Urban Mobility in a Global Perspective

Urban development and traffic are inseparable. One without the other is inconceivable. There is no city without traffic. Human settlements are established at every traffic nodal point. Cities determine the lines of force that traffic has to follow, while traffic shapes a city and influences its appearance.It is futile to set priorities: if one is subordinated to the other when assessing a given situation or when planning new facilities, one of the two will come off badly (Leibbrand 1980: 5). „This book opens with a city that was, symbolically, a world: it closes with a world that in many practical aspects has become a city“ (Mumford 1961: xi). This first sentence from Mumford’s classic history of the city and urban studies still serves as an apt encapsulation of present-day civilisation, which is now more than ever an urban civilisation. Cities have always been the laboratories of social modernisation and motors of civilisational development. At all stages of human civilisation, cities have been a widespread if not always dominant form of human life. But only with the beginning of industrial modernity and the associated rapid proliferation of the spatial, social and mental processes of urbanisation did the urban way of life come to occupy the absolute centre of society’s forms of habitation and production. The city has become the forum and medium of the industrial economic system per se– with all the known drawbacks and the tendencies to cultural erosion and neglect. In this sense, the city is a „machine“: a gigantic wheelwork of interlocking systems, infrastructures and functions serving the gratification of social and individual needs. Today, this development has reached an apogee. Population growth in the years to come will be concentrated almost entirely in the urban regions of the world. In 2007, the United Nations reported that, for the first time in the history of mankind, more people lived in cities than in rural areas, and there is no end to this trend in sight (cf. UN-DESA 2014). Living in urban agglomerations will therefore be the typical form of existence for the majority of the world’s population in the 21st century. This means that the question of the sustainable development of society will be decided chiefly in the cities of the future. Since the early 1990s the concept of „sustainability“ or „future viability“ has defined the socio-political debates concerning the right path to the future. The global political movement „Local Agenda 21“, which emerged from the first crucial summit on climate and sustainability in Rio in 1992, placed the city at the centre of efforts towards social sustainability. Today the city is just as likely to be the place where problems arise as the place where problems are worked out. Cities cause ecological, economic and social problems which become manifest in an often strikingly diminished but at the same time socially unequal „quality of life“. The city is also the place where these problems are managed politically. The search for ways to integrate the economic, environmental and social dimensions of the objectives of sustainable social development is accordingly played out in the midst of tensions arising from the re-adjustment of basic municipal functions. In the vision of a „sustainable city“, mobility, a reliable energy supply, healthy living and healthy food, security, social and cultural participation are provided for, minimising as far as possible the negative external effects on the environment and society (cf. Keiner et al. 2006).

source :

https://www.lit-verlag.de/Downloads/9783643908568.pdf