News and views toward an ecologically, healthy, peaceful planet
Tuesday, November 1, 2016
NOTES FROM A NATIVE SON
BIO
"At the heart of our efforts to transform blighted communities into ecologically sustainable communities, we must first celebrate cultural and ethnic diversity, respect our natural ecosystem, and utilize renewable resourced building materials. It is incumbent upon design professionals to engage stakeholders in a design process, that democratizes research, planning, and decision-making."
Arthur James III is a longtime catalyst for social, economic and environmental justice and a tireless advocate for ecologically and socially balanced communities. Arthur is a pro-active, creative thinker with more than 25 years of experience planning and designing sustainable habitats.
Arthur is currently the staff Environmental Designer/Planner for the The Rosenthall Group of Jackson, Mississippi. He has also served as a designer of housing and health care facilities with St. Louis architectural firm Richard Franklin and Associates and has extensive background in professional environmental and community design consulting in the San Francisco Bay area
His commitment to environmental restoration and public advocacy was perfectly suited for his job from as Program Manager of the Urban Greening and Restoration Program of the Urban Habitat Program, where he helped determine strategies and assumed leadership of the nascent environmental justice movement. During this period he co-founded the People of Color Greening Network, whose mission was to create organic community gardens and green spaces in minority neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Arthur collaborated with famed environmentalist and Urban Habitat Program Director Carl Anthony to publish the Race, Poverty and the Environment reader.
Arthur and Carl taught Race, Poverty and the Environment class at UC Berkeley.
Arthur also lectured on urban environmental leadership and community development at New College of California.
Before joining Urban Habitat, Arthur worked for the city of Oakland, where he worked in the Neighborhood Design Division and Community Economic Development. Arthur also served as a housing analyst and project manager for a 125-unit, affordable housing project for the Department of Community Development of the city of Berkeley, California. He also served as a housing analyst with the Housing Authority in Berkeley. California.
As a consultant, for the Green Belt Alliance , Arthur convened a round table of local community greening activist to participate in a U.S. National Park Service study on the social impacts of community greening efforts in the San Francisco Bay Area. He also served as a project manger the Urban Creeks Council's urban creek restoration and trail-side park project in a low-income Latino neighborhood in East Oakland, California.
He has advised and consulted on eco-village, green planning and water and community development projects in The Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Nigeria and Zimbabwe.
For well more than a decade, Arthur has served as a director or adviser to several community-based non profits, including Urban Ecology, Plant Closures Project, Urban Habitat Program, Global CPR Service, and the East Bay Economic Development Alliance.
He is an occasional contributor to the web zine Nature of Cities.
Arthur has a B.A. in economics and environmental studies from Antioch University and a M.A. in architecture from University of California at Berkeley.
Kaveh Samiei, Tehran, Iran
Arthur James III, St. Louis, USA
May 21, 2013
From: www.thenatureofcities.com
“Architects have been aware of the issues for some time, of course, but the proportion of those committed to sustainable and ecological practices has remained small. And until recently, much of the work produced as sustainable architecture has been of poor quality. Early examples were focused mainly around the capacities of simple technologies to produce energy and recycle waste.” —Mohsen Mostafavi, Gareth Doherty; Ecological Urbanism
Separation of City and Nature
During modern era of human development, growth of towns and cities displayed a separation between nature and human activities. This was not the case in premodern times, when human settlements either integrated or co-existed peacefully with the nature. There are many examples of this city—nature relationship in Old Iranian cities like Isfahan, Shiraz and even Tehran; The Garden Cities of Sir Ebenezer Howard in England, Kilwa coastal towns in what is now present day Tanzania, Teotenango, Mexico, as other few examples.
After the arrival of modernism and the growth urbanism, modern homes and high rise habitats replaced gardens. Fast growing populations and changes in lifestyle contributed to the destruction of garden cities (Samiei, 2012).
The modern city is a recent phenomenon. The growth of modern industry from the late 18th century onward led to massive urbanization and the rise of new great cities, first in Europe and then in other regions, as new opportunities brought huge numbers of migrants from rural communities into urban areas. In the United States from 1860 to 1910, the invention of railroads reduced transportation costs, and large manufacturing centers began to emerge, thus allowing migration from rural to city areas.
Before the rapid expansion in human population that began after the Industrial Revolution, cities were relatively small, few in number and their impact on the natural world was limited. There had been human-induced extinctions of wildlife caused by hunter-gatherers, the deforestation caused by the introduction to fire as a means of cooking and heating, but for the most part, the ecological footprint of human settlements was light because they were embedded bio regionally and their size permitted provisioning by the immediate surrounding natural environment.
