Car Free Visions: Exploring post-car-dependent futures in Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds and London
Our Car Free Visions project aims to engage with stakeholders across four UK cities, Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, and London, to help stakeholders envision what a car free future may look like in their respective cities.
With a literature review undertaken by Fare City, followed by a series of interviews with experts in each city, this research sought to answer the question:
How can we ensure our cities look, feel and operate equitably in a post-car dependent age?
The research question contains several key characteristics that the project team has endeavoured to address throughout the course of the research. Three key identified research themes – city infrastructure, city governance, and city identity – were used to structure the expert interviews. Fare City have since developed these themes based on analysis of the key findings of the interview data. This has helped inform the project recommendations.
As the project research has made clear, transitioning to car free cities will not be an easy undertaking. It will require individuals and authorities alike to make difficult and often unpopular decisions, which will disrupt some of the ways in which people live their lives, and affect how cities function. However, doing so is not only essential from an environmental, equitable, and economic standpoint, but may enable a city’s inhabitants to enjoy more engaging, more inclusive, and culturally richer places.
A sense of place should be positioned at the heart of any strategy designed to reduce car use in cities. This is not only because place forms the tangibles: how a city looks, feels, and functions, but because it also informs the intangibles: a city’s trajectory – how it perceives and projects itself – from the regional to the international. The report highlights that cities are complex ecosystems and that no one policy or programme can be delivered in isolation. Each city authority must choose the trajectory on which it wishes to position itself and develop a coherent aim, strategy, and set of tactics for how it may realise this ambition.
What the report recommendations do make clear is that any complementary car free measures must aim to normalise a car free city insofar as practicably possible. This will necessitate a level of trust between different city stakeholders, require a clarity of narrative, a willingness to build consensus, the perseverance to design and deliver, and the leadership to take responsibility and be held to account. Cities and their stakeholders are subject to both internal and external forces that will present ongoing challenges to implementing car free measures. It is up to city authorities and their stakeholders to make the case that with fewer cars, cities can be more united, more resilient, and more socially just places – better positioned to withstand the unprecedented times we live in.