Ronny Pettersson

Images of the future city : time and space for sustainable development

What could a future Western city look like if energy use per capita was reduced by sixty percent? This is the overarching question researchers have addressed in a major backcasting study carried ou ...

Stockholm’s Urban Development

The population centers in the Stockholm region have followed the typical pattern for all building activity, namely growth in development waves interspersed with periods of much lower activity. These waves have been concentrated to certain parts of the cityscape and dominated by certain object types with special characteristics regarding size, building types and density. For the most part they have built on a certain type of traffic supply and promoted by specific investor constellations. The crests and durations of these wave movements are marked not only by favorable financial conditions, but also by the fact that the parties involved managed to establish relatively stable institutional relationships around the construction. Traffic system expansion has contributed strongly to the construction and is described in the next chapter.

Future Cities – Possible Changes

Over the last 50 years the physical structure of the urban regions in the west has undergone basic changes. This is especially true of the larger cities. They have continued to grow, not only through a comprehensive immigration, but also due to a strong increase in space use expressed both in terms of building utilization and land use per capita. In many cases the increase in space use reaches more than twice the original. Tendencies to sprawl, functional separation, segregation, thinning and population growth have led to comprehensive suburbanization. The sparsely built suburb has surpassed the traditional, dense city. As has been described in an earlier chapter, a new phenomenon has appeared after WW2 where the formerly financially dominant traditional city core has been reduced in importance, while a number of smaller, but still viable centers have grown in the suburban zone.

Suburban Centers – Fast and Slow

What impresses most in Stockholm around 2050 is the multifaceted cityscape spread all the way to the end stations of subway and the commuter trains. While some are talking about the disappearance of the suburbs, others speak about the awakening of the bedroom city, though that label never referred to sleeping cities, but cities where people only slept. Regardless of which, by 2050 Stockholm is mostly urban districts or suburbs, nearly all of them linked to the inner city via the radiating subway and commuting lines whose stations still retain the old names. There are some 130 urban districts in the region, most of them with around 10,000 residents with a diverse housing structure with several thousand work sites, such as offices, shops, workshops, institutions and schools. Purely residential sections have been supplemented with work sites and the reverse. Wherever we step off the subway or commuter train we meet first the older extended and renewed urban district center with rather tall high-rise apartment and office buildings, student housing, service facilities, bachelor and regular hotels, shops and various types of restaurants. Included as well are district office complexes for administration, social services, police, office rentals, secondary and post-secondary educational facilities, plus libraries, primary care facilities, car and vehicular facilities for parking and rental. Some stations also boast comfortable stops to change between cross-town trolleys.

Introduction: Urban Structure, Activity Patterns and Technology

This second part on building blocks includes this introductory chapter and then 14 chapters in 3 groups. Chapters 6–9 focus on Urban Structures. The dispersion of housing over the city’s surface, localization of different activities in this cityscape and the design of the communications systems can collectively be called the urban structure. Together these factors have a decisive role in urban life, as well as for the environmental load and energy use this life carries with it. Through interaction with the institutional circumstances that regulate housing, activities and communications the urban structure shapes the outer conditions for the daily life of city residents.

The Sustainable City: Necessary System Shifts and Their Conditions

This chapter, which is divided into three sections, will initially offer responses to the three introductory questions.

Images of the Future from a National Economic Perspective

This chapter focuses on some macro-economic aspects of the images for the future. Long-term scenarios of economic development are frequently done using economic models. We intend to compare our future scenarios to economic scenarios that normally serve as a basis for various investigations and policy proposals.

Energy Use in 2000 and 2050

This chapter consists of seven parts. The first five give a detailed description of energy use for five of the six household functions (all but Common) in 2000, followed by corresponding data for the images of the future. The sixth section goes through energy use in 2000 and 2050 for work-related travel, goods transports and use of facilities. These aspects are not visible among the six household functions, but are built into private and public consumption. Still, we have chosen to list them specifically here, because as a group they use large amounts of energy and are vital for several household functions. The last section compares energy use in 2000 with the combined energy use of the six images of the future, divided up among the five household functions that are the focus of this chapter.

Specification of Images of the Future

This appendix contains the precise information that forms the basis for the three urban structures described in Chaps. 4 and 22–25, as well as the relatively schematic suppositions that form their foundations. The first table shows the changes in the number of residents and work sites stipulated for each of the six future images. These are then broken down for each new construction type, again for all future images excepting only the two Low-rise Settlements alternatives. These are not discussed, as the suppositions made do not lead to any differentiated results between the temporal structures Fast and Slow (Tables D.1–D.5).

Measures and Possibilities in Concentration

The three urban structures in the images of the future represent a concentration of the Stockholm region. In Urban Cores and Suburban Centers this happens through the exploitation of land directly proximate or bits inserted in existing housing, while in Low-rise Settlements it is done by developing larger, hitherto unused areas. The intent here is to provide a simple picture of the new construction in the various cores, hubs and areas, both for residences and work sites, related to the size of the land taken into use. The question is whether the land exploitation, concentration and average height that is the result of our choices is possible, reasonable and acceptable. The answer is a reformulation of the future number of residential and occupational sites into construction surfaces based on the percentage changes in these categories indicated in each future image (see Table 10.3). The total floor surface is then related to the stipulated land surface and the result is evaluated through a comparison with existing areas in Stockholm or elsewhere.