These developments were made possible by the large-scale exploitation of fossil fuel resources (especially petroleum), which offered large amounts of energy in an easily portable form, but also caused widespread concerns about pollution and long-term impact on the environment. In the USA, cheap gas and anti-urban policies led to sprawl which destroyed rural areas and replaced many farms and open space with low rise housing developments, landfills and shopping malls.
Urban dwellers became increasingly disconnected from nature, so that nowadays many of us no longer understand the connection of a healthy ecosystem and healthy cities. Landscapes on and around our buildings and infrastructure can be more than an optional ornamental extra but a multi-functional layer of soil and vegetation that controls surface water, provides food and wildlife habitat and keeps us cool, fit and sane. To make this transformation from grey to green will require panoramic, trans-disciplinary thinking and coordinated action (Grant, 2012).
Architecture and buildings are inseparable parts of a city; can you assume a city without architecture, buildings and their features? The biggest portion of built environment is building blocks and their attachments; how can imagine a sustainable and ecological city without the effects of architectural design and building constructions? Particularly in modern and semi modern cities today, the dominance of buildings against natural environment is undeniable. During last century our reaction about environmental crisis in construction industry was nearly nothing!
Architecture is the profession of designing the built environment. But we architects should include the contributions experts in related fields like landscape architects, urban design and planning, permaculturalist, and policy makers.
Each has a significant role in restoring balance between buildings, cities and our biological / ecological inventory. Surely ecological urbanism without ecological architecture is impossible. How can architects utilize ecological science to design cities and buildings which are in harmony with ecosystems?
Artist’s Rendition of Safavid-era Isfahan, which is typically described as the pinnacle of garden cities interspersed with harmoniously-designed pavilions and spacious thoroughfares. http://ajammc.com/2012/10/23/the-bridge-to-new-julfa-a-look-at-the-armenian-community-of-isfahan/
City Integration and Nature
Historically, the concept of the built environment both embraced and rejected the idea of a balance with our natural environment. Home was a safe place against wild and cruel nature of outside. We feared natural disasters, wild uncontrollable animals and untamed growth of forest and woodland areas. And even now, we destroy or neglect our natural infrastructure due to our focus on making life more convenient, with drive through services and large shopping malls.
The realization that nature embraces the city has powerful implications for how cities are built and maintained and for the health, safety, and welfare of each resident.
Disregard of natural processes in the city is and always has been costly and dangerous. Many cities have suffered from failure to take account of natural processes. The cost of disregarding nature extends also to quality of life. We witness this fact with unprecedented urban growth in cities across the globe. And if we look at urban history, we realize that the problems of contemporary urbanization are still persistent, just as plagued ancient cities.
Nature has been seen as a superficial embellishment, as a luxury encountered only in parks and gardens, rather and meaningful urban form is than as an essential force that permeates the city.
Civilizations and governments rise and fall, traditions, values, and policies change, but the natural environment of each city remains an enduring framework within which the human community builds. A city’s natural environment and its urban form, taken together, are a record of the interaction between natural processes and human purpose over time. Together they contribute to each city’s unique identity (Whiston Spirn, 2002).
Ecosystems provide our basic human and social needs. The biosphere nurtures our mind and soul, as well as our stomachs and lungs. The modern city is organic process, but one with an unhealthy bio system. The biophilia hypothesis suggests that humans have an innate tendency to affiliate with other living organisms and living processes. Humans require contact with a biodiverse world to stimulate the development of their emotional, cognitive, and social potential. As the living community of other organisms is reduced and human interaction with that community is lost, there is an extinction of experience that results in a loss of real ecological knowledge and emotional attachment to nature.
It is our relationships with our environment and other species that make us part of an ecosystem. The healthy functioning of a natural system, including their life-sustaining processes, depends on all species participating in a coordinative way. If we built our cities in such a way that children could play in creeks, we could watch the sunset and the night sky, and sometimes there was quiet, we would begin to know nature again. If wildlife could navigate the landscape, and the raindrop’s path from roof to river was manifest, then most of us would care about nature’s health.
If our parks could showcase our rich and native plant life and we could lessen our dependence on oil and breathe clean air by making our cities walkable, and compost and recycle our waste, our built environment could contribute to creating a collective ecological consciousness (Dekay and O’brien, 2001).
Thus cities should be an extension of our natural environment. Our decision to form a balanced relationship between nature and city is determinant; nature has complicated internal rules that define biodiversity as a collective life support system. There is a need for the city to connect to organic structures systematically. We as citizens must organize political, social and technological resources in an effort to create a dialogue and implementable action plan to redesign unhealthy urban habitats in balance with nature.
