An excellent analysis of the problem of the urban environment under capitalism is found in a presentation made by Dave Holmes to the recent Climate Change | Social Change Conference in Sydney, Australia, in April.

Here's an excerpt from his notes:

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When one sees a modern city from the air, especially at night, it is a truly awe-inspiring spectacle. What always strikes me is the immensity of the project, a testimony to the power and creativity of human beings. However, on the ground and actually living and working in this wonder, things are quite different and the social and ecological problems crowd in and fill one’s view. The truth is that our cities have always been dominated by the rich and powerful and built and operated to serve their needs — not those of the mass of working people who live and toil in them.

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Problems of urban life

And today the destructive effect on the quality of urban life of the capitalist pursuit of profits before anything else is growing alarmingly. Here is a short and far from complete list:

• Modern capitalist cities are absolutely dominated by cars and the trucks. This leads to massive, life-threatening pollution and a vast network of roads and car parks which scars the urban landscape. People live on islands surrounded by seas of asphalt and concrete — 40% or more of the city surface is asphalt and concrete. The city creates its own, warmer climate.

• Motor vehicles also directly kill and maim large numbers of people each year; still greater numbers die from the pollution. Vehicle emissions are also a major contributor to greenhouse gases and the climate change which threatens the human race with utter catastrophe.

• The corollary of this is that public transport systems are weak and take second place to the motor car. Similarly, the great bulk of freight is carried by trucks not rail.

• Developers aided by governments have created the appalling urban sprawl with all its ecological and social consequences (erosion of farmland, huge distances between home and work, etc., etc.). The word “developers”, of course, is an appalling euphemism — capitalist sharks would be a more accurate description.

• And now, in the name of urban consolidation, these same developers are being encouraged to build their often crappy blocks of units anywhere and everywhere. In Melbourne this has led to a great deal of angst in the suburbs. And one result is no better than the other.

• Then let’s look at what the developers actually construct. Modern houses and buildings are generally not only hard to maintain but ecologically wasteful and often extremely unhealthy (emissions from building materials, plastics and cleaning agents). They could be designed differently — we could easily have ecologically sensible houses instead of the current extremely wasteful “McMansions” favoured by the building industry.

• In the cities, public land — modest though it is — is constantly being alienated by greedy developers in league with councils and city and state governments.

• Not only are house prices soaring beyond the reach of most workers, but homelessness is growing sharply (estimated to be over 100,000 nationally) as governments refuse to build public housing and rely on the market to solve everything (preferring to give subsidies to people to rent from private landlords).

• Shopping centres (malls and supermarkets) dominate much of city life. They kill most of the neighbourhood shops and force people to rely on cars to do their shopping. But these juggernauts are purely the result of the capitalist thirst for profit — they appear before us as facts of life; people never get to discuss what is really needed. Moreover, the ubiquitous shopping mall represents a serious privatisation of social space — we all have to use them and they thus fulfil a social function but access and control is wholly in the hands of the private owners.

• And as the supermarkets and malls kill off many of the neighbourhood shops, their place is taken by chain outlets (7-11, Coles Express, petrol station shops) all offering emergency supplies — at much higher prices.

• Within the city we have the hypertrophy — a monstrous swelling — of the city centre (full of truly ugly buildings all jostling for position) and the bleak wasteland of the sprawling suburbs.

• In the sixties, “decentralisation” was a buzzword. Governments encouraged a modest movement of services and industry to regional centres. But today country towns and villages are dying as governments cut services and jobs and banks close branches. This has a multiplier effect. People move to the city (or at least to the big regional centres) and the rural crisis intensifies.

• There is a movement back to some regional centres but — under the wonderful capitalist system we have — it becomes ghastly caricature of what is really needed. The rich and middle classes build holiday homes in coastal towns forcing up prices and making life impossible for ordinary people (working-class pensioners and renters) who have to move elsewhere.

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[Article also available HERE]

[ 02 June 2008: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

It is almost contrarian - if people all live in lower density forms they will have to drive everywhere, infrastructure (sewers, electricity, roads etc) will be much more massive - so they will pollute more.

I read a paper a couple of days ago about the remarkable progress the Socialist/Green mayoralty of Paris has made in terms of air quality and quality of life there by promoting public transport - including some new tram lines - and cycling and discouraging overuse of the car.

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Originally posted by lagatta:
This paper strikes me as very, very odd. The evils he is talking about have nothing to do with urbanity and everything to do with oil, car and development industry-driven sprawl, crappy design and products in general, and capitalists taking advantage of public concern about the environment to build shitty densified complexes.

