Social Impacts

Social Impacts of Automobile Centric Urban Growth

There are several areas of societal impacts relating to the automobile as the foundation of a society. The fundamental core in every urban population is transportation: how a person gets from one place to another.

The automobile was sold to the general public as a method of attaining independence.  By partaking in the feeling of independence, suburbia was created and progressed into uncontrollable sprawl.  One of the unforeseen aspects to this claim of freedom and independence was costs to its future.

Social isolationism 

In its proposition of independence, the automobile centric society evolved into a culture of social isolationism.  Standard procedure for people today is to get up from bed, walk outside to their car and drive to work with no social interactions.  Many people park in a parking lot, walk to an office and work an entire day without benefit of the interaction of close personal relationships and then drive home, lacking any relevant social interaction.   

The un-sustainability of the automobile reaches deep into an automobile based society.  The cultural implications of social isolationism and the myriad of health problems created by traffic congestion are yet to be fully investigated.

Prior to the automobile centric urban land-use design, Western Society had been building its urban growth upon the railroad and streetcars: a transit oriented land-use design.  That type of urban growth has characteristics of sustainability. 

The style of an automobile is created by designers.  Primary influences relevant to these designs are current trends in fashion.  Car sales are promoted by advertising agencies’ campaigns exclusively measured by fashion trends to encourage customer purchases.  While this is reasonable in business, its effects reach further than mere car sales in the automobile centric society. 

Every car manufactured can be visually ascertained to its decade of origination.  Further reaching implications of fashion can be seen in the patterns and styles of the tract housing built to accommodate automobile centric urban growth.  The houses built in the 1920s are different than those of the 1930s, 40s, 50s, etc., throughout newly built dwellings today; every decade can be visually distinguished in its style.

On the negative repercussions from fashion-only production in the automobile centric society is the consequence of worn out parts.  Trends in design no longer fashionable fade into a negative social enigma.  Outdated tract homes and strip malls no longer in vogue stimulate economic activity to newer growth centers of sprawl development.  The significance can be seen in every urban area that is several decades old. 

As clothing fashion styles change from season to season, the automobile and tract house styles make major shifts every decade.  Inasmuch as fashions quickly go out of date, each tract style becomes out of fad after a decade and a new tract house area becomes popular.  The nature of automobile centric society follows new trending patterns based on that era’s marketing popularity in cultural and sprawl development.

Building

Tract houses are designed by sprawl developers as fashion statements to maintain the status-quo of cyclic trends.  As the new areas are built-out over a decade, older areas are unable to compete with the newly created trend.  These older areas hold a lower real estate value and fall victim to loss of pride in ownership; often becoming lower maintained rental properties.  As they are beset by several decades, the mass produced quality of these deteriorated housing units are exposed to lower income and subsidized first time home buyers.  Economically these properties are higher loan risks with higher foreclosure rates. 

In the building industry, high quality home building in the sprawl sector of tract housing is treated as profanity.  Quick sales with high performance of speed in building quantity and low cost are the only goals of tract housing developers.  The prominent phrase dictated to the labor sector: “never look back” while preforming one’s particular industry trade routine.  This phrase means that a worker can not take the necessary time required to do high quality craftsmanship with the check and balances of one’s own work.  It is demanded of the worker to not look for mistakes and when flaws are found, the low contract bids don’t allow a sub-contractor time to look back but, only leave errors for someone else to take care of.  The rational in this methodology is that there isn’t enough money in the lowball bid process of high production to accommodate high quality.  The focus on tract housing is to generate profit through high quantity.  The designer warmth of security found in Styrofoam beams and faux stone are a psychological façade.  The absence of high quality craftsmanship and long lasting buildings in sprawl development is replaced by contracted fashion designers for the purpose of quick sales to create short term profit.   

As this short term profit making of poor quality building becomes problematic to future generations as the buildings deteriorate; is this a result of the automobile centric land-use design?  This is perhaps material for a philosophical discussion but, even if one might lean towards the answer of it having to do with the nature of greed in mankind taking advantage of one another and having little to do with a land-use issue, it is still a consequence of non-sustainability.

As a source of transportation, the automobile is only 100 years old.  There are no established measurements to quantify the effects of a society based upon this unsustainable foundation.  

Urban blight

In the Car Culture, urban blight is a corollary to automobile centric growth.  Urban blight is a process of cyclic design changes within the car culture.  Once these forgotten areas gather low value rental status, many properties are foreclosed and abandoned.  When abandoned properties are boarded up and chain linked fences become the norm, blight dominates the area.

One of the most accurate terms in identifying urban blight is visual hostility (the term from studies produced by Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Ph.D., Chair, UCLA Dept, of Urban Planning).  Properties with graffiti filled walls, busted windows, rolled razor wire wrapped chain link fences, and warzone landscaping deliver the presents of abused neighborhoods.  These abandoned and economically decayed, visually hostile neighborhoods are socially negative environments.  Psychological ramifications of people (children) forced to live in this economic decay are psychologically effected but, undocumented as to the source and consequent outcome of such psychological ingestion. 

There is some analysis from social science observing this environment and has established the “broken windows theory”.  (In March 1982 an article by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling titled "Broken Windows" appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. This theory considers a building with a few broken windows leading to an increase in more broken windows and crime.)   The primary discussion, however, of “broken windows” relates to crime and efforts for crime prevention.  This paper merely raises the point that the foundation of such environments is the nature of unsustainability with automobile centric urban growth.    

Another product of the unsustainable automobile centric land use is the social dysfunction of its human hostile design.  Detailing the importance sidewalks play in an urban environment, authors Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Renia Ehrenfeucht in their book: Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space, approach the topic of social interactions in land-use design. 

The topic of social actions resulting from environmental conditions was introduced into the urban planning community in the 1960s by author Jane Jacobs.  There is currently some conversation within the urban planning community which discusses the importance of social interaction. (More about government intrusion and their failed attempts at social engineering; in other posts.)  

Author, Malcolm Gladwell, in his book: The Tipping Point makes the point: “Even the smallest and subtlest and most unexpected of factors can affect the way we act.”  Of social interaction with isolationism in the automobile centric society, this statement makes one ponder how the car culture can find sustainability.