The Urban Ecosystems: Introduction to Urban Ecology
Urban ecosystems are the cities, towns, and settlements constructed by humans. We all influence our urban ecosystem and at the same time, we are influenced by ecological conditions.
The health of biodiversity affects you. And what you do affects biodiversity. Everything we do either uses natural resources or returns them as waste. The amount of land and resources that a population or a person uses is called an ecological footprint. We all can do things to make our personal footprints smaller.
An urban ecosystem includes people among the living things, and the structures they build among the non living things. In an urban ecosystem, humans influence ecological factors (plants, air, soil, animals), and human decisions (where and how to build houses, parks, highways, schools) are influenced by ecological factors.
Social factors are a key component of a viable and healthy eco system. Respect for cultural and ethnic diversity and the recognition of multi cultural leadership are important inputs to a healthy city. Urban Ecology is the study of ecosystems that include humans living in cities and urbanizing landscapes, the application of the principles of ecology to a study of urban environments.
The term “urban ecology” has been used variously to describe the study of humans in cities, of nature in cities, and of the coupled relationships between humans and nature. Urban ecology is the study of the co-evolution of human-ecological systems.
It is an emerging, interdisciplinary field that aims to understand how human and ecological processes can coexist in human-dominated systems and help societies with their efforts to become more sustainable.
Urban ecologist Zipperer and Carreiro have identified four interrelated factors of an urban ecosystem:
1) The prevailing climate,
2) The substrate,
3) The resident organisms and their residual effects,
4) Relief, from soil erosion
5) The time over which the first four factors have been acting, which can be summarized as the history of the system. (Zipperer et al., 1997; Carreiro et al., 2009)
Urban ecosystems are diverse, and include human activities that sustain human life forms, (infrastructure; roads, dams and buildings) and biological inventory (plants, wildlife, water systems, food systems and microbes).
The condition of urban ecological systems can be useful indicators for comparing the effects of climate change, land use patterns, organismal components, and substrates on human and biological health. (Zipperer et al., 1997; Carreiro et al., 2009)
The Cityscape and Urban Ecology
Now what are the boundaries, nature or human made, of urban ecosystems? Wittig explains that an urban ecosystem’s boundaries are not restricted to human or natural areas. The ecosystem does not occur alone. They are always in contact with the adjacent ecosystems. Their boundaries are not well defined and they may overlap. There are certain areas where their boundaries are well defined it includes the pond and land ecosystems. They have some common organisms which includes the birds. There is an exchange of inorganic nutrients between them.
In the broadest sense, urban ecosystems comprise not only city cores, but suburban areas, sparsely settled villages connected by commuting or utilities to more densely settled and thoroughly built up areas. Strictly speaking, urban ecological systems do not necessarily encompass the hinterlands or remote villages in sparsely populated areas. Affected by energy and material transformations generated in urban core and suburban lands (Wittig, 2009)
Urban ecologists like Pickett have sought to define urban ecological system boundaries as a fusion of human and natural constraints:
The boundaries of urban ecosystems are often set by watersheds, airsheds, commuting radii, or by administrative units. In other words, boundaries of urban ecosystems are set in the same ways and for the same reasons as are the boundaries of any other ecosystem. In the case of urban ecosystems, it is clear that many fluxes and interactions extend well beyond their boundaries defined for political, research, or biophysical reasons. Urban ecology, as an integrative science with roots in ecology, focuses on urban ecosystems as broadly conceived. —Pickett et al, 1997
Ecological design is defined by Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan as “any form of design that minimizes environmentally destructive impacts by integrating itself with living processes” (Van der Ryn, Cowan S, 1996).
Ecological design is an integrative ecologically responsible design discipline. It helps connect scattered efforts in green architecture, sustainable agriculture, ecological engineering, ecological restoration and other fields.
This design approach must be organized around what can be called the “ecological design arts,” around developing the analytic abilities, ecological wisdom, and practical wherewithal essential to making things fit in a world of humans, microbes, plants, animals, and entropy (Orr, 1992).
Ecological problems are often the result of urban design, planning and human consumption problems: our land uses, transportation systems, buildings, and technologies often do not fit comfortably in the human or natural biosphere. Ecological design requires the ability to comprehend patterns that connect to nature, which requires working outside mainstream disciplines to see things in their larger context. Ecological design is the careful meshing of human purposes with the larger patterns and flows of the natural world; it is the careful study of those patterns and flows to inform human purposes (Orr, 1992).
How can architects foster integration between architecture and urban ecosystems? I think we have no other choice except to choose ecological design and planning as the best option to save our scarce resources for generation to come.
