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Reaching back beyond the 1970s: Relocalization
Daniel Lerch, Post Carbon Cities
New London, Connecticut is turning the clock back on a public square that was ‘re-muddled’ in the 1970s. In fact, there’s a lot to learn from the ways we built and organized our communities before the modern era. The success of our cities in the post-carbon era may depend on it.
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Last month I published a short article on what we learned –and didn’t learn– from the oil crises of the 1970s. We flirted with conservation and renewable energy, but quickly turned back to our squandering ways when a glut of cheap oil flooded world markets in the 1980s.
We also tried a few urban revitalization solution that ultimately proved poorly thought-through, or simply naïve. For example, we imported European-style pedestrian malls without the context of European densities, and pushed a new generation of heavy-handed planning and design solutions that wiped out human-scale streets and neighborhoods. Case in point: New London (Connecticut) recently decided to overhaul its historic Parade plaza, which was mangled by bad design in the 1970s.
The story of the Parade is an example not just of our earlier half-baked search for urban improvements, but of the value of pre-modern ways of organizing our communities. The Parade worked well in earlier times because it was designed with the same millennia-old, human-scale principles behind great public squares all over the world — as opposed to, say, more modern and abstract ideas of architecture-as-sculpture, where urban areas are either conduits to pass through quickly or distinct “destinations” with no real relation to their context.
A lot of how we did things in the pre-oil era makes good sense for the post-carbon 21st century. Without oil to skew our sense of distance and place, we developed cities, provisioning systems and even cultural and social norms suitable to a lower-energy world. It’s this way of doing things that we at Post Carbon Institute refer to with the term ‘relocalization’. Relocalization doesn’t mean reverting to some 19th century anti-technology past, but rather rediscovering those ways of running a society and an economy at the scale of humans, not petroleum-powered engines.
New London’s redesign of its Parade may well prove to be just one of many new redesigns of our city infrastructure as the post-carbon future becomes a reality.
(28 August 2008)
See the original for a model of Parade Plaza.
Previous article in this series from Daniel Lerch: What have we learned from the 1970s?.
Urban surprise: More bicyclists means fewer accidents
Inside Science News Service via Yahoo!News
In a study that at first glance seems counterintuitive, researchers at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, reviewed safety studies from 17 countries and 68 cities in California and found that the more people bike in a community, the less they collide with motorists.
“It appears that motorists adjust their behavior in the presence of increasing numbers of people bicycling because they expect or experience more people cycling,” said Julie Hatfield, an injury expert from the university.
With fewer accidents, people perceive cycling as safer, so more people cycle, thus making it even safer, she said.
“Rising cycling rates mean motorists are more likely to be cyclists, and therefore be more conscious of, and sympathetic towards, cyclists,” she said.
Safety experts said the decrease in accidents that comes with an increase in cycling is independent of improvements in cycling-friendly laws and better infrastructure such as bike paths. The safety studies reviewed were from Australia, D
Although the review focused on bicycling, it appears that the more is safer rule also applies to pedestrians, Hatfield said.
This article was provided by Inside Science News Service, which is supported by the American Institute of Physics.
(5 September 2008)
Creating our own neighborhood – Bellingham Cohousing
Peak Moment via Global Public Media
Kathleen Nolan was a co-creator (with 5 others) of Bellingham Cohousing, based on a neighborhood design of private homes and shared buildings, managed by residents in participatory decision making. Their 5.74 acre plot originally had one farmhouse, which they modified to become the shared community building with dining, kitchen, laundry, craft, office, guest, and other rooms. The individual townhouses make a small footprint, leaving open space for gardens and a natural wetland. She stresses the importance of agreeing on shared values, and how the social connections enhance and challenge personal growth. (www.bellcoho.com)
(21 August 2008)
