Mobility: The City Is Movement?

Latin America is Africa, Asia, and Europe at the same time. – Félix Guattari

One of the debates about cities was between compact and dispersed cities, the relative efficiency of the compact versus the dispersed, and the results of dispersion that ended up in satellite cities without services, without state presence, or with an unplanned presence.

However, the compact city effort is threatened by the movement of cities; for example, Guadalajara has been expanding and will reach Tequila in a few decades. That will affect the compactness that Tequila has prioritized. Likewise, as Davis. M. said, “A new monster is the metropolitan region of Rio-Sao Paulo in Brazil, which includes medium-sized cities located on the axis that joins the 500 kilometers that separate the two cities. In Mexico, the giant amoeba that is Mexico City, after having swallowed Toluca, will encompass Cuernavaca, Puebla, Cuautla, Pachuca, and Queretaro, to form a single megalopolis of 50 million inhabitants.” Before, the concern was the migration from the countryside to the city, now it comes alone.

When we talk about mobility, it is assumed that we are talking about traffic, cars, trucks. However, in a broad sense, it is really anything that moves. Mobility refers to all the movements that take place in a physical space, including private and public transport, as well as transport of people and goods. For example, an airport can move up to 450,000 people in a day, and in that same space there are several forms of mobility: cars arriving, cabs, trucks, people with suitcases going in and out of stores, suitcases on conveyor belts, people in wheelchairs, electric passenger cars going from one gate to another, trains going from one terminal to another, and smoking areas, among others.

Cars, bicycles, and motorcycles are considered a fundamental part of mobility in a city, because they are the vehicles that move people from one place to another.  The objective is to achieve accessibility; that is, to facilitate transit between places to make it easier and safer to reach each of the stakeholders’ destinations.

On the other hand, another aspect of mobility is “walkability,” which is a measure of how friendly the area is for walking. Pedestrian accessibility has health benefits as well as environmental and economic benefits.

Ricardo de Vecchi, in his article, “Walkability and bicycle lanes: options to improve the sustainability of our cities,” analyzes the factors that influence the creation of a corridor of public spaces in for Xalapa, Mexico, that led to converting that city into a more human and walkable space, one that is also friendly for cyclists. The article  analyzes non-motorized mobility in the city. Mobility also means connecting the most active areas with less active ones and the poorest with the richest by means of cable cars that connect the informal city with the urban center.  It should not be forgotten that, fortunately, not everything in a city is formal and planned: there are informal spaces in people’s lives, in the way they take possession of the city. And this is true for both residents and tourists.

If mobility is not analyzed in a broad sense, there is a risk of tourism-phobia (for residents) and a kind of agoraphobia (for tourists).

Place-making contributes to the achievement in time and in a shared space that makes a city a place of coexistence and not of resistance.

As Geoffrey West explained in his book, “Scale,” in all cities there are sublinear and supralinear scales. Economies of scale are sublinear – at twice the population growth, the city needs 15% less infrastructure instead of having to double in size, for example. On the other hand, supralinearity implies that the indicator is 1.15 – doubling the population more than doubles access to services, innovation, wealth, social activity, but also, crime, diseases, garbage, and so on. 

Mobility is no stranger; i) the sublinear level is in infrastructure, such as streets, transport stations, or electricity grids, and as a city grows, it needs relatively less infrastructure per person – an economy of physical scale, for example; and ii) the supralinear level: human interaction, speed of innovation, vehicular congestion or intensity of transport use. As the city grows, the amount of interactions and economic activity increases at an accelerated rate, leading to a more intense use of the mobility system.

From another point of view, Jan Ghel studies how people use public spaces: how they walk, where they stop, how they interact, be it, pedestrian flows, permanence in space, or spontaneous social activities.

In the end, if slow mobility in cities generates social cohesion, more space for urban life and its design changes people’s behavior, a holistic vision is needed from conceptual to implementation, in mobility, walkability, and scale.

The way to achieve a change is through projects. Stop talking about the issues and make quick executions. There are always more reasons not to act than there are to do something. Many of these issues are technical as the solutions have already been tested. We must not fall into participation, which in the end means participating in opinion forums. People accompany projects and oppose abstractions.

Nota original: Mexico Business News