Architects encourage and forge mutual relationships with the diverse stakeholders and professionals who deal with planning and design of the built and natural environment. We must work as a team and in the spirit of cooperation with urban agriculturist, landscape designers, biologist, environmental justice advocates, urban conservation officials, green economy / jobs advocates, wildlife managers, clean water and wetland activist, public health activist, artist and musicians, air quality experts, policy makers, sanitation and waste management officials, community organizers, builders, environmental educators and many more who have a vested interest in visioning a healthy urban environment.
We seek to embrace a critical analysis of environmental issues and problems as a way to foster a systems approach to caring for our fragile environment. Introduces a systems design model that cuts across academic and professional boundaries and the divide between social and physical sciences to move towards a transdisciplinary approach to environmental and social problem-solving. This approach will also result in high quality building design, integrating greenery, natural building materials, natural light and water in a harmonious balance. There are many conceptual and built examples of creative cutting edge ecological buildings.
I will develop a portfolio of successful and creative ecological buildings as part of a public outreach and in class educational tool.
The purpose of ecological design is to create a vision of how the natural world and the human world can be rejoined by taking ecology as the basis for design. Ecological design intelligence—effective adaptation to and integration with nature’s processes can be applied at all levels of scale, creating revolutionary forms of buildings, landscapes, cities, and technologies.
Ken Yeang, famous Malaysian architect and one of the pioneers in ecological architecture, has offered a set of principles / guidelines for designing with nature:
The ecological approach to design is about environmental bio-integration.
Our built forms and systems need to imitate nature’s processes, structure, and functions, as in its ecosystems.
The process of designing to imitate ecosystems is Ecomimesis. This is the fundamental premise for eco design.
There is much misperception about what is ecological design. We must not be misled and seduced by technology.
The other common misperception is that if our building gets a high notch in a green-rating system, then all is well.
Ecosystems in the biosphere are definable units containing both biotic and abiotic constituents acting together as a whole. (Yeang, 2008)
Ecological design principles create a sustainable world with increased energy efficiency, fewer toxics, less pollution (both indoor and outdoor pollution) greener and healthy buildings, accessible green open spaces, reduce noise pollution, healthy social relationships, reduced waste and a happy well adjusted citizenry.
Ken Yeang; Eco Bay Complex: Abu Dhabi; Vernacular urbanism in the middle. (Yeang, 2008)
Ecological Continuity and Building Design
Ecological continuity describes the process of uninterrupted succession, or union with a natural inventory, i.e., plant life, waterways, and open space, in an effort to maintain the natural and healthy integrity of a biosphere.
Ecological linkage describes the process of utilizing ecological design principles as as a key factor for designing and restoring damaged natural and human habitats.
As it applies to building design, the concept of continuity begins with knowing the ecology of site and the limits of construction activity. The process of constructing a building can adversely affect the natural environment. Every site possesses an ecological limiting capacity; to which if overburdened, the site suffers irrevocably ecological damage, such as soil erosion and destruction of local biodiversity.
Achieving these linkages ensures a wider level of species diversity, human and wildlife interaction and social and physical mobility and sharing of resources across municipal boundaries. Such real improvements in connectivity enhance biodiversity and further increase habitat resilience and species survival. Providing ecological corridors and linkages in regional planning is crucial in making urban patterns more biologically viable.
The footprint print we leave after construction process is complete will have a minimal impact on the site’s ecology, and if the site remains vegetated (and not entirely paved) it provides greater land area for surface water percolation back into the earth. We must ascertain the ecosystem’s structure and energy flow, its species diversity and other ecological properties.
The secret of designing successful ecological architecture is to embrace the notion that the site is a wholistic living natural element, similar to a tree; and functions as a part of an organic living environmental inventory.
This linkage of these organic elements must be extended vertically and horizontally, with vegetative connectivity stretching upwards within the built form to its roofscape, and horizontally in conjunction with the ground floor contours of the structure. More than enhancing ecological linkages, we must biologically integrate the inorganic aspects and processes of our built environment with the landscape so that they mutually become eco-systemic. This is the creation of human-made ecosystems compatible with the ecosystems in nature (Yeang, 2007).
ArchiNature: Architecture as living element in urban ecosystem; The centre for Ecological learnings (proposal); Tehran, Iran. Architect: Kaveh Samiei (AAG.) ArchiNature: Architecture as part of nature, home of animals and plants too or eco-systemic integration with nature. The centre for Ecological learnings (proposal); Tehran, Iran. Architect: Kaveh Samiei (AAG) Ecological residential complex; Semnan, Iran. Architects: Kaveh Samiei and Hamidreza Golzardi. Multifunctional ecological space in a residential complex; Semnan, Iran. Architects: Kaveh Samiei and Hamidreza Golzardi.
