In so many words, technology ain’t the boon it appears to be

“WORDS are things. You must be careful. Careful about calling people out of their names, using racial pejoratives and sexual pejoratives and all that ignorance. Don’t do that. Some day we’ll be able to measure the power of words. “I think they are things. I think they get on the walls. They get in your wall paper. They get in your rugs; in your upholstery. In your clothes and finally into you.” – Dr. Maya Angelou

Sometimes I forget the power of words, for good or ill. And it’s even easier to forget how the city itself communicates the values of those who design it, and their intent for our lives.

It’s not difficult to make the connection between street design and traffic safety, or to see how streets provide access to the places we want to reach.

But we need to mentally adjust focus to see that streets provide structure to the city, and how that structure sends a message of who belongs in it.

We start maybe with a donkey as a form of transport on a dirt path. As towns and cities grow, we keep those paths clear for transport, and as the number of donkeys increases, we see a need for wider paths. Then someone thinks of having the donkeys pulling carts on wheels, and the paths need to be paved with stones that prevent the wheels from sinking in the mud.

At some point the horse-drawn chariot is introduced, which is faster than the donkey cart, and this requires smoother surfaces and roads with gentler bends. Later, engineers put sewers under them, and telephone lines over them. And so it continues…

Each of these developments is revolutionary in what it can mean for the size and structure of the city, and its economy, but the more the city develops, the less flexible it becomes in accommodating old and new technologies.

This would not be a problem if each succeeding technology were better than the previous one, but that is not always the case. If the car were the pinnacle of transport technology for moving around cities, it would be better for everyone, and we could work towards getting rid of everything else.

I could write a book on the ways in which cars don’t make better cities, but one of the biggest challenges is how they reduce travel choices for society even as they seem to improve travel options for the individual driver.

As transport has evolved from walking to riding to cycling to driving, the earlier forms of transport haven’t disappeared, they have just been added to. This is because they each meet a different need, depending on the location, the purpose of travel, the cost, and the age and ability of the person.

A bigger range of technologies should give us greater choice.

But the way most cities have designed for the car – and this was not a preordained outcome – has made all other forms of transport harder. Harder for pedestrians to cross the road, harder for cyclists to avoid being knocked down, harder for buses to reach every corner of the city.

When people argue over the future of the car, it gets emotional for drivers – not just because the car represents their freedom of movement, but also because to challenge the dominance of the car is to challenge the values that shaped the city and what it represents.

And it gets emotional for everyone else because they intuitively know that the car’s supremacy undermines other values that most of us embrace, like equality, respect and dignity.

That is why it is so difficult to resolve the conflict that comes from trying to design for all the different forms of transport. It is a product of the contradictions embedded within the city’s streets. The language of streets is a physical manifestation of struggle in sharing a public resource.

Fear of this conflict means that change happens incrementally to avoid upsetting the applecart. But then the compromises make changes less effective. They fail to reverse the reduction in choice that society is experiencing.

I’m sure every well-meaning municipal politician secretly wishes he or she were a benign dictator, able to take their city through the initial pain of transformation, knowing that if they could just take a robust urban vision to its conclusion without interference, everything would be better. Sometimes I wish they would.

The language of streets is a physical manifestation of struggle in sharing a public resource