Don't Brick It

Well...a brick, you know - image © Elsewhere

 

 

George Monbiot in The Guardian - 23rd September - puts a slant on reducing vehicular pollution that perhaps many people might not immediately think of, including reducing the numbers of what to many are the exemplars of environmentally friendly motoring, electric vehicles. Of course he's absolutely correct, the problem is not so much the type of vehicle used on our roads, but the sheer numbers. The most insidious pollution coming from tyres: both during use and when discarded, un-recyclable in any meaningful way, except maybe by those who follow the Bob Flowerdew method of cultivating potatoes.

Monbiot cites the notion of the fifteen-minute city; a view of the urban on a village scale, a project started in Paris by its mayor, Anne Hidalgo. The idea is to return to a time when all one's needs could be met within a fifteen minute walk from home. Cities like Paris and London are already constructed in such a way that supports this; both are really just a collection of connected 'villages' within the greater urban area; Londoners and Parisians both tending to hold to their immediate districts, travelling out only for specific reasons. However, the shift towards mall shopping and large out of town superstores that started in earnest in the sixties has inevitably denuded some of the 'village' high streets of the shops and businesses that once served the local community, forcing people to travel further to service their needs. This could easily be rectified in both these cities.

Some conurbations, however, were designed around the automobile, Los Angeles being the example that springs most readily to mind. Reclamation of these cities will take much more effort, but it is possible, given the civic will to accept that climate change and currently, pandemic disease, are forcing us to re-evaluate our priorities in the way we socialise and trade with one another. The fifteen minute city is one such move we could take. It would also make dealing with a pandemic such this one more manageable by reducing the need to spread ourselves far and wide commuting to work, travelling large distances to shop or see movies, etc.

Following on from this, the bicycle could then become the logical form of transport aside from walking. Other European countries have appreciated the value of the bike for decades, Holland being the most celebrated example. The city of Bremen in Germany, for instance is dominated by the bicycle as its principal form of transport. Again, the village paradigm persists here.

The post-war rush to bend over to the transport and construction lobbies, which during the sixties were mired in corruption, graft and political duplicity - led to cities like Birmingham in the UK being gutted in the service of it all, with pedestrians forced down into fetid and at night dangerous subways, while road transport lorded the air that it was simultaneously fouling: a process I witnessed first hand growing up there; the resulting crap is still being torn down less than sixty years later. The town where I went to college, Stourbridge, was also cut into pieces in thrall to the car. A once lovely little community of a town riven to shreds and turned into a giant traffic roundabout for no other reason than profit alone.

Closer to home for me now, Caernarfon suffered pretty much the same fate at the same time, being sliced in two by the elevated section of road that pointlessly leads from one choke point to another in the space of less than half a mile. It is now being bypassed by a significant chunk of dual carriageway at enormous expense, to get more and more traffic down into the funnel that is Pen Lleyn. Pointless in itself, and I doubt that the mess they made of the town will ever be cleaned up, there being no obvious profit in that.

I came to the conclusion that we were on completely the wrong path nearly fifty years ago, as a sixth-former. The exemplification of all that we were doing wrong was to me the London Brick Company, at the time pretty much the monopoly supplier of building brick in the UK. In previous history, most towns, even of modest size, would have a brickworks of their own, supplying local building needs. As with most things post war, the trend was for greater and greater centralisation, with production highly concentrated and distribution by road the norm. Bricks were being shunted around in trucks to all corners of the country, with obvious (to modern eyes) environmental impact.

The folly of this approach is now thankfully starting to be realised more widely, and the efforts being made in Paris and in other parts of Europe need to replicated across the globe before it is too late to at least slow down our consumption's impact on the planet we inhabit, let alone stand some chance of containing diseases like Covid-19.