Eco-Systematic Integration
Architects and environmental planners should consider buildings and other landscape structures as organic elements of a larger ecosystem. Ecologically built structures will create small and less stressful environmental footprints, which in turn will promote ecological connectivity with rehabilitated vegetative networks, which in turn will enhance the quality of life of human and wildlife occupants.
One strategy assigns the built and natural to distinct realms, where wildlife habitat cores are pushed to the perimeter of the site, providing a clearing for housing, commerce, parking, and recreation. Other efforts to achieve significant “interdigitation” between built and natural realms include adding green roofs to structures. Green roofs serve as stepping-stone corridors for various avian species as well as a decreas the use of heating, ventilation, and HVAC systems.
Landscape-like eco building; Monterey Bay Shores Ecoresort. Designed by Thomas Rettenwender and Brent Bucknum for Rana Creek Habitat Restoration and BSA Architects. http://www.earthrisedesign.com/files/MPC-pub090709.pdf
Rainscreen facades provide habitat for cavity dwellers such as kestrels and birds. For many sensitive species, life in close proximity to development would be intolerable, yet numerous species would flourish under these conditions, and humans would have day-to-day contact with the wild. Assuming a thoughtful position between extreme segregation and integration, how consistent should the relationship between built and natural orders be (or between sub-orders within these)? Should we promote flowing, landscape-like building forms which closely synchronized with their surroundings, an approach that holds great currency in contemporary architectural circles (Muller, 2007)?
A growing body of literature under the rubric of landscape urbanism has stressed the closing of boundaries between architecture and landscape, between the ecological and cultural. Recent discourses and architectural models offer advances in theoretical thinking and design expressions. However, actual outcomes in terms of improved ecological functions in the urban environment remain to be seen (Hou, 2012).
Vertically, eco-skyscrapers can protect valuable open space by building up, rather than out. And the outer skin of the building could produce substantial amounts of energy for heating and cooling the entire structure as well as provide energy to adjacent structures.
Zipperer, W.C., Foresman, T.W., Sisinni, S.M., Pouyat, R.V.( 1997): Urban tree cover: an ecological perspective. Urban Ecosyst. 1, 229e247.
Carreiro, M.M., Pouyat, R.V., Tripler, C.E., Zhu,W. (2009): Carbon and nitrogen cycling in soils of remnant forests along urbanerural gradients: case studies in New York City and Louisville, Kentucky. In: McDonnell, M.J., Hahs, A., Breuste, J. (Eds.), Comparative Ecology of Cities and Towns. Cambridge University Press, New York, pp. 308e328.
Wittig, R. (2009): What is the main object of urban ecology? Determining demarcation using the example of research into urban flora. In: McDonnell, M.J., Hahs, A., Breuste, J. (Eds.), Eclogy of Cities and Towns: a Comparative Approach. Cambridge University Press, New York, pp. 523e529.
Muller, Brook. (2007): Continuity of Singularities: Urban Architectures, Ecology and the Aesthetics of Restorative Orders, Department of Architecture, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, 97403.
One hundred and sixteen years after the Supreme Court decision ofPlessy v. Ferguson, fifty-six years after the Supreme Court ended the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and forty-eight years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, government discrimination in transportation has not ended. In this section we will look at racism in transportation policies showing that the policies are clearly not colorblind.
All across the country, people of color and poor people do not have equal access to transportation. Access to transportation, influences ones upper social mobility and allows people to achieve better social and economic opportunities. Current transportation policies that favor roads over public transit, suburbs over cities create and enforce racial and economic inequality. They help to further polarize communities on the basis of class and color, and municipalities need to stop transit racism and revisit their public transportation agendas.
As stated earlier the term racism refers to any policy practice, or directive that differentially affects or disadvantages (whether intended or unintended) individuals, groups, or communities based on race or color. Institutionalized racism is part of the culture and history of the United States, it’s in the water and engrained into our society Transportation racism is the creation of racist, separate and unequal public transportation systems
Ever since the Emancipation Proclamation, which abolished the enslavement of Black people in the United States, Blacks have struggled to end discrimination on buses and trains.
