[R-G] What Would a Liveable City Look Like?

[Richard Menec]

http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=449#more-449

Climate and Capitalism            June 1, 2008

What Would a Liveable City Look Like?

Today's cities are built and operated to serve the needs of the rich and 
powerful rather than those of the working people


By Dave Holmes

(From Green Left Weekly, 30 May 2008)

When one sees a modern city from the air, especially at night, it is a truly 
awe-inspiring spectacle. The immensity of the project is a testimony to the 
power and creativity of human beings. However, on the ground and actually 
living and working in this wonder, things are quite different: the social 
and ecological problems crowd in and fill your view. The truth is that our 
cities have always been dominated by the rich and powerful, and built and 
operated to serve their needs rather than those of the mass of working 
people who live and toil in them.

Today the destructive effect on the quality of urban life of the capitalist 
pursuit of profits before anything else is growing alarmingly:

-Modern capitalist cities are absolutely dominated by cars and trucks. This 
leads to massive, life-threatening pollution and a vast network of roads and 
car parks that scar the urban landscape. People live on islands surrounded 
by seas of asphalt and concrete - 40% or more of the city surface is asphalt 
and concrete. The city creates its own, warmer climate.
-Motor vehicles also directly kill and maim large numbers of people each 
year; still greater numbers die from the pollution. Vehicle emissions are 
also a major contributor to greenhouse gases and climate change that 
threatens humanity with utter catastrophe.
-Public transport systems are weak and take second place to the motor car. 
Similarly, the great bulk of freight is carried by trucks not rail.
-Developers, aided by governments, have created the appalling urban sprawl 
with all its ecological and social consequences (erosion of farmland, huge 
distances between home and work, etc.). The word "developers" is an 
appalling euphemism - capitalist sharks would be a more accurate 
description.
-And now, in the name of urban consolidation, these same developers are 
being encouraged to build their often crappy-blocks of units anywhere and 
everywhere.
-Then look at what the developers actually construct. Modern houses and 
buildings are generally not only hard to maintain but ecologically wasteful 
and often extremely unhealthy (emissions from building materials, plastics 
and cleaning agents). They could be designed differently - we could easily 
have ecologically sensible houses instead of the current extremely wasteful 
"McMansions" favoured by the building industry.
-In the cities, public land - modest though it is - is constantly being 
alienated by greedy devoured in league with councils and city and state 
governments.
-Not only are house prices soaring beyond the reach of most workers, but 
homelessness is growing sharply (estimated to be over 100,000 nationally) as 
governments refuse to build public housing and rely on the market to solve 
everything (preferring to give subsidies to people to rent from private 
landlords).
-Shopping centres (malls and supermarkets) dominate much of city life. They 
kill most of the neighbourhood shops and force people to rely on cars to do 
their shopping. But these juggernauts are purely the result of the 
capitalist thirst for profit - they appear before us as facts of life; 
people never get to discuss what is really needed. Moreover, the ubiquitous 
shopping mall represents a serious privatization of social space - we all 
have to use them and they thus fulfil a social function but access and 
control is wholly in the hands of the private owners.
-As the supermarkets and malls kill off many of the neighbourhood shops, 
their place is taken by chain outlets (7-11, Coles Express, petrol station 
shops) all offering emergency supplies at much higher prices.
-Within the city we have the monstrous swelling of the city centre (full of 
truly ugly buildings all jostling for position) and the bleak wasteland of 
the sprawling suburbs. -In the 1960s, "decentralization" was a buzzword. 
Governments encouraged a modest movement of services and industry to 
regional centres. But today country towns and villages are dying as 
governments cut services and jobs and banks close branches. This has a 
multiplier effect. People move to the city (or at least to the big regional 
centres) and the rural crisis intensifies.
-There is a movement back to some regional centres but - under the wonderful 
capitalist system we have - it becomes a ghastly caricature of what is 
really needed. The rich and middle classes build holiday homes in coastal 
towns, forcing up prices and making life impossible for ordinary 
working-class pensioners and renters who have to move elsewhere.


Peak oil and climate change

On top of the all this, as the concept of peak oil and the eventual end of 
this finite resource laid down over millions of years gains currency, the 
fragility of the modern city is suddenly laid bare. The movie The End of 
Suburbia demonstrates very well how the American suburbs have been built on 
the automobile. If the motor vehicle as we know it goes - i.e., can no 
longer serve as mode of mass transport - then the urban sprawl becomes even 
more untenable and an alternative way of living becomes desperately urgent.

Similarly, climate change has put a big question mark over the modern city. 
Effecting a drastic and rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is a 
life-and-death question.

