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Taking Life Easy in Urban Italy
Stephan Orth, Der Spiegel (Germany)
Orvieto, Italy – Supporters of Italy’s “Slow City” movement are trying to develop liveable cities, banning cars from city centers and blocking McDonald’s branches and supermarkets. The movement is spreading across Europe and is now taking off in Asia.
It’s not easy to be punctual for a meeting with Stefano Cimicchi. Parking places are hard to come by in Orvieto, even if cars are still legal. Cars in the city center stick out like a sore thumb among strolling pedestrians, who move to the sides of the streets with studied slowness. After a couple of twisty laps though the narrow medieval alleyways of the old town center, you might find a parking place on the edge of the small Umbrian town — and pay handsomely for the privilege of parking.
Cimicchi was mayor of Orvieto from 1991 to 2004, and for several years he was president of the “Slow City” movement, an outgrowth of the successful “Slow Food” concept. “Slow City” advocates argue that small cities should preserve their traditional structures by observing strict rules: cars should be banned from city centers; people should eat only local products and use sustainable energy. In these cities, there’s not much point in looking for a supermarket chain or McDonald’s.
“Our goal is to create liveable cities,” says Cimicchi, a cheerful 51-year-old with a white moustache and laugh lines around his eyes. “We are working, if you will, on the concept of the utopian city, in the same way as the writer Italo Calvino and the architect Renzo Piano have done.”
The miniscule Tuscan Chianti town of Greve became the first “cittáslow” in 1999, followed by Bra, Positano and Orvieto. Over time, the slowness wave has spread. There are now 42 slow cities in Italy, and more and more cities — in Great Britain, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Poland and Norway — conform to the movement’s list of strict requirements. I
(5 October 2007)
Recommended by by Tom Philpott at Gristmill.
Get cool with Smart Growth
Neal Peirce, Seattle Times
WASHINGTON – Increasing the fuel efficiency of the cars we drive is a great cause.
But it’s not enough. We have to go a giant step further with sharp cuts in how far, and how often, we drive. If we don’t, there’s virtually no chance we can reduce our cars’ massive greenhouse-gas emissions – now responsible for 45 percent of automobile carbon emissions worldwide.
The message and the math are incorporated in a just-released report – “Growing Cooler” – issued by the prestigious Urban Land Institute in collaboration with Smart Growth America and allied organizations.
The problem is complex and fierce. There’s now broad agreement among scientists that to restrain an upward spiral in global warming – with dangerously rising seas and spreading deserts – global temperature rise must be limited to 2 degrees Celsius. And that to reach that goal, the U.S., up to now the world’s champion polluter, must cut its carbon-dioxide emissions between 60 percent to 80 percent by 2050, relative to their 1990 levels.
The authors projected that even if stiffer new fuel-economy standards currently now before Congress are approved, and even if there’s progress on hybrid cars and lower-carbon fuels, the nation’s transportation-related CO2 emissions in 2030 would be 12 percent above the 2005 level and 40 percent above the 1990 level, casting a deep shadow across the 2050 goal.
So is there any way out? Yes, they reply: Cut back sharply on the miles we drive our vehicles. Since 1980, total miles driven by Americans has grown three times faster than the rise in our population, even twice as fast as vehicle registrations. The vast majority of new development is laid out assuming people will use cars for virtually all trips. Homes have been built ever farther from workplaces. Shopping malls, big retail boxes, office parks and new schools are routinely built without a thought to pedestrians or public transit. The net result: more and longer auto trips, most often driving alone.
But what if we switched to develop more compactly? Surveys show at least a third of us would now prefer more-compact communities in which homes, town centers, shops, parks and schools are in walking or biking distance. It’s true that many young families feel obliged to “drive till you qualify” – ever-longer commutes for an affordable mortgage.
(8 October 2007)
Also at Common Dreams
The Grass Roots Syndrome
Jim Kunstler, blog
Because I wrote a couple of books about the design of cities (and the shortcomings of suburbia), a lot of blather comes my way about what towns around the nation are planning for the future — and, off course, I hear plenty on the subject in my own town, Saratoga Springs, New York, which is a classic “main street” type town. I also happen to travel a lot and actually see what’s going on far from home. Almost everything I see and hear is inconsistent with what I think reality has in store for us.
Most American towns, including my own, are obsessed to the point of mania with the issue of parking and more generally the management of cars, and much of their spending is directed to those ends. Municipal leaders (and the public they serve) have no idea what kind of problems the nation faces with oil. Because life in the USA has worked a particular way all their lives, they assume that it will continue to operate that way. Not only will they be disappointed as happy motoring spirals into history, but they will create a lot mischief in the meantime in planning things based on faulty assumptions.
(8 October 2007)
