IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

Speed 39
famous for his obsession with (admittedly high-tech) sailing boats. Destinations
too will now sell you the opportunity to be quiet and reflective;
the market for spas and retreats is booming. 40 Agri-tourism is growing fast
in popularity, and one-fifth of all travelers say they prefer to travel in an
ecologically sound way (i.e., to practice eco-tourism). 41
Some transport designers are exploring forms of motion that are not tied
into perpetual acceleration. Michael Douglas, an Australian designer,
believes tramways are a great way to move slowly in a rich context. ‘‘Tramways
curiously run against the grain of industrial logic,’’ he says. ‘‘Travelling
back and forth, day in and day out, tramways help us encounter and
learn about small things of value whilst participating in the larger choreography
of a city’s metabolism.’’ Many tram systems were eliminated from
cities during years of car-oriented urban planning since the 1950s, but
they are now coming back. Douglas, in a project called Tramjatra, based
in Melbourne and Kolkota, celebrates their cultural, as well as functional,
value. ‘‘In our enthusiasm for electronic technologies, it’s too easy to neglect
the value of networks like tramways which already exist,’’ he says.
‘‘Tramways facilitate a way of knowing that is embedded in the dynamic
time and place of its situation. We need to pursue design practices which
weave themselves through the social fabric without damaging it.’’ 42
Some transport planners regard Kolkota as a paragon among cities because
such a high proportion of its citizens walk to and from work. It’s a
great test bed for the study of pedestrian flow and human behavioral factors.
For transport ecologist John Whitelegg, ‘‘Kolkota is still very much
the weather vane or ‘canary in the cage’ of world transport. It is one of the
finest examples in the world of an accessible city. All of the recent rhetoric
about creating livable cities or sustainable cities in Europe and North America
is nothing compared to the reality of Calcutta which can provide thousands
of everyday destinations for its 14 million citizens within walking
and rickshaw distances that can be covered in less than half an hour.’’ 43
Compared to Kolkota’s trams and pedestrians, today’s high-speed train
(HST) is a marvel of speedy travel—but also of profligate resource consumption.
Fast trains are transforming the experience of space and time of thirteen
million travelers who already use them each year—and of citizens
who live in places where the trains deign to stop. Enormous infrastructure
projects are under way, but we are only now beginning to reflect on the
cultural and social consequences of it all and whether they are desirable.