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Green? Dense? Walkable?
Alex Steffen, WorldChanging
Here’s a debate where none is needed: the argument about whether green building, compact communities, or transit-supportive design is a better approach to improving the world.
The latest piece to kick up some dust is a report from the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, which, as reported by Reuters, says
“Green” construction could cut North America’s climate-warming emissions faster and more cheaply than any other measure…
Elsewhere, people reaffirm that North Americans’ best bet for carbon reduction is walking and taking transit, while others (often including myself) think density is the best lever, if we have to pick one with which to start.
Now, it’s rarely much of an argument. There are green builders who are against growth management, and urban planners who hate transit and love cars, and transpogeeks who think architects are a useless form of decorator, but by and large, most advocates for each of these positions support the others, but just want to see their approach be taken on first.
But, of course, the whole argument is silly, and can be answered “all three, at once.” All three strategies are mutually reinforcing (and equally difficult to implement without one another).
(19 March 2008)
Respect for the Human Scale
Lakis Polycarpou, Next American City
An interview with urban theorists James Howard Kunstler and Nikos Salingaros
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James Howard Kunstler has written numerous books about urbanism and “the fiasco of suburbia,” including The Geography of Nowhere, Home from Nowhere and The City in Mind. In his most recent book, The Long Emergency, Kunstler explores the shocking implications of the imminent decline of oil and natural gas for the American way of life. His forthcoming novel, World Made by Hand, is set in a small upstate New York town in a not-too-distant “post-petroleum” future – a place where highways and suburbs have been abandoned and life has become “extremely local.”
Nikos Salingaros is a professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a renowned urban theorist. The author of Principles of Urban Structure and A Theory of Architecture, Salingaros links mathematical, fractal and network theory to urban planning and architecture. Over the years he has been a close collaborator with numerous noted architects and urban planners, including Christopher Alexander, Andrés Duany, Léon Krier and others.
Next American City took some time to speak with Mr. Kunstler and Mr. Salingaros about peak oil, crime, Vegas, transportation and both the failures and successes of urbanism.
(Spring 2008)
From the latest issue of Next American City, which is devoted to “Living in Peril”:
Fire, water, terror. Global warming. Threat of predators. Illegal immigration. Racism. War. Through both paranoia and legitimate fear, ours is a world attuned to, even stimulated by, hazard. But in the face of this, the question is not; should we advance or withdraw? The question is; how can we grow?
Suburban sprawl pollutes Hungary
Colin Woodard, The Christian Science Monitor
The rapid rise in commuter traffic to and from Budapest is creating Los Angeles-style smog.
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… When communism imploded in 1989, Budapest’s air was atrocious. With their two-cycle engines, fleets of Trabant automobiles spewed black clouds of lead-laden exhaust, while city busses and industrial facilities pumped eye-stinging emissions into the air. During the 1990s the air cleared as factories installed pollution controls, leaded gasoline was banned, and newer, cleaner Western cars replaced dirty Soviet ones.
But in recent years, those gains have been reversed as many Hungarians now drive to work from increasingly far-flung suburban areas. Lead and sulfur dioxide have been replaced by dangerous concentrations of tiny exhaust particles.
“We’ve exchanged [Victorian-era] London-type smog for Los Angles-type smog,” laments Janos Zlinszky of the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe
(19 March 2008)
