International Perspective on a Common International Problem | Nov 8th at 10:30am
We’re back in action on Saturday morning, much earlier than this blogger typically engages with urban ideas on a weekend, but it’s great to be involved nonetheless. The first panel covers programs being implemented in Shanghai, Ottowa, and Curitiba (Brazil). The difference in scale is amusing. Jiang Wu describes China’s plan to surround the 10 million person central city of Shanghai with 9 new edge cities of up to 800,000 people each. They intend to ply Shanghai with 1000 kilometers of Metrorail by 2020. The American planners swoon. I swoon. That’s a lot of rail.
Jonas Rabinovitch discusses the operation of the famous bus-rapid transit system of Curitiba, meanwhile, and Clive Doucet offers his thoughts on the tragedy that was the elimination of urban streetcar networks across North America. The contrast is interesting. There is room—there must be room—for massive new infrastructure investments. On the other hand, it’s sometimes the case that the first best policy is not to mess with the stuff that works.
For my money, moderator Andrew Altman asks the key question—as folks familiar with the actual operations of cities, how do you get your people to accept the necessary changes, of design, density, and transportation mode? Doucet says, rather unsatisfactorily, that no one knows how to get these things implemented. If that’s the case, we need to be spending our time on that question and little else. The what doesn’t matter without the how.
Wu, for his part, suggests that stronger municipal governments in China simplify planning decisions. And no doubt they do. But the winning answer comes from Rabinovitch. You get people to act, he says, by giving them an economic incentive to act. Only later do they develop their environmental conscience. And he’s right. We have a design problem with our cities, but that design problem has its roots in an institutional problem—in the rules that we set that encourage bad planning and bad behavior. It’s critical that we recognize the structural roots of the crisis at hand and take the necessity of their alteration seriously.
Ryan Avent is an economics writer living in Washington, DC. He authors The Economist's economics blog, Free Exchange, and covers environmental and urban policy issues for Grist.
