The New Urban Agenda

Last week, the United Nations conference on housing and sustainable development, Habitat III, adopted the New Urban Agenda. Is this a new version of Agenda 21 aimed at controlling how we live and use our land?

Yes and no. Yes, it is an update to Agenda 21. No, it won’t control how we live any more than the original. If you are worried about such control, look to the city planners on your local government’s staff rather than to some United Nations document.

A close reading of the New Urban Agenda suggests it was heavily influenced by first-world urban planners. But it is filled with so many fudge words and modifiers that it ends up with no meaning at all. Certainly, the United Nations is more interested in eliminating poverty and improving sanitation in developing countries than in interfering with the daily lives of people in developed countries.

The document mentions poverty and sanitation four times each, while it mentions density and transit two times each. Here’s what it says about density:

We commit to promote the development of urban spatial frameworks, including urban planning and design instruments that support sustainable management and use of natural resources and land, appropriate compactness and density, polycentrism, and mixed uses, through infill or planned urban extension strategies as applicable.

We will promote integrated urban and territorial planning, including planned urban extensions based on the principles of equitable, efficient, and sustainable use of land and natural resources, compactness, polycentrism, appropriate density and connectivity, multiple use of space, as well as mixed social and economic uses in the built-up areas, to prevent urban sprawl.

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About transit, it says,

We will encourage national, sub-national, and local governments to develop and expand financing instruments, enabling them to improve their transport and mobility infrastructure and systems, such as mass rapid transit systems, integrated transport systems, air and rail systems, and safe, sufficient and adequate pedestrian and cycling infrastructure and technology-based innovations in transport and transit systems to reduce congestion and pollution while improving efficiency, connectivity, accessibility, health, and quality of life.

We will promote access for all to safe, age- and gender-responsive, affordable, accessible, and sustainable urban mobility. . . in particular through supporting (a) a significant increase in accessible safe, efficient, affordable, and sustainable infrastructure for public transport as well as non-motorized options such as walking and cycling, prioritizing them over private motorized transportation; (b) equitable Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) that minimizes the displacement in particular of the poor and features affordable, mixed-income housing and a mix of jobs and services.

That’s a lot more specific, but again there are those modifying terms, such as “efficient, affordable, and sustainable. . . public transit.” That pretty much eliminates rail transit except in cities with Manhattan-like densities and Bogota-like rates of auto ownership. Anywhere else, only buses qualify.

How about “equitable [and affordable] transit-oriented development”? A truly equitable and affordable transit-oriented development would be single-family homes on 50×100 lots located within a quarter mile of a bus stop. That’s what the streetcar suburbs of the early twentieth century looked like, except with the substitution of efficient buses for expensive streetcars. The Greenwich-Village-like designs that American planners call “transit-oriented” are neither efficient nor affordable.

Apparently, 35,000 people got to go on a junket to Quito, Ecuador to produce this lame document. I wonder how many of them used “sustainable” methods of travel to get there? More important, I wonder how many of them have actually looked at the comparative costs and energy efficiencies of different kinds of housing and modes of travel? If they had, they would know that it is far more cost effective to build more efficient single-family homes and automobiles than to try to completely transform peoples’ lifestyles.