit does not accrue to the builder but to society as a whole. For example, builders are not
charged for the environmental pollution of demolition nor for the environmental costs of
producing the new materials that compete with deconstructed harvest. Further, producing many
raw materials is subsidized. But there is no subsidy to promote deconstruction, which will attain
greater efficiency with practice and so, merits a jumpstart subsidy.
Currently, one of New York’s biggest real estate investors, Durst, using one of the City’s
biggest construction firms, Tishman, has been deconstructing structures on two Manhattan
building sites. Philadelphia is using deconstruction on a large public housing project. Labor and
construction industry leaders are beginning to pay attention.
6.2. High performance building
The US Green Building Council has established a rating system by which the environmental
quality of new and renovated buildings can be measured. It is called LEED, and buildings are
rated as Platinum, Gold or Silver, depending on points earned for:
† deconstruction to minimize demolition wastes—percent of materials put back into use;

percent of previously used materials used in the building, whether from that site or other
sites;
† percent of new building materials obtained within 200 miles, minimizing environmental
costs of shipping;
† re-use of slightly dirty (gray) water, e.g. for toilets and watering landscape, and reduction in
clean water used;
† minimizing or eliminating storm water run off;
† cleanliness of indoor air, including minimizing ‘off-gassing’ of materials used in floors, floor
covering, paints, upholstery;
† total energy used and how much is provided from alternative energy sources.
Interest in competing for LEED rating is increasing since its 2000 inception, but still only
1400 in the US have applied for certification and only 120 have been certified. However, a single
builder (Tishman) in New York City is constructing 42 million square feet of office and
apartment towers and aiming at platinum and gold LEED ratings. Daniel Tishman, the CEO,
said recently: to do that requires fundamentally changing the way buildings are conceived, built
and operated.
A recent California survey of nationwide studies of the economics of high performance
buildings demonstrates that they repay the extra costs over the life of the building in energy and
water saving. In schools, studies of performance of teachers and students show significantly
reduced absences and raised test scores in high-performance schools. If that performance
improvement is the same in office buildings, occupants will easily be repaid in raised
productivity for any higher rent.
The non-profit Center for Economic & Environmental Partnership (CEEP) conducted a
survey of obstacles to adopting high-performance building standards. Its report is at http://
www.ceepinc.org. The obstacles start with resistance to change, including fear that it will
cost more and take longer. Also, many professionals in the building industry lack awareness
and information. Some zoning and building codes interfere. There is lack of information
about materials, and, sometimes, good materials are not readily available. Some regulations
take away incentives to achieving greater energy efficiency or actually block it. In addition,
builders do not get financial credit for facilitating what benefits the whole community, e.g.
recycling water and preventing water runoff. Union rules sometimes block the most efficient
methods, though unions now are taking strong interest in sustainable construction’s social
benefits. Trade unions have allied themselves with environmental organizations in the
Apollo Alliance, nationally and in many local areas, to achieve energy independence in
America by many means including construction of high performance energy efficient
buildings.
Other obstacles: Even when there would be long-term savings, the builder often does not hold
the building long enough to reap them. Few in the general public know about high-performance
building benefits, so owners cannot easily ask higher rent or purchase price.
There are still many unknowns; people working toward high-performance buildings are
pioneering. For example, possible toxicity of indoor materials is not easily found, and
improvements in materials and construction methods are being made every day.
6.3. Green roofs
Imagine a city in which the natural area that was on the ground before the building was
constructed is now on its roof. While research on the effects of green roofs is not decisive, it
appears that they better insulate the building from cold and heat, absorb rain water to reduce
runoff, last longer than the usual roof and bring nature back into the City, including birds and
insects and vegetation that absorbs air pollution. The large Chicago City Hall green roof has
become widely known, and the Mayor of Chicago vows to bring gardens to many more roofs in
the City. In New York, Queens Botanical Garden is building an impressive green roof, and
several smaller ones are completed. They are promoted by a non-profit organization called
EarthPledge, which has a model on its own headquarters on East 38th Street in Manhattan.
6.4. High-performance maintenance
Better maintenance can reduce energy and water use in both old buildings and new. New
high-performance buildings rely heavily on electronic controls. Keeping the high-performance
qualities relies, then, on the maintenance team being educated enough to make sure everything is
running properly.
For older buildings, little attention has been paid to ways to reduce energy and water use
through better maintenance. The potential is great. A few universities outside New York have
begun to focus on building maintenance: Texas A&M and University of Colorado have institutes
devoted to it. They report energy savings of 20–30% with little capital investment, mainly
improving operations. City University of New York’s Sustainable Building Initiative is
promoting similar energy saving laboratories there.
7. Conclusion
Recentralizing American urban areas with surrounding housing in a density gradient around
the large and small centers would be the greatest contribution to more sustainable urban areas.
Three steps can move the US toward recentralizing: (1) ending anti-sustainable subsidies,
