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Front Page of the London Evening Standard, Thursday April 15th, 2010

For the past few days, something has been missing from the urban landscape of London. A quick scan of the city’s streets – red busses, black cabs – shows nothing amiss. Beneath them, the Underground proceeds apace through tubular tunnels. A glance upwards, however, reveals an unmolested sky. Cloudless and blue may not be what we expect from an April afternoon in London, but this is different: no passenger planes have crossed British airspace since Thursday. For me, what was supposed to be an hour’s routine layover has turned into six days of going nowhere, fast. And it has me wondering a few things about aviation, international connection and the future of cities.

London is one of many European cities to find itself under a massive cloud of volcanic ash, bereft of air travel. The disruption has started chatter of what the volcano might mean for the interconnections and interdependencies on which our global economy relies. After all, it’s not just executives, tourists and migrants who fly into Heathrow daily; it’s also courier packages from the US, cut flowers from Kenya, and bananas from Costa Rica. On a normal day, all of these journeys compete for an airspace whose closure has raised questions about who is calling the shots: national transport ministries, European and international aviation regulators, airlines, airports, central governments. The ash cloud provokes questions about our individual dependencies on air travel, too. Everyone knows that we fly at a huge environmental cost, yet many of us – myself included – have trouble reconciling our desire to be green with our desire to be anywhere in the world we want, at any time.

I spent a sunny Saturday in London with fellow volcano strandee Richard Sennett, an urbanist whom Omnibus readers will remember from the walk he took with us around the West Village last year. During that walk, somewhere around the West Side Highway and Perry Street, Richard mentioned that he had been thinking recently about renunciation, about making do with less. This topic came up again as Richard and I pondered our volcanic-ash-induced predicament together. One of the ways we measure progress is through a constant increase in the possible connections between people, places and things – a constant expansion of social, spatial and commercial networks enabled by the Internet and by international transport and trade. What happens when the system, defined by so many dependencies, disrupts? Are we equipped to plan for a future characterized by unpredictable constrictions on the supply of on-demand access to those people, places and things outside of our immediate, physical grasp? Probably not. But, wait, isn’t this the future that the climate crisis promises? Most definitely.

In our metropolitan areas, we may well be moving towards a planning regime that leverages new technological opportunities to identify efficiencies within existing systems. This shift is what the Regional Plan Association explored in its Regional Assembly last week (an event we’ll look at in greater depth on the Omnibus next week). And part of this effort to make cities smarter grows from an impulse to waste fewer resources (natural and capital alike), to get more out of what we already have. This is a good thing. But the ash cloud is making me wonder how long we can consider “more” to be the exclusive measure of progress, much less the determinant of quality in planning and design.

In an article in Wired last year, Omnibus advisor Andrew Blum explored the design of the airspace over New York City (see graphic above) and what he found out about the massive traffic jam above northern New Jersey suggests that perhaps, um, some updates are in order. I know nothing about the design of European airspace or travel routes, but if the leadership structure in a crisis can be as piecemeal as the response to the volcanic ash incident has been, then it’s probably safe to assume that the design and management of European airspace could be more coordinated. I certainly don’t want to disparage the efficiency of an aviation system that moves millions of passengers around the world and enables historically unprecedented amounts of migration, travel and trade. But I do want to question whether we are prepared, in our quest for greater efficiency, to employ a design logic rooted in an ethic of scarcity.

Because, as it turns out, the desire for efficiency does not necessarily herald an end to building new systems out of whole cloth to compress time and space. A few feet from where I’m sitting now, enjoying a bookstore café’s free wireless as if a convenient internet connection were my inalienable right, the intersection of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street – otherwise known by the skyscraper named CentrePoint – is all torn up. The construction is to accommodate Crossrail, a massive infrastructure project that will connect Heathrow Airport in West London to Brussels- and Paris-bound Eurostar trains in central London to the site of the 2012 Olympics in East London. Looking ahead to my pathetically indirect journey home via the AirTrain (assuming I ever make it to JFK), I’m already jealous as it is of Heathrow Express – which connects the airport to the center of the city in fifteen minutes. And now with Crossrail, there will be an even faster, even more efficient way to get across London. But as I daydream about a future for New York that might include the kind of innovations in high-speed, intercity rail that are already commonplace in Europe, I am reminded that today, with all airplanes grounded and even with train frequency increased by 60%, the wait for a seat on a Eurostar to Paris is still over ten days long.

In this week’s Omnibus feature, Vishaan Chakrabarti reminds us that the building of new, greener buildings is, by itself, unequal to the challenge of climate change. And yes, part of what must be done is to rethink how we get ourselves around. But part of it is also, surely, to remind ourselves that we need not intervene exclusively in the name of efficiency. Perhaps, we can intervene in the name of patience. Which is why I think I am going to go spend some time with one of history’s grandest and most important routes of transit, commerce and cultural exchange: I’m going to go take a leisurely walk along the Thames.

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Postscript: Heathrow opened this morning. But flights to JFK were either still canceled or fully booked through next week. So I booked myself on a flight to Los Angeles and managed to talk my way onto a flight to Chicago. How’s that for efficient intercity travel?

Cassim Shepard is the project director of Urban Omnibus. He is currently en route back to New York City.