Gulf News April 18, 2008 By Shiva Kumar Thekkepat
"As a youngster I thumbed rides so I could get on the highway," he reminisces. "Part of the fun in going to the big city was the way you got there."
Robert found his vocation on the road, and getting to the big city, in his case, Detroit. He still can't resist thumbing a ride from the American University of Dubai, where he gave a lecture, to his hotel in the Dubai Marina. "You're going that way, so I'd rather not hire a cab which would mean one more vehicle polluting the earth," he explains.
Also, he's more than a little interested in feeling the pulse of the city, asking questions about the development and environmental issues that Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah face.
Why? Robert is both a planner and an architect. He is an Emeritus Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning, and Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Social Research in Michigan.
As the driving force behind the Detroit Area Study (DAS) 2001, he has compiled an extensive body of research, backed by equally extensive community involvement, on issues of the built and natural environments, neighbourhood quality, recreation behaviour and parks, and retirement housing.
More than that, Professor Robert had a first-hand feel of what the planners in the UAE are up against when he drove down to the AUS (American University of Sharjah) to speak about his experience with DAS 2001.
He was half an hour late, something that's never happened to him before. "The traffic was something else," he smiled, too polite to be more explicit. "Welcome to the UAE!" chortled Dr Amer Moustafa, Associate Professor, School of Architecture and Design at AUS.
The Dubai-Sharjah experience was part of Robert's tour of the UAE to map out a way of applying the research work he conducted in Detroit to this region. "I was invited by the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research to discuss the DAS 2001 study (and how it can be applied here).
I essentially talked about the presentation we had made at Sharjah and they were very interested. They thought it might be interesting to do the whole study. They said they didn't want to do just Dubai or Sharjah, but the entire UAE.
If it's done here maybe the American University of Dubai might do it, and in Sharjah maybe the American University of Sharjah may be involved.
The institutes would play a critical role in helping to design the questionnaire, doing the data collection, start the interviews, sampling of households in different cities... they have all that capability.
That's also the reason I wanted to talk to them because this is not something one individual or organisation can do. It's got to be very much of a team effort. So it's quite exciting."
Practical application
But what are the implications of such a vast study? And are they practical or just utopian ideals to be filed and produced for seminars and theses? "There's nothing utopian about the survey or the findings," says Robert.
"It is the sum total of the people's aspirations on a very practical level, and which the authorities can work towards realising."
But the DAS findings were not applied right away as one would expect. "I was constantly talking about the results in different areas to different groups of government officials," says Robert ruefully. "It was slow but there was progress nevertheless.
We'd get enquiries from different departments, like the planning department and I would provide them with the information. What should be understood is that there is no single report because there is too much of it! We have made it available on the website.
I think anybody interested in urban planning should be able to go there and use all the stuff they need." Robert knows his forte is research and sticks to it. "After all, I am not going to do the work and I think it really requires people from institutes and the departments concerned, working together and planning it out," he says.
About the future of such a study in the UAE and in future in the Middle East, he is hopeful but reserved.
"It requires a lot of planning," he explains. "I think everybody [here] likes the idea but nobody has the plan. So they have a lot of work to do.
The chairman of the interior design department at the AUD [American University of Dubai] was very excited, he's an architect by training. When I said they really needed someone, a faculty member with some knowledge and background [in such research] to take a leadership role, he told me that he had spoken to people in Dubai Municipality and they were interested.
They are the ones who will eventually implement it too, not the academics. They will be the people to use the findings, their suggestions and decisions.
"That's the value of the research. Hopefully it's done at least once, but preferably with some regularity every five to six years. Because you want to see how things change.
"It's very informative as to how people in Dubai, the Emiratis, the expatriates, are responding to life here. And the change that's taking place here because of it. That's the essence of it."
Implications of the study
What has DAS 2001 unearthed about the planning defects in Detroit? For one, it has helped detect the pattern of ‘urban sprawl' in the city, according to Robert.
"Traditionally people have opted for bigger houses in the suburbs and moved out of the city," he says, explaining the meaning of the term. "This has created more and more suburbia and there is an increasing recognition among planners that this is not necessarily a sustainable way to live.
Particularly since you have to drive everywhere to work and back home, most people have to drive to the supermarket, buses to take children to school..." This, according to Robert, is a major cause of environmental pollution.