including environmental and social assets not now priced, (2) strengthening the magnetism of
city centers by improving their attractiveness as places for people to meet while organizing
public, private and non-profit agencies to concurrently commit to downtown investment, and (3)
making the case for regional planning by arraying the many powerful reasons for
recentralization which are not now recognized together. It may seem quixotic to think we can
reverse the strong centrifugal forces created by the automobile in the US, but there is strong
public support for buying open land, some residential return to cities by the childless and a good
deal of negative discussion of sprawl and its auto congestion. If people begin to grasp the
depletion of environmental assets and the threat of global warming—as European business and
government leaders now have, recentralization would be on the nation’s agenda and could be
backed by a broad coalition because many interests would be helped. Banning smoking in public
places took only about a decade—from smoke-filled meeting rooms and public transport to
handful of smokers standing outside smoke-free office buildings. Within a decade, people might
be ready to ban scattered stores and offices and spread out homes.
References
[1] Puentes R, Prince R. Fueling transportation finance: a primer on the gas tax. Washington, DC: Brookings
Institution; 2003.
[2] Myers N, Kent J. Perverse subsidies. In: Speth JG, editor. Red sky in the morning. New Haven: Yale University
Press; 2004.
[3] Brian T, Ketcham PE, Konheim CS. What New Yorkers pay to travel: how to spend less and get more. New York:
Community Consulting, 2004. http://www.communityconsulting.org/CostofTravel/Final%20Report%2010-10-04.
pdf
[4] Anderson D, McCullough G. The full cost of transportation in the Twin City region. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Center for Transportation Studies; 2000.
[5] Nordhaus WD, Kokkelenberg EC. Nature’s numbers. Expanding the national economic accounts to include the
environment. Washington, DC: National Academies Press; 1999.
[6] Breen A, Rigby D. Intown living: a different American dream. Washington, DC: Island Press; 2004.
[7] Available from: http://www.smartgrowth.org/library/by
[8] Kreyling C. Hug that transit station. Planning; January 2001.
[9] Hovey B. The Queen City hub: a regional action plan for downtown Buffalo. Planning; March 2005.
[10] Surface transportation policy project. Aging Americans: stranded without options; April 14, 2004. Available from:
http://www.transact.org/report.asp?idZ232
[11] Duncan JE, Frank J. The search for efficient urban growth patterns. Tallahassee: Florida Department of Community
Affairs; 1989.
[12] Hirschhorn J. Growing pains: quality of life in the new economy. Washington, DC: National Governors Association;
2000: Available from http://www.nga.org/center/divisions/1,1188,C_ISSUE_BRIEF%5ED_609,00.html
[13] South Florida Regional Planning Council (SFRPC). Building on success: a report on eastward ho! Hollywood, FL:
SFRPC; 1998.
[14] Grow smart Rhode Island. Costs of suburban sprawl and urban decay in Rhode Island. Providence: Grow Smart
Rhode Island; 1999.
[15] Thousand Friends of Pennsylvania. The costs of sprawl in Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: Thousand Friends of
Pennsylvania; 2000.
[16] Burchell R. Cost of sprawl revisited. Washington, DC: National Transportation Research Board; 1998.
[17] Weyrich P, Lind W. Conservatives and mass transit: is it time for a new look? Washington, DC: Free Congress
Research and Education Foundation; 1996.
[18] Kennan GF. Provocateur: auto addiction. Transport Altern 1996;January/February:2.
[19] Peirce N. Walking, cycling, auto alternatives on congress’ chopping block. Washington, DC: National Academy of
Public Administration; 2003.
[20] New York Community Trust. Grants: February 2005 Newsletter. New York: NY Community Trust; 2005.
William B. Shore is Senior Fellow, Institute for Urban Systems, City University of New York. From 1961 to 1996 he
was a senior staff member of the Regional Plan Association, a non-governmental organization and the only agency
planning land-use and transportation for the Tri-State Region surrounding the Port of New York. Mr Shore wrote reports
and press releases and presented audio-visual demonstrations of the Region’s development and alternative ways to grow.
He experimented with several forms of public participation and wrote extensively about it. He is executive secretary of
Nature Network, a coalition of major scientific and educational organizations that promotes joint research and public
education on the Tri-State environment. He is secretary of the DMZ Forum, an international organization dedicated to
preserving the Korean De-Militarized Zone as an environmental laboratory and a source for restoring biodiversity to both
North and South Korea, as well as a Peace Park. Mr Shore is a co-founder and a member of the Sustainable Building
Initiative of the City University of New York.

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+ model ARTICLE IN PRESS

Technology in Society xx (2005) 1–17

Land-use, transportation and sustainability

1. Traditional urban areas and current urban areas

– How much energy is used

* Tel.: C1 212 817 7246; fax: C1 212 817 1511.

0160-791X/$ - see front matter q 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Now, the pattern of development in the US is the greatest threat to sustainability.

2. Urban form and sustainability

Scattered development depends on ground water, which is only slowly replaced—and

2.4. Air and water quality

2.6. Humane and equitable communities

3. Accommodating growth in a centers-and-communities pattern

4. Reshaping American metropolitan areas

5. Strategies toward recentralization

5.1. Getting the prices right

A 2001 calculation: worldwide, “.governments intervene in the marketplace to create $860

5.2. Strengthening the magnetism in city center

5.3. Arguing the case for enforceable regional plans

6. Urban practice and sustainabilty: how we build

6.2. High performance building

† deconstruction to minimize demolition wastes—percent of materials put back into use;

6.3. Green roofs

6.4. High-performance maintenance

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