Automobiles: Not a Necessity in Urban Areas with Compact Development

In the article Growing Cooler, Ewing discusses a sustainable method known as compact development. Such a development enhances a group of communities to focus land uses around a transit station or within a transit corridor. In other words, it is a method in which Americans can reduce the vehicle miles traveled, thus lowering the amount of greenhouse gases in the air. “Better community planning and more compact development will help people live within walking or bicycling distance of some of the destinations they need to get to every day.” Compact development allows there to be interconnectedness within urban areas so that people can use the automobile less often. Studies have shown that areas that take on this sort of development are actually quite successful. “Even accounting for income and other socioeconomic differences, residents drove about 25 percent less in the more compact regions.” No, compact development won’t solve all of the issues related to CO2 emissions, but it is a great step in making our processes in large metropolises more sustainable.

            Many have speculated that there are two theoretical perspectives on how to combat the world’s problems, technological sustainability and ecological sustainability. One of these perspectives, technological sustainability, views technical solutions of creating new innovations as the best way to get the necessary resources to continue living on Earth. The other perspective, ecological sustainability, calls for the alteration of human actions. That is, maybe we shouldn’t find new ways of getting resources, but instead try to use less of those resources and live simpler lives. Ideally, it would be best to combine these two perspectives to fix our planet. Combining the theories from these perspectives would be hard, but it isn’t impossible. Using these two different perspectives, one can study the effectiveness of a sustainable process like compact development. That is, one can look at these two different perspectives and in turn compare them to the features of compact development. In my opinion, it seems as if compact development is sort of like a hybrid of these two perspectives.

The components of technological and ecological sustainability are combined within the method known as compact development. I believe that compact development is a hybrid of these two perspectives because this strategy not only calls for the development of new infrastructures (or the alteration of existing infrastructure) within urban areas, but also tries to alter the lifestyles of citizens living in an urban area. The lifestyles of the citizens in the city would be different because the infrastructure of the city would cause them to drive less. Through the innovative implementation of compact development, people would be forced to use public transit or walk. Thus with more and more people either walking or using public transit, the vehicle miles driven in the area would decrease. “With smart growth, most developments would be built to connect seamlessly with the external street network. These developments would fill in vacant lots, replace failing shopping centers, construct transit-oriented neighborhoods, and revitalize older town centers rather than displacing forests or farmland. This would in turn cause people in urban areas to be near important places as well as have a means of transit (other than the automobile) to get to where they need to go.” This strategy of development would in turn change the processes that happen in a city. With compact development people could have "urban lives" without having the automobile be a necessity. With a well-integrated system of compact development, urban residents could travel around different parts of the city by solely relying on mass transit and/or their own two feet. 
              Neither technological sustainability nor ecological sustainability are perfect methods to fix the problems of our world. These two perspectives both have their pros and cons. With that said, to actually modify our processes to be more sustainable it would be ideal to combine these two perspectives. Compact development is one example of a method that combines the innovativeness of technological sustainability with the environmental awareness of ecological sustainability.