Multimobility, Multispeed Cities: A Challenge for Architects, Town Planners, and Politicians

摘要

An important characteristic of the metropolitan landscape is the mobility of its inhabitants, who utilize multiple modes at multiple speeds. The essence of mobility is presented here through a progression of thoughts that describe its importance and the challenges it poses for the future form of urbanized regions. The history of cities is deeply interwoven with specific techniques for transporting and storing people, information and goods/values. Thus, even early cities needed to develop a dense building fabric, money, accounting, written records, and food-preservation techniques. Techniques for transportation and storage of people, information and goods constitute a system. These techniques constitute an interdependent system: there are few movements that do not simultaneously mobilize resources from all three of these domains. The form of cities and the functional and social organization of urban spaces interact with the techniques of transportation and storage. The system for transporting and storing people, information and goods has a profound impact on the shape of the city, on urban space and social organization. Zoning, urban densities, centralities, axial ties, polarization, and the functional and social segregation that occur within our cities depend upon and simultaneously shape their development. The dynamics of the system for transporting and storing people, information and goods accelerate big-city growth and "metropolization." Contrary to the beliefs of many thinkers, the development of private transportation and telecommunication technologies has not resulted in the demise of cities. On the contrary, as economists such as Paul Krugman have explained, the growth of cities and the concentration of activities promote the development of transportation and telecommunications in mutually reinforcing ways. Being "social objects," technologies are rooted in the logic of society, and serve the agents that dominate it. Thus, it is hard to imagine that they would run counter to the conditions of their creation. We can conclude that NICT (New Information and Communication Technologies) and private transportation have thus promoted metropolization rather than limit it.