KOOZ What prompted the project?

ES I first became interested in autonomous vehicles (AVs) when in 2018 I called a self-driving Lyft in Boston’s seaport district. In 2017 Lyft partnered with nuTonomy, an AV mobility company that was the first to deploy self-driving taxis on city streets,and launched a pilot project which featured a taxi service throughout the city of Boston. At the time, I was skeptical of autonomous technology, but seeing this technology on our roads made me immediately think about the long-term impact that the former would have on our built environment. The more I dived into the discourse around AVs, the more I found the literature examining the potential physical design & transformation of our cities from AVs lacking.

To date, huge tech companies like Google’s Waymo, TNC’s like Uber/Lyft, or private sector auto-makers like Tesla, are at the forefront of this impending technological revolution while slow-reacting public agencies wait to see how this emerging tech will impact the future evolution of our cities. Conspicuously the perspectives which could be offered by engaging in the discourse urban designers, planners, and architects, professionals with the skills to imagine, analyse and design the infrastructure of this new technology is lacking.

KOOZ What questions does the project raise and which does it address?

ES The project explores numerous critical questions related to the visioning, design and implementation of how autonomous vehicles will impact our built environment. What impact could automated mobility have on our city’s land use, zoning, and urban form? What policy options, planning templates, and political strategies could cities adopt to create multi-modal, environmentally friendly, and improved public realm solutions? How will today’s auto-oriented architectural typologies evolve, adapt, and hybridize with new or expanded uses? How will existing transportation networks, modal hierarchies and trip chains be affected by the introduction of AVs? How can autonomous mobility create a blueprint for the broader restructuring of urban growth patterns and development paradigms for the future city? In what ways can the implementation of new AV technology ensure spatial & economic accessibility & equity, to and for all diverse constituents of the city?

Embedded within this research is the belief that not only must the introduction of AV in our cities support, catalyze, and incentivize transit & ridesharing by filling existing mobility gaps, but it must rival point-to-point service by shifting mobility to a service model that integrates mobility into seamless trip chains. We must re-think the evolution of the city’s urban growth pattern ensuring that affordability and equity are central to these changes.

KOOZ Aside from reducing traffic congestion and mobility inequality, how do you envision Transitopia informing and redefining the architectural typology of the suburban home? What are the implications of this?

ES One of the most transformative impacts of automation will be on the adaptive conversion of car-centric architecture typologies that are pervasive in contemporary cities. Suburban homes are just one of a variety of building types that have been designed around the spatial constraints of queuing and parking requirements of the private automobile. Car-centric typologies such as the fast-food drive-through restaurant, the retail strip mall, streets & highways, and of course the abundance of parking will all need to be re-configured for a driverless world, in ways that prioritize the experience of the human and the public realm they inhabit, rather than the single-occupancy vehicle. When so much of our cities have been configured for the automobile and its driver, what happens to these urban spatial relationships in a driverless future?

When looking specifically to the single-family residential typology, the private automobile has exerted a strong influence on the emergence, evolution and sprawl of the suburban home in the US. This influence is most prominently manifested in the use of the two-car garage and paved driveway as primary entrance to countless homes which, not only consume large amounts of space, but also shapes the public character of the suburban street edge. As one walks or preferably drives along a typical suburban street in the US, the characteristic street-front is defined by the horizontal plane of a concrete driveway and the vertical facade of a plastic garage door.

KOOZ What informed Los Angeles as a site for the speculation? How and to what extent could the model be exported to other cities facing similar issues?

ES The project situates itself firmly in the city of Los Angeles as a testbed for several important reasons. Los Angeles is a prime example of larger shifts in cultural mobility trends which contemporary American cities are facing today. Despite the popular stereotype of the city’s love affair with the car, LA was once on the forefront of transit development. In the late 19th century, the backbone of the city was built on railway expansion and speculative real estate development giving rise to the city’s sprawl through streetcar suburbs. If this period of the city can be coined the “First” LA, the “Second” LA is the period of well-documented history which produced the city’s obsession with the car following the dismantling of its rail lines and the political/cultural proliferation of the private automobile.

The following decades of growing traffic congestion, environmental degradation, and an increasingly shrinking civic realm have brought us to the “Third” iteration of the city which is now investing massively in public transit. In 2016, voters approved Measure M granting LA Metro $120 billion to build a 21st century public transit system by year 2047. This massive investment carries with it the potential to fundamentally transform mobility in the region. While LA’s transportation agencies have been focused on prioritizing the expansion of the city’s light rail/subway network, automation presents the distinct opportunity to rethink the bus network of the city. The latter could be deployed to reconceptualize the entire NextGen bus transit network, in which a whole new range of transit vehicle sizes could run on flexible and on-demand routes to serve low-density areas and fill last-mile mobility gaps, while the elimination of driver cost in existing rapid and local transit would allow an increase in both service frequency and coverage.

