PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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“on the move” while the wealthy can afford to be more immobile. 41
Mobility in the sense
of daily commuting habits is a burden rather than a luxury. In these cities, only the
middle class and the rich own cars, but normally there is a wide variety of both formal
and informal public transport providing relatively high mobility to all but the very poor.
Meanwhile, in extremely congested cities such as Sao Paulo or Bangkok, around-theclock
gridlock affects everyone. 42
In the end, the problem is less one of mobility within
the city than of access to certain spaces, in particular gated communities and walled in
office complexes. In socialist cities, by contrast, mobility patterns were centrally planned
and neither housing nor employment were allocated according to market principles. And
with the exemption of a very small elite, everyone took public transport and mobility
patterns were less related to income. (This is now quickly changing, of course.) In
Western industrialized cities, which are the focus of Baeten’s article, (auto)mobility is
also less and less a matter of affordability, and congestion makes reduced mobility a
desirable option. Given the attractiveness of many central city neighborhoods, many
higher-income young urban professionals make a conscious choice to live close to their
place of employment, sometimes even selling their cars. Finally, in the US, unmistakably
the most automobilized country in the world, the mobility situation of the rich and the
poor is quite contrary to the one in less developed countries, and housing-transportation
trade-off work in almost opposite directions. Like everywhere else, higher-income
households can make more flexible housing decisions, choosing, for example, a large
single-family home close to a suburban rail-line or a gated penthouse apartment next to
41 Note that “work” in most cases does not mean formal employment here. Yet even informal economy
activities tend to be concentrate in the city center.
42 Baeten is certainly right, however, as far as the exceptional mobility of the super-rich is concerned: in
Sao Paulo in particular, high-level executives escape urban gridlock and violence by door-to-door
commuting via helicopter. See Faiola (2002)