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California Moves on Bill to Curb Sprawl and Emissions
Felicity Barringer, New York Times
California, known for its far-ranging suburbs and jam-packed traffic, is close to adopting a law intended to slow the increase in emissions of heat-trapping gases by encouraging housing close to job sites, rail lines and bus stops to shorten the time people spend in their cars.
The measure, which the State Assembly passed on Monday and awaits final approval by the Senate, would be the nation’s most comprehensive effort to reduce sprawl. It would loosely tie tens of billions of dollars in state and federal transportation subsidies to cities’ and counties’ compliance with efforts to slow the inexorable increase in driving. The goal is to encourage housing near current development and to reduce commutes to work.
(28 August 2008)
Publish Your Green Urban Life, Win $100
SustainLane.com
* Live in a major US city?
* Into sustainability?
* Always on the lookout for green trends?
Help us shine some light into your corner of the map. Send us your perspectives (humorous, tragic, ironic) on living green in your gray city.
* Is it easy to use your city without a car?
* What energy sources would suit your city best?
* What unique contributions to global sustainability can your city make?
* How would you reform the city’s spaces, if you were queen/king?
The more specific you are, the more your city’s flavor will emerge. Geek out or wax poetic. Dig deep for your inner-urbanist.
Send us your insights and perspectives (500 words). We’ll showcase the best submissions on our forthcoming website on urban sustainability. We’re looking for the green situation on the ground, penned by ordinary residents of the largest cities in the United States.
Compensation: $100 per accepted piece.
Please submit all stories by September 1, 2008.
(August 2008)
SustainLane writes:
We last put out our US City Rankings in 2006. This time, we will spotlight citizen voices as part of our 2008 US City Rankings website.
Live architecture: Grow your own home
Jeanna Bryner, Live Science via MSNBC
Malleable roots are shaped into useful objects for both indoors and out
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Tolkien’s hobbits would feel right at home in new dwellings made out of living tree roots and designed to protect inhabitants from earthquakes. The homegrown architecture is just one of many eco-structures a new company hopes to roll out worldwide.
The concept of coaxing living trees into useful objects, sometimes called tree shaping, arborsculpture, living art or eco-architecture, isn’t new. But now engineers and plant scientists from Tel Aviv University have taken their leafy designs to the next, and more practical and playful, level.
(28 August 2008)
The man who saw the future
Steve Rose, The Guardian
In the 1970s, visionary architect Paolo Soleri built an extraordinary eco-city in the Arizona desert. Did it work? Steve Rose tracks down a guru who now finds himself back in demand
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Wind-bells tinkle and cypresses sway in the breeze. The sun casts sharp shadows across an undulating landscape. There are strange concrete forms everywhere: giant open vaults, painted half-domes with strange crests, an amphitheatre ringed by buildings with giant circular openings, little houses sunk into the hillside. Healthy-looking, vaguely hippy-ish people, young and old, stride about in dusty jeans and T-shirts. Beyond are the scrub-covered hills of the Sonoran desert. This not your typical American settlement. In fact, it’s not your typical Earth settlement. For one thing, there are no cars or roads. Everything is connected by winding footpaths. Nor are there shops, billboards, or any other garish commercial intrusion. It looks like the set of a sci-fi movie designed by Le Corbusier. Round the next corner, you might expect to bump into Luke Skywalker, or Socrates, or a troupe of dancers doing Aquarius.
This is Arcosanti, 70 miles from Phoenix, Arizona. It’s a curious taste of what an environmentally friendly US town could look like, but probably never will. It was designed by Paolo Soleri, an Italian-born architect, who originally came to Arizona to work for Frank Lloyd Wright, but soon set off on his own idiosyncratic path. Soleri is a genuine visionary architect. In the early 1970s, his designs and fantastical writings made him a big-hitter in architectural circles, up there with other postwar sci-fi modernists such as Buckminster Fuller. Then he all but disappeared, becoming, for the past 30 years, little more than an obscure curiosity. Yet today, as the world wakes up to the grim realities of climate change, peak oil and sustainability, Soleri’s path looks less idiosyncratic. In fact, he’s now something of a guru
(25 August 2008)