In 1892, a black man, (actually he was biracial), named Homer Plessy who could easily pass for white,
Homer Plessy
decided to challenge a Louisiana law that required separate train cars for Whites and Blacks. Plessy intentionally boarded a car reserved for Whites and knew he would be arrested. The case made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court. In 1886 the U.S. Supreme court upheld Louisiana’s Separate Car Act that called for segregated seating in railroad cars. The case better known as Plessy v Ferguson ushered in an era of separate but equal. Transportation racism dates back to the concept of separate but equal which was set in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, a U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld segregated seating on railroad cars. In 1953 Blacks in Baton Rouge Louisiana staged the first successful bus boycott against racial discrimination. This was followed by the infamous and successful 1955 Montgomery Alabama bus Boycott when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man.
The 1954 case Brown v. the Board of Education was also partly about transportation racism. The famous civil rights case was a class action law suit. One of the cases, Biggs v. Elliot was about getting a bus to transport kids to and from school. The kids that went to the white schools in Calendon County, South Carolina, road the bus back and forth to school, the kids that went to the Black segregated school had to walk because the school board of Clarendon County refused to provide bus for the kids that went to the segregated schools. The parents sued and this case became part of the famous Brown v. the Board of Education.
Today, blacks are physically isolated from the means to upward mobility, in other words jobs. Blacks tend to own fewer cars or no cars when compared to whites and transportation in most areas of the United States in inadequate. Another part of transportation discrimination is the problem of Sprawl.
In their book, Sprawl City: Race Politics, and Planning in Atlanta the authors analyzes and critique the crisis resulting from urban sprawl in the Metropolitan area of Atlanta, Georgia. The book puts sprawlrelated concerns as a core environmental justice and civil rights issue. The book focuses on how government housing, education, and transportation policies have aided and in some cases subsidized separate but unequal economic development and segregated neighborhoods. The authors explain the causes and consequences of sprawl, and outlines policy recommendations and an action agenda for coping with sprawl-related problems, both in metropolitan Atlanta and around the country.
The authors define Sprawl as “random, unplanned growth characterized by inadequate accessibility to essential land uses such as housing, jobs and public services that include schools, parks, green space and public transportation. Typically strip centers, low density residential housing, and other isolated, scattered developments leapfrog over the landscape without rhyme or reason. Sprawl fueled growth pushes people further apart geographically, politically, economically, and socially. The economic boom times that drive sprawl creates unequal opportunities. Developments in the suburbs often mean empty storefronts in the city’s core. The government creates more roads that lead to the suburbs s but do not create public transit to the suburbs. Without public transportation to the suburbs, new jobs, created by suburban business development are out of reach to city residents who do not have cars. This creates the concentration of poverty in the city’s urban core. Sprawl is not a necessary by-product of metropolitan growth and economic development. Growth can be planned and managed. Sprawl drives up transportation cost. Families are spending more money to drive further distances to work, school, etc. There are more cars on the road which creates more pollution due to traffic congestion. According to the CDC sprawl is a major health threat and during the 1996 Olympics games there was a 22.5% reduction traffic and a 42% reduction in Asthma related emergency room and hospital visits.
Transportation equity (TE) is where concerns extend to disparate outcomes in planning, maintenance, and infrastructure development. Transportation is a key component in addressing poverty, unemployment, equal opportunity, and ensuring equal access to education, employment, and other public services. Transportation equity is about fairness, access, and opportunity to better transportation that will take people to where the jobs are located. Transportation equity looks at the negative environmental costs of transportation and scrutinizes discrepancies in resource allocation and investment. It also seeks to address unequal outcomes in planning, operation and maintenance and infrastructure development. Transportation equity focuses on the distribution of benefits and enhancements among the various population groups, especially among low income and people of color communities.
There are three general types of transportation equity, Horizontal Equity focuses on fairness of cost and benefit allocation between individuals and groups who are considered comparable in wealth and ability. Vertical Equity with Regard to Income and Social Class is concerned with allocation of cost between income and social classes. Vertical Equity with Regard to Mobility Need and Ability focuses on how well an individual’s needs are met compared with others in their community.
Cost and benefits associated with transportation developments are not randomly distributed. The discriminatory effects of transportation projects can be included under three categories of inequity Procedural Inequity, Geographic Inequity and Social Inequity. Procedural Inequity results when transportation decisions are not carried out in a uniform, fair and consistent manner with involvement of diverse public stake holders. Geographic Inequityresults from the geographic and special impacts of transportation decisions. These impacts affect rural, urban, and central-city neighborhoods differently. Such as physically being located on the wrong side of the tracks and receiving substandard services. Social Inequality results when transportation benefits and burdens are not randomly distributed across population groups.