It is almost contrarian - if people all live in lower density forms they will have to drive everywhere, infrastructure (sewers, electricity, roads etc) will be much more massive - so they will pollute more.

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The author is talking about "livability" of cities. He talks about "oil, car and development industry-driven sprawl, crappy design and products in general, and capitalists taking advantage of public concern about the environment to build shitty densified complexes" (your words), which seems to me to say a lot about livability.

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The fundamental way we live — how we generate our power, get around, grow our food — is not decided by us but by the big corporations. Without the rule of corporate capital we could set in place radically different, ecologically sustainable arrangements.

For example, the cars most of us use are a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. But what choice do we really have? We don’t favour private cars over public transport because we are a society of petrol-heads; it’s a consequence of the deliberate policies of capitalist governments protecting the interests of their big-business masters. The auto industry and its associated sectors make up a very large part of many national capitalist economies and oppose moves to improve public transport-.

Trying to stabilise — and indeed reduce — the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere is a life-and-death challenge for humanity. We need to phase out fossil fuels and all the problems that go with them (carbon dioxide emissions and the fact that they will not last forever). But big business thinks it can make a few adjustments and carry on as usual. The changes required are simply too fundamentally in contradiction with huge economic interests to be easily contemplated.

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As for the article M. Spector introduced I approve of most of the criticism of cities but I had a problem with the idea of "capitalist cities" as it implies that "socialist cities" would be free of the problems identified. In practice socialist cities have nearly all the same problems identified and I think even in theory the problems are associated with cities themselves and the solution requires moving away from the form of cities entirely, rather than addressing what I see as superficialities. Now don't get me wrong its not that I'm against "socialist cities" if that means something radically unlike what is currently the form of a "city" (and I believe it would have to) but then a new term seems appropriate if we are discussing a new form. To illustrate this I believe human populations must live where the resources needed to sustain these populations are found; this can never happen in cities, or at least I don't think the term city fits this conceptualization.

Pogo:

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"Take the cars out of the city and they become much more liveable."

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This seems like an oversimplification; do you mean "cars" or road-borne vehicles? Replacing private cars with public transit is an excellent step but what about the endless trucks bringing raw materials needed by city dwellers from around the world?

It seems to me that taking people out of the city would be more effective.

Lagatta:

It seems to me that if goods are coming to consumers from far and wide it makes more sense in terms of efficiency of distribution to concentrate the consumers in one place and bring the goods to them, rather than disperse people out of the cities, as you seem to suggest. The whole question of whether we can and should continue to tolerate globalized consumption patterns, where most of our goods, including our food, travels thousands of km to get to us, instead of supporting localized production, is another topic in itself.

Yes, we will need public forms of transit to replace the private automobile, and again, transit is more efficient when population densities are high, rather than spread out. But with comprehensive planning we can design cities where people can live, work, socialize, recreate, and obtain the goods and services they require without having to travel great distances.

Considerations of that nature, such as the personal and social well-being of the urban dweller and the conservation of the environment, are foreign to capitalism, because they don't enter into the picture when the main consideration is maximizing profits (the hard-wired raison d'être of the capitalist system). That's why we speak of "capitalist cities" as being something very different from what we can only imagine to be "socialist cities" (since the latter have never existed). It is only when the priorities of society change - away from the absolute imperatives of growth and the production of private profit - that it is possible to produce urban environments that are sustainable ecologically and geared to the needs of those who live in them.

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
Urban sprawl: bad for your health, the planet and your pocketbook

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Rising fuel prices will create pain for Alberta suburbanites. The suburbs are an artifact of the age of cheap and abundant oil. But as CIBC economist Jeff Rubin reported in April of this year, we are leaving that age and entering an "age of scarcity."

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I'm still not convinced that concentrating large numbers of people in cities is good for the environment let alone natural. What does David Suzuki say about it?

Here's a classic example:

Everybody in the GVRD agrees that it's the height of lunacy to create circumstances where it's cost-effective to live in Langley and drive 45 minutes each way so as to work in Vancouver proper.

Yet none of the gang of idiots running the cities here wants to prick the golden egg of rising property prices, which is causing the exact opposite effect of what they want, which is higher density and lower overall commute distances.

The fastest way to make people live closer to where they work is to crash property prices through the floor in the GVRD.

Fastest way to end the problem of ridiculous dependence on the automobile is to make housing cheaper.

But like I said, this kills the golden goose of rising property tax revenues from rich people speculating and driving up housing costs.