The challenges and opportunities facing a city like LA are ones that many urban areas are grappling with today. Faced with the well-documented effects of auto-oriented planning, automation may just be the technological ‘black swan’ that could help cities rethink their future transportation and development models.

KOOZ To become environmentally sustainable, what are in your opinion the shifts which need to occur throughout cities such as LA?

ES Urban development models that rely on the single-occupancy automobile as its primary form of mobility and transportation planning are inherently environmentally unsustainable. This can be traced to the many negative externalities that the automobile has imparted onto our cities throughout the 20th century: suburban sprawl, a shrunken public realm, traffic congestion and pollution. The proliferation of the private automobile contributes to the well-documented root causes of the many cultural, physical, and economic issues that our cities face today. Proliferation of automobile transport also comes at a significant environmental cost. Transit-dependent cities in Asia and Europe serve huge urban densities while consuming far less energy, while their American counterparts exhibit an inverse trait (See: Sustainability & Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence by Newman & Kensworthy, 1989). If there were to be a proliferation of the AV into the private mobility sphere (single-occupancy, gasoline powered, and privately owned) there are real fears that they may exacerbate the worst trends of 20th century urbanism: cars on steroids enabling greater unsustainable urban sprawl and exacerbating congestion and pollution.

Therefore, cities need to take important measures to ensure that automated mobility is deployed to foster more sustainable forms of urban growth. Automation must be deployed to support transit ridership, incentivize ridesharing, fill mobility (last-mile) gaps, and re-envision transportation chains. Urban growth patterns need to be coordinated closely with automated mobility, concentrating urban growth on hierarchies of transit options rather than the flattened non-hierarchical nature of uniform urban sprawl enabled by the automobile. Mobility needs to be consumed as a ‘Service’ with multi-modal travel options for multi-travel needs without requiring individual vehicle ownership. New mobility services need to be affordable for all users and not just benefit those who can afford them.

If a city like Los Angeles were to do so, it could unleash the full potential of its polycentric metropolitan structure, transitioning from an individualistic car-oriented city to one that is more mixed, dense, walkable, and equitable, reinventing its DNA yet again for decades to come.

KOOZ What is for you the power of the architectural imagination?

ES Urban and architectural imaginaries provide important visioning for our cities and societies to guide their potential future transformation. In envisioning a utopian automated-transit incorporated Los Angeles 2047, the project acknowledges and builds upon a history of urban imaginaries and utopias that preceded it. Urban utopias like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre city or Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City were social and cultural critiques that were catalyzed by mobility technologies of their respective eras. Broadacre city, an apotheosis of the newly born American suburbia, was founded on the belief that all major transport be done by the newly pervasive private automobile, while the co-centric structure of the Garden city was enabled by the locomotive. Past urban imaginaries had great power in critiquing the social and cultural issues facing cities of their times, but often envisioned these alternative futures through single-minded top-down visions.

Therefore, this project departs sharply from the urban utopias of the 20th century through the particular medium that it takes - that of the graphic novel. Embedded within this medium is a critique of traditional design outputs that focus on site-based outcomes, and far less on how the everyday user of the built environment experience and interact with those spaces. The project argues that it is through the eyes of the everyday user of such technology, that we must imagine an urban environment that evolves more positively for the human, rather than alienating us, something that technology has historically wrought upon the city.

The graphic novel as a medium of imagination is also a way to combat the historic proliferating celebration of the car in the American imaginary, through media campaigns, car adverts, and especially through Hollywood. It offers an alternative story that might perhaps be read by children, adults today who used to read comics, and the everyday city-goer, to illustrate the urban development and transportation crossroads at which we now stand. This medium is therefore vital in order to convince city-dwellers that alternatives to car culture can exist: that there is hope to transition from the Autopia of today, to a Transitopia of tomorrow. Fundamentally, the project operates on the belief that a mobility paradigm shift must happen from below, by citizens, for citizens. It is with this spirit that I hope readers leaves reading this research with.

Bio

Evan Shieh is an architect, urbanist, researcher and educator, and is the founder and director of Emergent Studio LLC. His interdisciplinary research focuses on the spatial impact of new mobility technologies on the design/planning of our built environments. Autonomous Urbanism was the recipient of the 2019 Urban Design Thesis Prize at Harvard GSD, 2nd Place Runner-up in the 2021 A+D Museum Design Awards, and was also exhibited at the 2019 Seoul and 2020 Shenzhen Biennales of Architecture & Urbanism. Evan currently teaches studios at Parsons School of Design and NY Institute of Technology, having previously taught at the University of Virginia, and at Harvard GSD. He is a graduate of Harvard GSD with a Masters of Architecture in Urban Design.