"Much of what ails cities all around the world today is due to the development aspect we term urban sprawl," he says. "You have more traffic spreading out in all directions which leads to more transportation, leading to traffic jams, waste of time, and of course an increase in pollution. This
in turn leads to lifestyle changes that reflect in the quality of life."
Containing urban sprawl
Marans is an advocate of the concept of neo-urbanism to contain the ill-effects of urban sprawl. "The thought is that there may be an alternative to housing people and creating neighbourhoods, and that is where the emerging national trend, a concept called neo-urbanism or neo-traditional development comes up," he opines. "For example there is a housing project, one of several in the state of Indiana, that is trying it out.
The aim of these housing developments is to turn the tide on suburban sprawl by creating modern-day villages, taking the best parts of the city and mixing it with what people like best about the suburbs."
Neo-traditional developments call for narrower streets that are more pedestrian-friendly as well as a mixture of housing types, ranging from apartments to row houses to large, upscale homes all within a few blocks of each other.
Commercial and retail districts are within the development so people can walk, instead of drive, for some of their basic needs. The one Robert is talking about, for instance, will have a post office, a dentist's office, a dry cleaner and a restaurant in its village centre.
Other neo-urbanism principles include avoiding cul-de-sacs to aid in better traffic flow, reducing the size of the front yard as well as having smaller lot sizes to increase housing density and decrease the amount of land gobbled up.
"It is the idea that while you shift to one side of higher density of development, which means living closer together, there are also other users, schools, shopping, libraries, mosques, churches whatever it may be, and this all within the context of good transportation for people," he says.
"So people don't depend totally on automobiles, and there are plenty of opportunities to walk to places. That is an important way of containing the urban sprawl. And now it's become even more important because of the rising fuel costs in the US.
But the implications of automobile driving in terms of emissions and what it does to the environment makes it pertinent here in the Middle East."
Would containing the urban sprawl mean more densely populated urban areas? "Yes, but it need not necessarily mean more highrises either," counters Robert.
"It would require a different balance of development and there are different ways of designing these things. Neo-urbanism is one way of getting around it.
How do you acquire an urban environment like the old European cities without the attendant traffic problems? There's something nice about living in these kinds of places where you can walk and you don't have to rely on your automobile.
The best example is New York City but it has got other problems. In the poorer areas of NYC, there are issues of hygiene, as it would be in any other urban area in any other part of the world. But the pattern is right, though the hygiene and housing conditions may be poor.
You want good housing conditions in a good urban environment. That would be the goal.
Give the people what they want in a sustainable way." Does he see this happening in Detroit? "First of all, the Detroit situation is not very good now because of what's going on in the US with the home loan crisis.
Buildings are not being built like they were three to four years ago," says Robert. "But there has been a movement towards this as builders and developers recognise that there is a market for this kind of function.
Not everyone of course. Some people still want the bigger house in the suburbs. But older couples will when they become less mobile. They are the ones that might want to move back... or young professionals.
In the US, if you have children, you may want a yard. So that group is the one that wants a more traditional type of housing. But there are other segments of population and that's in part what this research shows. It's also market research too and developers need to know this information."
Land use
What it all boils down to is the policy followed in land use, says Robert. "You have to take into account where people live and add some mixture of land use and again these are planning ideas," he explains. "You don't want one large area of the city being only residential and another area of the city being solely commercial. It has to be mixed.
"The mall idea here is a big thing and isn't going to go away: everybody who comes to the mall has to drive and so you have to devise a plan to have a housing close by so that more people can walk to it. So it's a little difficult but not impossible."
"How do you create liveable spaces and how can you make it easy for people to move around?" he asks. "Besides the automobile, you have to give them an alternative. I know some workers do use the bus here.
I don't know much about planning in the UAE, but there are issues and I am sure the local planners are thinking about it and trying to deal with it.
There's the question about the links between Dubai and Sharjah and Abu Dhabi - all the emirates in fact - are these cities going to go together, are there better ways to link them through transportation and so forth.
"My interest is in seeing how a study like this could work on [improving] the quality of life and help policy makers and planners in knowing how people behave in these parts: are they spending more time in automobiles and less at home; their thoughts on the kind of neighbourhood they live in; families, shopping, and what are the implications of these different ways of life in terms of their health...?
A study would help them understand the dynamics of the change."