In this context, the compact city is associated to:

On the ground, the dilemma between urban form and transport impact lies unresolved, even in those cities that have pioneered both urban compactness and travel demand management, and notwithstanding some remarkable successes in both fields. There are, of course, enormous differences among European cities regarding both their predisposition and their responses to current trends. In his article, Scheurer discusses the cities of Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Hamburg. In this context, it is in particular the synergies of traditional urbanism that have gradually been sacrificed in the modern city. Historically, the small-scale integration of urban activities within a compact district, a street, even an individual building not only served to facilitate productive exchange between interdependent trades, but self-constructed a public realm that formed the base of a city's informal, social and cultural exchange. During the 20th century, there was a prevailing trend to fragment urban complexity and to try and optimize each individual element within its individual spatial allocation.

Crucial criteria for compact city policy:

Even though decentralized concentration and the short-trip city are relatively recent paradigms, they contain elements from earlier urban and regional planning models and can thus, to a limited extent, be assessed to their expected efficacy when dominating planning philosophy.

Unfortunately, elected metro-regional governments with planning and implementation authority are still the exception to the rule of municipal fragmentation, and the slow pace of institutional reform in this field does not exactly indicate a sea change. As examples, both Amsterdam's proposed metropolitan council and the amalgamation of the states of Berlin and Brandenburg were knocked back in public referenda during the late 1990s. London's reinstated metropolitan authority stands out as one of the few positive developments here. But even in the hypothetical case of bringing the various actors in local and regional government, business and the populace in line to support compact city goals politically, physical urban structures still fulfill no more than a passive role in the sustainability transition. This is because they enable, rather than enforce, sustainable behavior patterns that can translate into lower resource use and less travel impact in cities. While - as elaborated earlier - a sizeable body of research provides evidence to the notion that users of compact urban areas produce significantly less automobile travel than those in dispersed areas at a fixed point in time, the issue becomes more complex in the context of long-term spatial development patterns which clearly move into the direction of ever increasing inter- and intra-regional interdependency.

Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute - RMIT University
Melbourne
Dr. Jan Scheurer (Research Associate), tel. +(61 3) 9925 9573

//2005

//2007

Jan Scheurer

research

Urban Policy > Urban environment > Urban renewal

Urban restructuring