by James Inedu George

China has a middle class of about 300 million. It’s a growing middle class. As the economy gets better and the government lifts even more people out of poverty, it is becoming clearer what the staggering number of people with new wealth means.

Cars!

Cars and even more cars. This, in turn, will translate to such humungous traffic congestions that will shut cities down. The scale of these build-ups has never been encountered by mankind before -the worst of them have already begun. In 2011, there was an eleven-day pile up in China… yes, eleven days.

The response we have globally to population increases and mega growth, whilst universal,  are out dated. They were made for the city of a million people. Today, even in Africa, those are small cities. Our land is not an infinite resource and as such, we can’t expand our cities ad-infinitum to cope with population growth. It was really simple before. But as more citizens get richer, and buy more vehicles, the city will tax them more in order to provide basic amenities and build more roads and suburbs. This method is now untenable.

Lagos is about 20 million people, and that is the size of a typical Chinese city. The roads reach a point that they take up more city space than the city itself. Basically, it feels like the goal of modern urban planning is to make the entire city a road. You see, this is just not right.

The problem is clear from the numbers, we either redefine the road or like a parasite, it will redefine our cities.

So many of the constants in our lives were designed to solve a particular problem persistent at the time of their invention. These responses over time become comfortable and as older generations die off, the new ones inherit these things as law. This, in a lot of cases, puts a LID ON INNOVATION AND for an activity AS EXPENSIVE AS CITY making and architecture, this convenience is proliferated globally as a salient and cheaper solution to a problem whose dynamics have been changed totally by the technology of the times. This is most glaring in the road. The road, as it is, is accepted as a fact, but it is absolutely not!

Our world today has moulted unrecognizably because of the technologies that are daily being perfected. More of us can live in cities today and technology is triumphing over class divisions. Our cities today are irrevocably denser than at any point in human history and for the first time, we seem to have the means to cope with this if properly applied.

In our time, due to technology, we have seen love letters totally eliminated, as the youth today prefer the poesy of sending nudes; saying grace before meals has become outmoded and is replaced by the dutiful picture or filtered video for the ‘Gram or Snapchat. We do not necessarily need to interact with the city to interact with each other and Amazon has nullified the market place. In Chicago, for instance, shopping malls are simply collection centres for things bought on the internet and actually shopping in these stores is 40-50% more expensive than mere collection. The shopping malls are more of an urban storage space. Or an experience centre, where new product advancements can be tried on unsuspecting masses, or a product testing laboratory.

The road of today is a bitumen paved horse drawn and donkey tack. It has no relationship to our cities and takes too much space at its heart. Perhaps it is because of the distances between our homes and work places which is a direct response to the percentage of city land roads take up that cannot be appropriated for dwelling purposes. In Marina Lagos, for instance, roadways take up 15% of the existing land space. So in a place severely starved of land and the cash to build, a road, which costs at least twice the conventional home per square meter to build, takes up 15% of the land. Have you began to see the utter wastefulness of the road?

The true question becomes, if not roads, what?

This can only be answered by a genuine consideration of the parameters of today’s architecture and urbanism. The first thing that comes to mind is population. We are in a period of unprecedented population increase, and these population is fighting for amenities that exist in most cases, only in the centre of the city. In response to this, we build carpets upon carpets of roads to cart people away from this centre and as these roads appear, the prices of surrounding suburban land miraculously increase, pushing the people further, thereby needing more roads and an endless paradox is formed.

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Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija

James Inedu George is an African architect practicing out of Nigeria and South Africa with focus on Innovative Sustainable Affordable Solutions and Future African Cities.