Where would we be without cars? They’re not even just a form of transport,
they can be a restaurant, or a cinema. Jump in a car and the world is your oyster.
With a clear stretch of wide open highway,
cars help make our cities the fast, efficient, clean and safe places we love
Ok maybe not. In fact, despite being the main way we get around for the best part of a century,
it seems like our love affair with cars is going through a rough spot.
“I love you” “Uh huh? Great, thanks…”
It seems like everywhere from Berlin to Busan is trying to kick cars out of parts
of the city. Is this just a temporary fad of urban planning or is this the start of
a permanent change? Believe it or not, the answer might lie in a flatpack sofa.
Now, a lot has already been said about how and why cities are running cars off the road so
don’t worry we’re not going over old territory here but let’s just quickly go over the basics.
The obvious reason for this big push is not cars themselves but what comes
out of them. Road transport makes up a big chunk of global CO2 emissions.
As well as being bad for the planet, it’s also bad for us. Air pollution is the biggest
environmental threat to our health, in the UK it accounts for 36,000 deaths a year.
Then there’s the sheer amount of space cars take up. Cars take up
more than seven times the space a bus does to transport the same number of
people and up to 60 percent of land in American cities is reserved for parking.
As the number of people living in cities continues to rise,
people have begun to question if all that space is really necessary. Gabe Klein,
an urban planner in the US, has thought a lot about the role cars play in our cities.
We spend all this time trying to create places where you can move as fast as humanly possible
to get from this node to this node and I think what the lesson’s been for cities is they sort
of lost their sense of self, if you will, with white flight out of the cities and this idea that
we’re gonna run freeways through the cities. What happened is cities became insecure and they said,
wait a second, are we here to serve the people that live in the city or are we
here just to serve the population that's left to come back in the city to work?
As the pandemic gave a vision of what clean roads and air could look like, many cities
began to rethink the role of cars. The Norwegian capital of Oslo has been a pioneer in phasing out
cars from its city centre since 2017. New York City has given more space to outdoor dining.
Paris is building new bike lanes. Barcelona is prioritising pedestrians - you get the idea…
But at the risk of sounding terribly old fashioned… surely
cars are actually quite good for some things?
As fun as cycling is, going for a bike ride in the rain isn’t many people’s idea of a
good time. Cars offer people a sense of freedom we take for granted and for
disabled people they can be an essential part of living a more independent life.
And aside from anything else, imagine going shopping without a car. Getting
groceries home is one thing, but have you ever tried to get a sofa home on public transport?
“He actually brought a sofa onto the subway…”
Well… you get my point.
But developments in retail are now even challenging these assumptions.
This is IKEA Westbahnhof in Vienna. Opened in August 2019
it’s quite different to what you might expect.
Instead of a giant blue shed in an out of town park, this is a light,
airy building sitting right in the centre of Vienna.
Sustainability was a big part of the design brief and the building is studded with trees which,
along with the shade created by the building’s grid like exterior
are expected to reduce the temperature around the building by around 2 degrees.
As cities across Europe struggle with rising temperatures,
a building which combats urban heat rises in a low tech way is quite a big deal.
Above the Ikea floors, there’s a hostel and even a publicly accessible roof garden
where you can come and look out over the city without having to buy a billy bookcase first.
Most importantly for this video though, you can’t get here by car.
Instead, you’ll just have to make do with Vienna’s amazing public transport.
And you don’t need to worry about that sofa,
that and other big items all get delivered within 24 hours.
Why this is so different is that it's changing our shopping habits so that cars could become
irrelevant. Just in the same way out of town stores made cars necessary in the first place.
And surprisingly it’s retailers who are ahead of the curve with this. IKEA went
ahead with the car free store despite Vienna’s landmark car free zone being voted down in 2020
Retail, apartment buildings, others are realising that amenities are important,
experience is important, and it's a very competitive environment.
The developers have already realised that making car light cities, complete sidewalk
network bike lanes, that that's what the people wanted to hear moving into their
buildings. And so often the development community and the business community
are working together in the development committee's a little bit more progressive.
And this isn’t the only one of its kind. Plans were announced in 2021 to open an
IKEA on London’s Oxford street, which technically you can get to in a car, but you’d be mad to try.
This is part of a wider trend in retail where physical stores are being used more
to create an experience, the job of getting goods home is shifted to delivery drivers.
More delivery means less bags or boxes full of goods for you to carry home,
which means eventually you might not need that car after all.
But IKEA is going even further in re-thinking how we use our cities,
testing out new ideas at the H22 expo earlier this year.
Located in the Swedish city of Helsingborg,
H22 is an exhibition for new, innovative ways to improve cities.
One of IKEA’s exhibits was DM,
a multifunctional marketplace containing a farm, food court and meeting place.
As well as providing much needed jobs for the area,
it aimed to create new infrastructure for food consumption and social inclusion.
By developing this site in a cut off, economically deprived suburb,
it created opportunities within a small area which could be easily accessed by local residents.
Of course this is just a test but what is exciting is DM and IKEA Westbahnhof are
influencing the debate on how we use our cities in ways we wouldn’t have thought possible before.
Now, don’t worry, we’re not saying everyone should scrap their cars
and cycle off into the sunset - however tempting the price of petrol might make it.
Cars clearly will have a use for a long time to come and what works in one city
won’t necessarily work for another, but the assumption that cars should
be the main way we get around cities is now being seriously challenged.
We're going to see more innovation, I mean we’ve learned that it's not about technology per se,
or innovation per se, It's about changing hearts and minds. It's about getting people on board.
The old way of thinking was “if we do something good for people. It's going to be
bad for business or this group is going to be upset” which is total... you know. So now that
people understand the alignment in this, in the positive social outcomes and that
you can be pro-business, pro-environment, pro people, it's really been a sea change.
We may never outlaw cars from all our cities entirely, but who knows,
next time you want to replace your landskrona
with a new kivik, it might be easier to jump on your cykel instead of getting in your bild.
This video was made possible by IKEA, you can learn more about that in the link below and,
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