In Australia, perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of climate change for 
the cities is the question mark over water supplies. Achieving water 
security and sustainability is a burning issue. To date, the main response 
of state and federal governments has been to go for big-budget projects (in 
Victoria, a desalination plant and a diversion pipeline to take scarce water 
from the equally drought-affected Murray-Goulburn irrigation area in the 
north).

Arguably, such responses do not address the real problem and will actually 
make it worse. For instance, Victoria's projected desalination plant will be 
a major emitter of greenhouse gases.

All in all, climate change calls into question many aspects of our current 
urban existence.

-The motor vehicle culture that big business has foisted on us is no longer 
viable (if it ever was). If declining fuel supplies and ever-more-expensive 
petrol costs don't kill it off, surely climate change will. Public transport 
systems will have to be developed to replace it.
-The urban sprawl especially characteristic of Australian capital cities - 
which compels people to travel vast distances to get to work - will have to 
give way to some form of consolidation. The growth of the city centre and 
the bleakness of much of the suburbs needs to be overcome. A much better 
spread of jobs would mean that people didn't have to travel vast distances 
to work.
-Over time the fetish of the quarter-acre block - the equivalent of every 
family owning its own car - would start to ease and eventually disappear as 
people realized that denser living with radically improved public amenities 
(parks, transport, services) had a lot to offer (as it does in some European 
cities).
-As currently constructed, our houses and buildings embody huge amounts of 
water and energy and considerable greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, their 
actual operation is characterized by a high and unsustainable energy and 
water consumption.
-Climate change will put our food supply under extreme pressure. What foods 
we eat, how they are transported and distributed will become important 
questions. As well as finding ways to guarantee our food security, reducing 
the water and energy consumed in the whole process will be vitally 
important.
-We need a much more uniform distribution of the population over the 
countryside. At the very least, the cities must get smaller and the country 
towns grow. But, unlike what is happening today, this needs to be done in 
such a way that jobs and services move out also, transport access is 
maintained and actual living communities are created. In time, the 
traditional isolation of the countryside would disappear along with the 
swollen capital city with its bloated centre.

In this regard socialists reject the current developer-driven model whereby 
green field housing estates gobble up precious farmland and create 
McMansion-style ghettos on the fringes of the city, isolated and with few 
amenities, a trap for the less mobile and a terrific burden for those who 
have to travel vast distances to work. We can surely work out something much 
better.


Abandon affluence?

As an aside, Ted Trainer, in his 1985 book Abandon Affluence, had a lot to 
say on the modern city. But his non-Marxist, radical green framework marred 
a lot of the useful points he made.

He saw "over-consumption" by the West as the source of the global ecological 
crisis. In his book he bases everything on reducing consumption.

Marxists, of course, see the fundamental problem not as "over-consumption" 
but the capitalist drive for profits ahead of all else; achieving a relative 
material abundance is essential if humanity is to leave class conflict 
behind and achieve full communism. With modern technology, it would be quite 
possible to achieve relative material abundance and - by improving 
production processes and eliminating the wastefulness of capitalist 
production and society - at the same time actually reduce our ecological 
footprint massively.

One can say generally that the West consumes too many resources but this 
obscures the reality that these are class-divided societies and a large 
proportion of the population doesn't consume very much at all. For example, 
in the United States there is a huge internal Third World which radically 
under-consumes the necessities of life. They are not responsible for the 
reckless extravagance of the US - that should be sheeted home squarely to 
the ruling capitalist plutocracy.

While we oppose the wasteful use of resources and while we too are opposed 
to capitalist consumerism, posing the problem in terms of reducing 
consumption as such is wrong and would be political suicide for the 
socialist movement. For instance, supermarkets, for all their capitalistic 
form, are actually a tremendous labour- and time-saving convenience. The 
liberation of women and the whole working class has many aspects; a key one 
is reducing drudgery to the minimum. We want to go forwards from capitalism, 
not backwards.

Trainer's city of the future has a very definite reactionary, feudal, 
labour-intensive feel to it, but even allowing for this rather basic 
weakness, he does paint a thought-provoking picture of the new city, with 
the old freeways and roads dug up, with vegetable gardens where the 
factories once stood, etc.

Monstrous beast in the room

Making our cities livable and grappling with peak oil, climate change and 
sustainability are really one and the same thing.

Ideally, we would have a big discussion, develop a rational plan and then 
organize ourselves to implement it. If we were, say, a small community 
living in ancient times before the development of class society, that is 
exactly what we would have done.

But today, the problem is not that the population has grown but that the 
economy on which we all depend - the productive apparatus and everything 
associated with it - is not owned collectively by society, but by a tiny 
handful of capitalists. Working people's labour operates the means of 
production - in that sense it is social - but only a few per cent of the 
population privately own it.

