Housing & urban design – June 5

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Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage

Scenario Based Transport Planning
Bryn Davidson, Dynamic Cities Project
Peak Oil and Climate Change are unprecedented global challenges that are creating an entirely new context for global development.

In response, we need to fundamentally change the way we plan our cities. It is our belief that every major project that will serve us from 2015 to 2050 (and beyond) needs to be planned using a scenario-based analysis.

This presentation uses a large highway replacement project in Seattle as a test case for scenario-based transport planning.

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(A slideshow which proposes an alternative framework for weighing transport planning options. The framework is based on the DCP’s energy transition scenarios, and aims to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of various design concepts when looked at through the lens of alternative futures.

Our goal is to create a dialogue tool which allows us to think outside of the narrow (and potentially misleading) future that we currently use to plan our major investments.)

PDF of the presentation
(29 May 2007)

Radiant City movie review: Life in the Sprawling Suburbs, if You Can Really Call It Living
Matt Zoller Seitz, NY Times
“In some ways a suburban city can be understood as an intolerant city.” If that loaded quotation from the Calgary-based architect Marc Boutin doesn’t tell you exactly where “Radiant City” stands on the issue of suburban sprawl, the filmmakers have plenty more just like it.

Blending documentary elements and some dramatic material (you don’t realize which is which until the movie springs its best surprise), “Radiant City” is an acerbic position paper on the cultural damage done by postwar architectural fads. The film unfavorably contrasts early-20th-century suburbs, which were built around shared public spaces and more conducive to pedestrian life, with their postwar successors, which lured inhabitants by promising huge amounts of space and no obligation to care about what happened beyond your property line.

…James Howard Kunstler, a critic of suburbanization, appears throughout “Radiant City” and helps define its tone, which could be described as one of incredulous lament. The cinematographer Patrick McLaughlin’s eerie, sometimes monumental images italicize the experts’ statements, making the suburbs seem like an asphalt-and-Sheetrock dreamscape where democracy goes to die.
(30 May 2007)

No drought about it … Maleny set to face a flood of ‘oasis-changers’
Sam Benger, Sunshine Coast Daily
FORGET seachange, Coast residents can expect an influx of people looking for an oasis change, according to a property expert.

With the state gripped by drought, and water restrictions facing most of south-east Queensland, the latest trend to hit the real estate market will be people looking for areas with high rainfall and good water resources. The trend, dubbed an “oasis change” by property expert Terry Ryder, would see people move to regions like Townsville, Perth, and the Sunshine Coast’s own Maleny region.

Despite the Coast being drought-declared last week, it was the green hills of Maleny that would bring people to the Coast in the future, according to Mr Ryder. ..
(22 May 2007)