Access to transportation, whether public or private, influences ones upper social mobility and allows people to move into better social and economic opportunities. The book Highway Robbery: Transportation Racism & New Routes to Equity links the inequalities in transportation to larger economic, health, environmental justice, and quality of life issues. The book shows that publicly funded segregation jeopardizes health and limits economic opportunities, and creates feelings of frustration and isolation. The authors demonstrate how transportation policy and urban planning create and enforce racial and economic inequality. Highway Robberyasserts these current policies will further polarize communities on the basis of class and color, and the authors in this anthology demand that cities and states revisit their public transportation policy agendas.
Changes in zoning have made it possible for suburbs to increase their share of office space, while the urban core of cities see their share declining. Federal and state transportation funds favor roads and highways that lead to the suburbs and favor suburban commuters and auto owners over people who are dependent on public transit for their transportation needs. Transportation users suffer rundown buses, long waits, longer rides, poor connections, service cuts, overcrowding, and daily exposure to some of the environmental pollutants from cars. A few years ago I read an article that related that several members of congress felt that spending money on public transportation was a waste of time. The belief was that government spends money on public transit, yet most Americans do not use it. Thus, public transit is a waste of money. This is not the entire picture of what happens with public transportation.
Far too much of our transportation dollars are spent on roads and highways at the expense of communities of color, the government encourages people to use their cars and not public transportation. Federal tax dollars build and subsidize the roads, freeways and public transit systems. The government builds highways to the suburbs and then subsidizes the construction of suburban homes. In other words the government gives tax breaks to home owners who buy newer homes, basically paying people to move out to the suburbs, another term is middleclass welfare. The transportation projects of building the roads out to the suburbs, have the unintended consequence of dividing, isolating and disrupting some communities while imposing inequitable economic, environmental, and health burdens on them.
Suburban communities benefit from the building of the roads and highways while the cities bear the burden and pay the cost in poor health and loss of jobs. Many children who live in areas near an interstate suffer from asthma that is probably caused by pollutants that come from the exhaust of cars.
Moreover the federal government spends more money on highways than on public transit. These new roads are built that lead to the suburbs without significant public transportation service, and thereby open up those areas for development and new jobs. The result is people leave the city, move to the suburbs where the jobs are located, this takes jobs out of the cities core. Thus, highway spending shifts people and jobs to areas without public transit, thus gutting transit ridership.
Transportation is a key component in addressing poverty, unemployment, equal opportunity, and ensuring equal access to education, employment, and other public services. Transportation equity is about fairness, access, and opportunity to better transportation that will take people to where the jobs are located. Transportation equity looks at the negative environmental costs of transportation and scrutinizes discrepancies in resource allocation and investment. It also seeks to address unequal outcomes in planning, operation and maintenance and infrastructure development. Transportation equity focuses on the distribution of benefits and enhancements among the various population groups, especially among low income and people of color communities.
In the city of Atlanta transportation policies are implicated in land-use patterns, unhealthy air, and suburban sprawl in metropolitan Atlanta. Transportation and land-use plans contributed to social, economic, and racial inequities. Race shaped the path of land-use planning and public transportation in metro Atlanta. Racism has kept the Atlanta region economically and geographically divided. Atlanta metropolitan area has a regional transit system in name only. The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) serves just two counties, Fulton and DeKalb. The original plan called for a five-county regional transit system. In the 1960s, MARTA was hailed as the solution to the region’s growing traffic and pollution problems. Atlanta’s white economic and political elites, led by Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr., pushed for a rapid-rail system that they felt would market Atlanta as a “cosmopolitan” New South city. White suburbanites did not want public transit or blacks in their communities. For whites in Atlanta MARTA has stood for “Moving Africans Rapidly through Atlanta.”
The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991(ISTEA) attempted to level the playing field between Highway and transit investment. This law changed existing patterns where the federal government covered about 90 percent of the cost for highway and about 75 percent of the cost for transit. This caused the local governments to invest their funds in highway transportation because the federal share was bigger. This law also allowed states to be flexible in their highway funds and move funds to transit and other alternatives. ISTEA has since expired and was replaced with the 1998 Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) that authorized federal funds to improve the nation’s transportation infrastructure. TEA-21 expired 2003 and was replaced with TEA-3 to rejuvenate urban areas through transportation redevelopment, increased transit and sustainable alternatives to urban sprawl. TEA-3 adhered to civil rights laws and affirmed the principles of environmental justice.
Race still matters in the United States and the deterioration of urban public transportation is totally do to racism and must be addressed. Transit racism (TR) was responsible for the death of 17 year old Cynthia Wiggins of Buffalo, New York. Wiggins was unable to secure a job in Buffalo but was able to find work in the mall. On her way to work Wiggins was crushed by a dump truck while crossing a seven lane highway because the number 6 bus, used by mostly inner city blacks was not allowed to stop at the suburban Walden Galleria Mall. Members of the Wiggins family and members of the black community charged the Walden Galleria Mall with using the highway as a racial barrier to exclude some city residents. The case was settled 10 days after it was filed with several million dollars left to Wiggin’s son.
