Interview with Peter Newman

Peter Newman is Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Australia. He writes a lot about sustainability and the impact of automobility--he is the co-author of two important books, Cities and Automobile Dependence: An International Sourcebook and Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence. BeyondDC and I heard him speak at the Virginia Light Rail conference in November 2006, and for me, his talk was the highlight of the day.

The Portland Oregonian has a nice interview with him in a blog entry "To make a sustainable city, boost rail and reduce driving." He spoke at a conference in Portland, and was promoting his newest book, Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems: Principles and Practices.

There is some great discussion in the interview about Vancouver and its planning regime, reduced car usage areas, such as at the center of Portland or DC. According to this piece, "Cities with a sense of place" in what looks to be an interesting website-blog, Celsias, the book uses the creation of the Washington subway system as an example of a city taking a chance with innovation.

(Note that I think that what they think of as purposive ended up being an unintended consequence. The subway system was created to keep the central business district viable, rather than to revitalize urban neighborhoods. But having great urban design, good architectural bones, and a strong neighborhood preservation movement meant that neighborhoods on the subway line were well-positioned to take advantage of the mobility improvement. Arlington County Virginia has been more direct about changing its planning paradigm in response to subway access, repatterning the Wilson Blvd. corridor into a much more densely built environment. But much of the benefit of these changes, in either DC or Arlington, has only truly been reaped in the last 10 years. It takes a long time for such change to be effected. When I first came to DC for example (late 1980s), Virginia Square in Arlington mostly consisted of a Giant Supermarket anchored shopping center, and a mediumly dense regular old neighborhood. It's much different now.)