January 31, 2017

Habitat III and Seattle Urban Village Strategy

In 2016, cities occupied only 2% of the earth’s total land but they are home to 54.5% of its population. Transportation and mobility are important factors shaping urbanization.

Habitat III was the 3^rd United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development which took place in Quito, Ecuador, last fall with the goal to “reinvigorate the global commitment to sustainable urbanization and adopt a New Urban Agenda”.

In 1976, as urbanization was growing rapidly and its consequences were recognized, Habitat I took place in Vancouver. The major outcome of Habitat I was that shelter and urbanization were recognized as global issues. After 20 years, in 1996, Habitat II took place in Istanbul to reaffirm the Habitat I commitments. The main outcomes of Habitat II were looking at urbanization as opportunity, calling for stronger involvement of local authorities and “recognizing the power of participation”.

Habitat III participants’ shared vision is equal use and enjoyment of cities and human settlements and ensuring that all the current and future inhabitants, without discrimination, are able to inhibit and access to affordable human settlements to maintain quality life. Now let’s look at what Habitat III is suggesting for mobility and transportation and where Seattle stands.

The issue paper of Habitat III on Transport and Mobility points out the bias toward accommodating individual motorized transport rather than providing accessibility for all. It suggests that the objective should be “creating compact and walkable neighborhoods” and “reducing vehicle kilometers traveled per capita”. It supports this argument by noting that compact cities would provide people, especially less fortunate people, easy access to jobs and social services while decreasing energy consumption.

Since 1994, Seattle has been pursing an Urban Village strategy that has some similar objectives to Habitat III. The Urban Village strategy’s approach is to direct housing and employment growth into 30 designated urban villages throughout the city (to learn more you can look at Elyse’s blog post). The following map shows Urban Villages:

Figure 1. Seattle Urban Village Strategy, Source: Seattle Planning Department 1993

Seattle’s comprehensive plan Toward a Sustainable Seattle,  like Habitat III, is targeting pedestrian oriented urban centers and villages. In 2014 Steinbrueck Urban Strategies was tasked with evaluating progress on the 1994-2014 Seattle Comprehensive Plan and Urban Village Strategy, under the name of Seattle Sustainable Neighborhoods Assessment Project (SSNAP). Transit ridership and vehicle traffic screenline counts are two indicators related to the quality of the transportation system and whether resources are being used efficiently or not.

SSNAP reported that 8 out of 10 urban villages studied had a significant increase in average weekday transit boarding per person per acre between 1994 and 2014. In the case of traffic counts, arterials within or close by most urban villages (except the city’s high through traffic corridors such as Downtown) show traffic volumes are in the acceptable range of volume to capacity ratio.

Figure 2. Average Weekday boardings as a factor of population density Source: King County Metro

So far it seems that Seattle’s plan is working. Over the past 20 years, 75% of residential and employment growth has been directed into urban villages. From the perspective of transportation, car dependence has declined and transit ridership has increased.