Transportation racism is also responsible for a large part of the deaths that occurred during and after the Hurricane Katrina. Forecasters predicted that Hurricane Katrina was going to be deadly, government officials knew that nearly 134,000 residents-most of them poor and black did not have transportation and would be stuck in New Orleans and would not be able to evacuate. The government failed to provide transportation to evacuate people before the Hurricane and continued to fail in evacuating people after the hurricane.
A Green Shadow Cabinet (greenshadowcabinet.us) is being launched on Earth Day to provide an alternative to the corporate policies promoted by the Obama administration (Democrats) and the Republican Party.
The Cabinet includes a Bureau of Food Sovereignty. Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally meaningful food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. Our current federal policies put national food sovereignty at risk.
Food is a necessity and a fundamental human right. And those who grow it have a right to a fair return for their labor and safe working conditions.
The Green Shadow Cabinet will promote a green food system that provides a high quality of life for farmers and food workers, nutritious and safe food for consumers, and reward farming methods that enhance the quality of water, soil, and air, and the beauty of the landscape.
We need to reduce the carbon foot print of our food system, including supporting local food sourcing. We need to phase-out man-made pesticides and artificial fertilizers, using organic and Integrated Pest Management techniques as an alternative to chemical-based agriculture. We need to promote energy and fuel conservation through rotational grazing, cover-crop rotations, nitrogen-fixing systems, and fuel-free, clean renewable energy development on the farm. We need to support community agriculture such as urban farms, Community Supported Agriculture, farmers markets (wholesale and retail), food cooperatives, and community gardens. We need to protect community ownership and control of water. We need to preserve farmland, especially close to urban areas. We need to provide financial support to young and disadvantaged farmers. We need to incentivize fruits and vegetables, and correct the problem of food deserts in many low-income communities. We need to promote sustainable water uses in agriculture and avoid threats to water quality including hydrofracking for natural gas.
Many of the problems with the American food system can be traced to the Farm Bill, currently up for reauthorization. Current subsidies support the overuse of water, pesticide and nitrogenous fertilizer. Its financial support for commodities such as corn (sugar) and soy (fat) contributes to overly processed unhealthy foods being the staples of the American diet, resulting in massive public health problems such as high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity. It promotes monoculture crops rather than diversified sustainable farming. The subsides overwhelming goes to corporate agribusiness rather than family farms. The farm bill supports genetic engineering of our food system while discriminating against organic farming. It subsidizes the conversion of crops to ethanol, which is not energy efficient and contributes to increasing world hunger and higher food prices.
The Farm Bill also undermines the food sovereignty of other nations. Around the world, particularly in the global south, family farmers and local food self-sufficiency are disappearing, in part, because of their inability to compete with our subsidized commodity crops.
And while the food stamp (SNAP) program is the biggest part of the farm bill, the benefits are too low and the program is too restrictive to end hunger in America.
America’s present agriculture system is not ecologically sound. Our so-called cheap food comes at the expense of the exploitation of our farmers along with the oppression of third world peoples, inhumane treatment of animals, pollution of air and water, and degradation of our land. Its reliance on chemicals, fossil fuels, vast amounts of water, and long distance transportation is bad for our environment and contributes to climate change. Runoff from agriculture uses – farm fields and animal corporate farms (CAFOs) – is the largest source of water pollution. Agriculture accounts for about 20% of our energy consumption and 8 to 10% of our greenhouse gases.
A relatively small number of corporations increasingly control food production, availability, and cost. Livestock farmers are forced to sell to a handful of processors, making them little more than contract serfs who are forced to utilize farm practices that are abusive to animals and unhealthy to consumers. Unsound public policies have resulted in corporate consolidation of the food chain making it increasingly difficult for small and mid-sized farms to continue operation. The Obama administration failed to adequately implement the reforms enacted in the Farm Bill five years to provide fairer competition for farmers and livestock producers, and these minor reforms are under attack in the present reauthorization.
The Green Shadow Cabinet supports eliminating patent rights for genetic material, life forms, gene-splicing techniques, and biochemicals derived from them. Food and life belongs to all of us; it should not be turned into another commodity to be exploited for corporate profit.
Mark A. Dunlea is Executive Director of the Hunger Action Network of NYS and a member of the Executive Committee of the Green Party of NY. He is author of Madame President: The Unauthorized Biography of the First Green Party President.