This is the monstrous, slaving beast in the room. At every turn of the wheel 
it has to fed. Its ravenous appetite must be satisfied ahead of any human 
need. What it wants - profits - is not what the rest of us want: meaningful 
action on climate change and other social problems.

For example, in Victoria right now, the big-business-oriented Brumby ALP 
government is moving at high speed in the opposite direction to what is 
needed to confront peak oil and climate change:

-Rather than a massive program of fitting all dwellings with water tanks and 
recycling systems, imposing conservation targets on industry and 
agribusiness, and establishing the infrastructure for large-scale storm 
water capture, it has signed off on the desalination plant and the northern 
pipeline - bonanzas for big business but a disaster for the rest of us. 
Water bills for ordinary households are projected to double within five 
years.
-Rather than a program to phase out our disastrous dependence on brown coal 
and make the switch to renewable energy, the state government is intent on 
pursuing the mirage of "clean coal" technology. Power prices are also set to 
double for ordinary users over the next few years.
-It refuses to put the necessary resources into public transport, which 
exists in absolutely infuriating and permanent crisis; instead its program 
is roads and still more roads. Now it is inching towards a truly insane 
monster road tunnel under Melbourne's general cemetery. Not even the dead 
are to be left to rest in peace!
-It is going ahead with a radical dredging of Melbourne's Port Phillip Bay 
that threatens to lead to the flooding of low-lying suburbs at high tide. 
And all this is so that bigger ships - laden with yet more consumerist 
crap - can transit the bay.
-It has given the go-ahead to GM canola. Brumby's utterly ludicrous comment 
was that this was giving the consumer "choice"! The consumers don't want 
this sort of fake "choice" - they want safe foods. GM was given the green 
light to give a profit bonanza to Monsanto and a few big exporters; the rest 
of us will pay the price (an increase in allergies and who knows what other 
long-term health damage).


Public ownership and planning

In order to grapple with the crisis of climate change we need a total 
mobilization of society and a drastic, rapid reorientation of our entire 
economy. But to imagine that anything can compel a horde of profit-crazed 
corporations to be "responsible" is utterly fanciful. The commanding heights 
of the economy must be in public hands.

-Socialists call for the nationalization of the entire energy sector. This 
vital infrastructure must belong to the community - whether it is in 
federal, state or municipal hands. The charter of this sector must be to 
phase out the fossil fuel power plants and make the "big switch" to 
renewable energy as quickly as possible.
-The public transport and freight systems must also be in public hands. The 
aim must be to achieve a rapid, substantial reduction in the use of motor 
vehicles. The roads should be kept safe; apart from that, massive 
investments must be poured into rail, trams and feeder bus systems.
-The automobile industry should likewise be nationalized. The car plants 
should be retooled to produce public transport stock and renewable power 
equipment.
-As the crisis of climate change bites deeper, food security will become a 
big issue for society. We can't leave the bulk of the distribution system in 
the hands of profit-gouging supermarket chains like Coles and Woolworths, 
that exploit small suppliers and consumers alike. They too should be brought 
under public ownership.
-The banks, which underpin the capitalist economy, should be nationalized 
and a single state bank created. This would guarantee bank workers' jobs, 
provide services and generate funds for the reconstruction of the economy.


Economic planning based on public ownership of the means of production has 
tremendous power. Here is just one example.

In 1967 Isaac Deutscher, the renowned biographer of Trotsky, published The 
Unfinished Revolution, his well-known study of the Soviet Union. He pointed 
out that if you allowed for all the years the USSR took to simply get back 
to pre-war levels of production (following World War I and the Civil War and 
then World War II), then in the equivalent of a mere 25 peaceful years - 
from a very low base - it had created the second most powerful industrial 
economy in the world.

Put aside Stalinist bureaucratism and repression, the deliberate neglect of 
consumer needs in favour of heavy industry, and the damage to the 
environment - this example nevertheless shows the enormous power of 
collective labour, once it is freed from the shackles of capitalism and 
allocated according to a conscious plan.

Of course, the capitalist class has immense power and wealth and will not 
give it up without a tremendous struggle. Only the growth of a vast popular 
movement, solidly based on the great working-class majority, can succeed. 
The development of a movement to fight for meaningful action on climate 
change will at the same time prepare the political conditions for a workers' 
government which will finally bring the economy under collective ownership 
and control.

This - and only this - will enable us to begin to construct a society based 
on the fulfilment of human needs and living sustainably in harmony with 
nature.

[Dave Holmes is a member of the Democratic Socialist Perspective, a Marxist 
tendency within the Socialist Alliance in Australia. This article is based 
on a talk presented at the Climate Change - Social Change Conference in 
Sydney in April, 2008. The conference was organized by Green Left Weekly.]

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