Neighbourhood has been, and always will be, a significant factor in living sustainably, especially if human practices come to mimic ecological diversity in unity, layers, niches and ecotones. First, I discuss global cities moving to address environmental and social sustainabil-ity by de-prioritising the car, increasing green and open spaces and planning for connectedness in neighbourhood precincts. Second, I show how planning encouraged sustainable practices in Edo (Japan), which urbanised in the seventeenth century on a compact model of multiple easily replicated cell-like districts with waterways and bridges used for transport and travel.
Car space, open space and green space
Many council planning guidelines fly in the face of sustainability principles, say by insisting on space for cars but not for storing bikes in apartment blocks and public spaces. Planning application and approval processes often prove unfriendly and unwieldy for individual applicants while at a general level appearing too lax, as in the case of the City of Melbourne, where the population is expected to rise from 4.3m (2014) to 7.7m in 2051.47 A 2015 study of six global cities with high-density, high-rise inner-city dwellings showed that – in contrast to Hong Kong, New York City (NYC), Seoul, Tokyo and Vancouver – apartment block developments in Melbourne were proceeding without effective controls to density, height or proximity to other towers and little regulation of apartment quality, such as light (windows) and air. Furthermore, Melburnian developers did not pay bonuses used by other city councils to establish, improve and maintain open space facilities for residents.
Instead Melbourne’s apartment dwellers enjoyed a fraction of such space available in the comparison cities.48
To illustrate the implications of planning guidelines, the 2015 study proposed a hypothetical set of apartment developments centring on a dense CBD block, to reveal that Melbourne’s policies demanded four to nine times the amount of space for cars than Vancouver, NYC or Hong Kong. Meanwhile, hypothetical residents in the Melbournian block would have to make do with a tiny 0.1sq m green or open space per capita compared with the World Health Organisation (WHO) 9sq m standard for green space per capita. While those in the other three cities would get 11 to 30 times the Melbourne average, they too fell far short of the WHO minimum standard.49 In contrast, London boasts 27sq m and Amsterdam 87.5sq m green and open space per capita.As city populations rise, the pressures on competing uses for space increase, so planning skills and power are crucial to create and maintain quality amenity for residents.
To address these challenges, one mid-2016 plan for the polluted and noisy Catalan capital Barcelona – currently offering an average of 6.6sq mgreen and open spaceper capita (centrally located Eixample residents must make do with 1.85sq m) – envisaged slicing the city into superblocks (superilles) impenetrable by vehicular traffic unless travelling slowly and specifically for local purposes. Thus, locally, pedestrians, bicyclists and public transport would become dominant, bike paths would be extended to three times their current length, with more than half of the streets now monopolised by mechanical vehicles re-appropriated for environmentally friendly mobility and green and open spaces. Such superblocks would become stronger internally networked neighbourhood communities.50
A similar set of strategies recommended by Arup, to ban cars from the centre and greatly expand greenery on top of, among and around city buildings, has been adopted as urban policy in Spain’s capital Madrid.
These policies were developed to counteract the impacts of pollution, the growing numbers and intensity of heat waves, generalised drought and flash flooding resulting from climate change. Greenery absorbs and retains rain while preventing buildings, and their inhabitants, from heating up so much.51 In 2009, Toronto authorities introduced regulations to ensure that all future industrial and residential buildings had green roofs and, in 2015, Paris authorities passed legislation requiring all new construction in the commercial zone to install green roofs and/or solar panels.52
From Edo to Tokyo
The superblocks proposed for Barcelona hark back to traditional planning in cities such as Edo, where Tokyo now stands. Furthermore, some traditional Japanese cultural mores continue to enhance urban living today. Centuries ago, crowded lower Edo had 1700 districts, each housing around 300 residents, and some 69,000 inhabitants per sq km.
