Connectivity challenges.
The Connectivity Challenge
- About the Connectivity Challenge
- Connectivity Challenge Team
- Connectivity Challenge Final Report
- Presentation: Chicago Regional Transportation Authority
- Presentation: Active Transportation Alliance
- Presentation: Neighborhood Capital Institute
- Presentation: Chicago Department of Transportation
- Presentation: Chicago Transit Authority
- Presentation: Chicago Public Building Commission
- Presentation: Civic Consulting Alliance
Seventy years ago GM’s Futurama generated a compelling vision for a new American ideal: a spacious, car-centered good life. That ideal dominated public policy for 50 years, literally paving the way for Americans to spread out by increasing homebuyers’ access to credit and supporting development patterns that relied on cheap land and cheap gas.
We are beginning to see that while sprawling suburbanization made sense for a time, Americans have a growing appetite for urban living. Planners now project that 86% of the growth in new households will be single people or couples without children at home – and neither group wants to live in remote suburbs or in houses surrounded by big lawns. Four cars in every garage may have once been the dream of Americans, but it’s now clear that not only is that time-consuming and isolating; not only does it undermine the natural advantages of cities, but it is also expensive.
A key advantage of cities is their intrinsic sustainability: they require less car travel, use less energy and generate fewer emissions per capita than more sprawling areas. Alternative forms of transportation (transit, walking and cycling) enable city-dwellers to recapture income otherwise spent on cars and gasoline – money that quickly leaves the local economy – and redistribute it in their local economies.
Imagine a community taking up the challenge to ensure its citizens are able to meet their daily needs without owning a car. What would that look like? What would be an effective quick start strategy? Where are the early wins to create momentum? And how would a community know when it is succeeding?
On December 8-10, 2010, CEOs for Cities and a team of international connectivity experts led by Copenhagen’s Jan Gehl worked over 2.5 days in Chicago with Chicago transit stakeholders to imagine the future of connectivity as expressed in the Declaration of Interdependence: We can meet our daily needs without owning a car.
The resulting Big Ideas and quick-start strategies are available in the Connectivity Challenge Final Report and will also be reported nationally as part of a book, generously underwritten by The Rockefeller Foundation.
Questions? Contact Julia Klaiber at 202-525-5627.
