Damian Edmond | Kingston: Tale of suffering commuters and disgruntled nostalgias

I drive out of Kingston each week and often return home in the late evenings. I’m always alarmed at the number of cars that fill three lanes for miles, trying to get out of Kingston to home. These cars light up the highway like a Catholic candlelight vigil, with exhausted parents and children sleeping on the backseats and overcrowded public transport buses.

These persons spend an average of five hours a day in a motor vehicle on the way to and from work. Most people are forced to live outside of the city that provides more affordable housing solutions because of lower land prices and developer costs. They simply cannot afford housing prices and Kingston remains a half-life city that is only occupied during the day and dies at night. And nobody cares.

While most would prefer to live in Kingston and, for the few that can afford it, they can only purchase high-rise solutions in “desirable “ neighbourhoods because of current densities and land prices. The existing residents in these desirable neighbourhoods are now faced with a changing urban fabric from single-family bungalows to four-story apartment buildings juxtaposed against them. This creates privacy issues, reduction in light, obstructed wind flows, and major noise increases as a result of the number of adjacent neighbours, in most cases, and traffic. The newspapers for the last four years have been littered with rhetoric from building professionals, angry residents wanting their neighbourhoods to remain the same, breaches in overdevelopment by developers, and a legal framework being used to stop developments and order demolitions.

Kingston exists within two tales - those who suffer daily (commuters) to get in and out of its urban fabric and those who live in Kingston suburbia and would like it to remain the same (disgruntled nostalgias). For both, everyone wants to see progress but no one wants it to affect them negatively. Regardless of the tale you choose, a city is the most efficient and cost-effective way to live. The needs of commuters and nostalgias are real and are not ignored. This urban issue can be fixed through good design with positive social, economic, and environmental impact while decreasing our daily mass exodus out of the city.

COST OF DAILY EXODUS

The average two-bedroom starter home in St Catherine and Old Harbour surrounds costs an average of $15 million, in comparison to a two bedroom in Kingston that starts at an average $40 million. The comparative mortgage payment with two NHT benefits and 10 per cent deposit is impossible for most Jamaicans. Ironically, only 25 per cent of Jamaicans own a motor vehicle, and the rest take public transport. If we are to collectively calculate the daily average hourly work, people who lose five hours in traffic, results in loss of potential revenues and quality of life. Getting home late at night each day leaves very little time to be with family, much less gain adequate sleep each day, which is essential for good health. The commuters have to wake up at 4 a.m. each day to get to work and do school drop offs. They are actually slowly killing themselves, and further research needs to be done on the average health standards of commuters versus those who live in the city. The data will alarm you.

Traditionally, cities have been created to satisfy two modalities: trade and fortification. Trade, which enables a direct contact with the sea or large bodies of water for movement of goods and services. Fortification, which has advantage with placement inland for more defensible higher ground, with better views and vantage points to fight an enemy. Kingston was formed to facilitate the former and our urban fabric and syntax derived from our colonisers whose approach to urban design was reactionary and a replication to urban fabric of their home countries that are largely the result of their climates. The Spanish live largely outdoors because of their warmer climate, whose urban fabric is littered with courtyards, plazas, parks and public places for people to gather. The British climate was quite the opposite, with the outside being less desirable with a cold and damp climate with its urban organisation geared less towards public space but instead internal gatherings. They created roadways that joined commercial nodes with single-city centres that would have government buildings to show political power rather than urban spaces for people to gather. This urban arrangement can be seen all across Jamaica and, as it relates to urbanity that is appropriate for the tropics, we unfortunately received the British.

UNDEVELOPED

Kingston remains largely undeveloped with a few densely populated areas, with vast areas of land that are in urban decay in proximity. While the lands in the hills are now more desired areas, the lands between Cross Roads and Ocean Boulevard are the most valuable and prime lands for redevelopment of a Kingston that can create affordable housing. This urban renewal provides the potential to build a proper tropical city like our Spanish neighbours have enjoyed, with designed urban spaces that are walkable, with parks and plazas with proximity to all the amenities of a proper city. Urban renewal is constant and this phenomena happens all over the world. Cities are not static and the value of a place is the value we give to it by way of how we treat our shared built environments through common social agreements. The Norbrook of today will not always be the Norbrook of tomorrow. Cities grow and change. Sprawling out into the neighbouring parishes each day is simply not the answer. Security comes from occupying a space, not guarding it. Let’s redevelop downtown Kingston and surrounding areas.

Damian Edmond is managing director of Form Architects Limited and former programme director of the Caribbean School of Architecture. Send feedback to dedmond@formarchitects.com