Abstract
This book advances the idea of moving beyond mobility as a platform for achieving more sustainable urban futures. The first chapter adopted the term urban recalibration as a framework for doing so. Rather than sweeping reforms or a Kuhnian paradigm shift, urban recalibration calls for a series of calculated steps aimed at a strategic longer-range vision of a city’s future, advancing principles of people-oriented development and place-making every bit as much as private car mobility, if not more. Rather than driving down sustainability metrics such as vehicle miles traveled (VMT) per capita in one fell swoop through dramatic changes, it entails a series of 1 to 2 percent recalibration “victories”—intersection by intersection, neighborhood by neighborhood—that cumulatively move beyond the historically almost singular focus on mobility, making for better communities, better environments, and better economies. With urban recalibration, change is more evolutionary than revolutionary.
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Notes
- 1.
Robert Cervero, “Why Go Anywhere?” Scientific American 273, no. 3 (1995): 92–93.
- 2.
Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy, Cities and Automobile Dependence: A Sourcebook (Aldershot, England: Grower, 1989); Reid Ewing and Robert Cervero, “Travel and the Built Environment,” Journal of the American Planning Association 76 (2010): 262–94.
- 3.
Ewing and Cervero, “Travel and the Built Environment,” 276.
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Zhan Guo, Asha W. Agrawal, and Jennifer Dill, “Are Land Use Planning and Congestion Pricing Mutually Supportive? Evidence from a Pilot Mileage Fee Program in Portland, OR,,” Journal of the American Planning Association 77, no. 3 (2011): 232–50.
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The exponential decay relationship between VMT per capita and urban densities holds at multiple geographic scales, regardless of whether data observations are cities, districts, or neighborhoods. See Newman and Kenworthy, Cities and Automobile Dependence; Ewing and Cervero, “Travel and the Built Environment,” 87–114.
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Hiroaki Suzuki, Robert Cervero, and Kanako Iuchi, “Transforming Cities with Transit,” (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013).
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Cervero, R., Guerra, E., Al, S. (2017). Toward Sustainable Urban Futures. In: Beyond Mobility. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-835-0_11
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