The Pope on Cities

With the Pope’s passing, more people are looking back on his legacy. For all the Catholic Church’s faults, bad positions, and the parts he played in them, Francis seemed different than previous iterations of his position on human suffering and poverty.

Jarrett Walker notes how Francis confronted transportation policy and architecture in his 2015 environmental encyclical Luadato Si, which sided with humans and nature over machines and constructions. (I also recommend going back and listening to Paula DiPerna’s story about the pope and her small influence on him in episode 442 of the podcast related to carbon trading).

Jarrett’s interpretation is more powerfully put in some ways than Francis’ original writing. “The beauty is not in the thing humans have built, however much we may be dazzled by photos and renderings. The beauty is in the transformation of people’s lives.”

This is perhaps how we should also go about transportation and city building. Architecture is flashy, but street trees and benches induce people to walk.  A clean wide street seems pleasant, but a messy one is safer. Looking past appearances we can see what leads to human flourishing and transformation.

Pope Francis also seemed to understand that the way we build our cities impacts suffering as well, blaming over reliance on cars. “Many cars, used by one or more people, circulate in cities, causing traffic congestion, raising the level of pollution, and consuming enormous quantities of non-renewable energy. This makes it necessary to build more roads and parking areas which spoil the urban landscape.”

But here in the United States we seem doomed to spoil it more. Policies looking to build more much needed housing are focused on public lands on the periphery that would induce more driving and more road construction, even at a time when legislators in places like Nevada understand people want to be closer to activities and employment. They know they may run out of land.

We could choose a different path, but we choose outward expansion and to make people pay more money for it while urban roads languish. Brookings says 34% of VMT is on local roads, but just 16% of state disbursements go to local roads. 7% of state roads are in bad condition while 49% of locals are in the same boat.

Other countries are more balanced in their approach and it shows. Recent research shows in charts like the one above that North America has chosen a path towards auto dependence. We are certainly transforming people’s lives with all this investment, but I wouldn’t call it beautiful.