Each square district had a central main road, secured main gates at each end and, internally, were administered by five upper-class families selected from around one-quarter of the residents who were small property-owning artisans and merchants. Many districts were character-ised by an industry, such as shoe-making or carpentry, and its associated culture. Property-less artisans and merchants rented overcrowded row houses from upper-class landlords – accessing shared toilets, baths and a well on an adjacent street. Japan’s modernisation in the second half of the nineteenth century more or less eradicated these communities and their homes, a task completed by the 1923 earthquake and Second World War bombing.53
Multi-storey apartment buildings typified reconstruction in the centre and suburban areas of Tokyo, the world’s most populous city. Yet Evelyn Schultz refers to numerous ‘small neighbourhoods in which the elements and structures of the pre-modern era have survived’, having parallels with intentionally mixed-use revitalisation and privately owned public spaces integrating residential, commercial and green spaces in North America.
A recent longing for prioritising the ‘slow life’ – walking, eating local food, sustainability, cultural traditions, community and neighbourhood – are building blocks of what Schulz calls the ‘collective living’ of small-scale mixed-use urban redevelopments.54 Similarly, Hildner points to sustain-ability benefits of Japanese culture: adept at living in small spaces and nurturing traditional concepts, such as likening a ‘short useful life’ with
‘wood construction and ideas of religious purity and renovation’, both reducing embodied and operating energy and materials.55
Planning for dense settlements
A ‘compact city’ means more than developing density through apartment building encompassing proximity to essential services, daily work and infrastructure. Improving designs for density and green spaces, many contemporary planning proposals focus on ‘new urbanist’ principles of
transit-oriented development, where evenly spread infrastructure and services support neighbourhood precincts and local economies, as in Edo. A ‘smart city’, using multiple innovations in information and com-munication technology for systemic efficiencies, is often considered complementary to the development of a compact city.
However, the greening of our cities is far from a high-tech top-down story as guerrilla gardening and other forms of occupying public spaces, such as hand-knits for poles and seats, and hospitality and eco-tourist ventures promote green spaces and activities. The recent growth in participatory planning offers models for greater residential input into decisions made by local authorities, who are increasingly responsible for complex urban developments. Nurturing neighbourhoods and their communities, implementing mixed-use buildings and zones, and encouraging socio-cultural diversity and mix are key aspects of operationalising and assessing appropriate models for future cities, incorporating the best of planning in the past with greater democracy for the future.
Social media offers means for residents to access all kinds of information about activities, goods and services available locally. While claims of sharing economy and platform cooperativism advocates often exaggerate the potential of novel technology, provided they remain accessible to all, digital technologies can enhance the knowledge and skills of many individual and collective activities. For instance, supported by universities and others – for the purpose of collective resistance – the San Francisco Bay anti-eviction online mapping project collects and presents visual and narrative data recording residential dispossession through gentrification, homelessness and eviction and the privatisation of public spaces as a result of contemporary capitalist developments.56
conclusion
This chapter discussed challenges relating to the demand and supply of smaller apartments if living in smaller spaces is to prove genuinely, holistically, environmentally sustainable. A small apartment needs to be well-designed for flexibility and adaptability and to either provide for two or more occupants, or nest in a building where householders can share, say, laundry, social and work facilities, and garden and other green spaces. Could not a community of apartment-block neighbours recreate the household sharing of yesteryear? Multi-unit apartment blocks can
include shared space by economising on individual dwelling sizes, and shared facilities with equipment offer more than any small dwelling can hold while saving on purchase, energy and other running costs. If cars are marginalised, the block needs to be well-located to infrastruc-ture with residents close to transport, parks and other open space with opportunities for community gardening, play, walking and bike riding.
In many cities, so few mainstream commercial developers offer community-based sustainable apartment options that such innovative developments often end up being unaffordable simply as a function of niche market forces. However, Part II discusses a range of community-based sustainable developments that offer, often more affordable, alternatives, such as: sustainability-focused cohousing settlements, ecovillages, cooperative housing, joint households and collectives of tiny houses. These developments have been characterised by their non-commercial and innovative nature, their victorious struggles with planners and other regulators, and their discreet disregard of authorities as they bent or broke rules that might otherwise shackle their efforts to establish a sustainable and affordable way forward for human habitation on Earth.