Written by Jesús Torres
In the United States, in 1930, a group of automotive companies including General Motors and Ford created a union called the National Highway Users Conference; they began lobbying the U.S. government in turn for the construction of roads across the country.
In 1956 Dwight Eisenhower signed the federal highway law. He believed it necessary for the evolution of his nation and because of his experience: he participated in World War II and realized how important it was to have functional roads to transport goods, services and people, as well as a road trip he made in 1917, from Washington D.C. to San Francisco, California, which took 62 days to fully perform. Nowadays that same journey would take 48 hours.
Was Eisenhower a visionary ahead of his time? Was the National Highway Users Conference a union of companies that advocated for the good of the American community without any interest?
Partially, definitely not, and of course not, respectively.
The lobby created by these companies began the creation of thousands of kilometers on roads throughout the United States, and with it, a new typology of city: the American city. The continent began to adopt the typology of the most advanced country at the time and with it, its virtues and vices. The continent was fertile ground for the creation of cities that could assimilate the flow of people from the countryside to urban areas, started since the Industrial Revolution.
Why is what the U.S. president and the union of car companies achieved important?
Cities across the continent replicated a style: the urban center would be dedicated to commerce and administration, and the suburbs would house the working class: the bulk of the population that makes the economic system of the moment viable. Wide and long avenues were planned to bring progress and modernity by means of machines with functional internal engines burning fossil fuels that could communicate the homes of the newcomers to the cities with the work centers.
The suburbs are settlements created by entrepreneurs, at low cost, acquired in the peripheries administered by the municipality, authorized by the respective public directorates and then offered for sale to the public at affordable prices. Sounds good?
Maybe, but we have to understand the globality of the event.
At the beginning of the 20th century, what the automotive group of companies did, like any functional company within the capitalist system, was to be amoral while seeking returns.
Lobbying for roads to exist throughout the country responds to generating a need in the user. Why would you buy a car if you live two blocks from the job, you can buy weekly supplies 3 blocks from home, and the kids study in a school that is 5 blocks away? In addition, a car is expensive: buy it and maintain it; what if having a car goes from being a luxury to a necessity? You have the perfect business.
Many entrepreneurs were born as spectators to an issue and then generated a solution, but what if the entrepreneur generates the problem they would solve afterwards?
In 2021, the Finance Global 500 report, ranks eight automotive companies among the most valuable in the world. Toyota is No. 12, valued at $59.479 billion. The car is the perfect vaccine for this illness named city.
When cities began to adopt the American system, there were many variants in the middle of the equation that made the result more or less disastrous: corruption, racism, classism, new interests, excessive migration from countryside to urban areas, the inability and ignorance of how to address this kind of issue.
Currently, the suburban housing creation scheme continues to function thanks to the lax measures of governments and interests within them, while urban centers suffer deterioration due to their abandonment.
Building in downtown Mexico City, Mexico.
Building in downtown Monterrey, Mexico.
A city with an abandoned urban center means low population density, which means that the population inhabits the peripheries, which translates into greater spending by the government to maintain and bring quality services even further away to sites with existing services.
It is an area easily held by criminal groups and becomes a point of insecurity.
A city that requires its inhabitants to travel by car to do daily activities, it is a city that drives its citizens to a sedentary lifestyle, and in turn, to a health deteriorated by problems of obesity and hypertension due to lack of physical activity, and a city contaminated by the excessive use of internal combustion vehicles.
The infimum attention that governments give to urban centers and their abandonment in the southern globe countries, corresponds to the reality of the citizenship: downtowns ceased to be a meeting point and has become, for many years now, a transitional space.
This shift of perception has been organic due to the dynamics that the city itself dictates: a city that is dismembered by its roads, and governments that do not actively seek to heal these malfunctions, it is condemned to live and see its downtown as an uninhabitable space.
The answer? There are not simple answers. Each city corresponds to multifactorial technical and social problems, variable by latitudes and idiosyncrasies, besides the universal basis for this global issue.
What we have to do as citizens is to be aware of the problems that a lonely urban center entails, and to demand that the decision-makers of our cities do something about it. A solitary urban center is not a cause but a symptom of an even greater disease.
Let's use public transport and alternative means of transport. Let's demand quality infrastructure to move in other ways besides the car. Take advantage of democracy and demand a democratic city. Demand equal chances to live a worth-living life. Demand real changes. Demand. Demand. Demand.
A city does not happen to us, we are a city.