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After the bubble, ghost towns across America
Alex Roth, Wall Street Journal
Half-Built Subdivisions
Are Lonesome Places;
‘There’s Just No Noise’
—
… Since real-estate tanked, many new planned communities across the country are half-empty, with for-sale signs outnumbering residents by a large margin.
Some of the projects abandoned by bankrupt developers are in places that were hotbeds of new housing construction: Southern California, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Phoenix. As of July, the percentage of vacant housing stock available for sale or rent stood at 4.8% nationally, the highest figure in at least 33 years, according to Zelman & Associates, a real-estate research firm.
Daily life in these developments seems a bit post-cataclysmic. Children play on elaborate but empty playgrounds. They walk their dogs past rows of shiny houses that have never been lived in. Voices echo up and down the block. Unfinished houses and vacant lots strewn with construction debris clutter the horizon.
(2 August 2008)
Jeffrey J. Brown points out that only four years have passed since “End of Suburbia” was released. Trailer (2004). “America took all of its post-war wealth and invested it in a living arrangement that has no future”
– James Howard Kunstler
Vancouver needs to plan for a post-oil world — now
Barbara Yaffe, Vancouver Sun
North American cities had better start adapting to a future characterized by climate change and depleting oil. Fewer parking lots. More condominiums. No more big highway upgrades. No further airport expansion. Emergency response and health care systems that can respond to the potential impacts of global warming and energy shocks.
The future is here, declares Bryn Davidson, a Vancouver engineer and architect who, with fellow planners Jonathan Frantz and Tom Lancaster, established the Dynamic Cities Project in 2005.
The project is a non-profit organization aimed at jolting designers and planners out of a torpor that has them carrying out business as usual.
To date, only the municipality of Burnaby has done any formal analysis of trends that are starting to hit North America.
A group of activists calling themselves the Vancouver Peak Oil Executive launched a petition recently urging Vancouver to strike a committee that would address the same issue.
Davidson’s Dynamic Cities Project website (www.dynamiccities.org) features a slide show detailing the ways in which climate change and declining petroleum reserves will drastically alter people’s behaviour.
Yet government planners have been fashioning civic infrastructure based on past trends.
(31 July 2008)
Bryn Davidson has been a contributor to Energy Bulletin.
Changing the world one block at a time
Jay Walljasper, Worldchanging
Tuesday August 5 is National Night Out, a red-letter day in thousands of towns and cities around the country. Up to 30 million people will take to the streets and parks, with no one calling the cops. Indeed, local police departments organize these block parties, cook-outs, and music events as a practical method to fight crime. The idea is that communities are safer when neighbors get to know one another and work together on solving problems.
But crime is not the only major problem facing us that can be effectively addressed at the neighborhood level. So can the environment, economic decline, traffic, social alienation and even global climate change. People are more likely to get involved on issues that affect their own backyard, and where they can see the effect of their actions. When you add up the people from all over the world who are walking more and driving less, starting new businesses and citizens groups, or simply reaching out to meet their neighbors, the results can be impressive.
The notion of the neighborhood as an important social institution might seem old-fashioned, like nostalgic memories of the corner soda fountain. Yet it’s actually as up-to-date as an internet café, where you find people communicating with New Zealand and Morocco at their laptops but also striking up conversations with someone at the next table…
(29 July 2008)
Concrete Dragon, a Book Review (about China)
Regine Debatty, WorldChanging
We’ve written a lot about China and the future of the planet. If you want to better understand the role China will play in the future, you might want to start with The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World, by Thomas J. Campanella, an associate professor of urban design and planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a visiting professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Publisher Princeton Architectural Press says:
China is the most rapidly urbanizing nation in the world, with an urban population that may well reach one billion within a generation. Over the past 25 years, surging economic growth has propelled a construction boom unlike anything the world has ever seen, radically transforming both city and countryside in its wake. The speed and scale of China’s urban revolution challenges nearly all our expectations about architecture, urbanism and city planning.
(30 July 2008)
