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Crossing Paths In The Walkable City
Kevin Plummer, Torontoist
In her ambitious new book, The Walkable City (Véhicule Press, 2008), Mary Soderstrom writes: “The walkable city, the oldest kind of city is going to be the key to whatever success we have in meeting the challenges of the future.”
After all, until the early nineteenth-century people moved only as fast and as far as their feet could carry them. Urban centres had to mirror this fact, whether they developed organically, like in Europe, or according to self-conscious plans, like in North America. Residents lived close to their work until the rise of the suburbs, expressways, and shopping malls separated residential from commercial districts. In many cities since that time, there’s been a distinct lack of streets that invite walking. Soderstrom sets off to examine the planning policies and circumstances that have made cities the way they are; to find out what makes neighbourhoods walkable; and to assess how cities can achieve a more walkable, more livable, and greener future.
Because she dedicates extended discussion to Toronto—where October has just been declared the Toronto Walking Festival—it’s worth exploring Soderstrom’s book in greater detail.
(2 October 2008)
To Save Energy, Cities Darken Street Lights
Kate Galbraith, New York Times
From Belmont, Mass., (see this article from The Boston Globe) to the tiny but trendy town of Marfa, Tex., (News West 9) a number of municipalities have turned off, or are considering turning off, their street lights to save money.
Even Fairbanks, Alaska, has discussed turning out the lights, to the chagrin of local police. According to an article this summer in The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, a whopping 60 percent or more of the city’s electricity bill comes from street lights.
(Seems staggering, but it is dark half the year.)
The London Times reported last week that the city council of Powys, Wales, had decided to darken 64 percent of its lamps. “I know that elderly people are particularly concerned,” a local official was quoted as saying.
And in Santa Rosa, Calif., an Adopt-A-Light program gives residents the opportunity to turn darkened street lights back on — they just have to pay $150 a year for each light…
(26 September 2008)
Future solutions in 1930s house
BBC
A 1930s-style house is being built on a university campus to help people who own old homes to save on energy costs.
The replica house at Nottingham University will have hundreds of sensors to monitor heat loss and find better ways to update old houses.
The project, supported by energy firm E.ON, is meant to learn from the failings of homes of the past.
The three-year project will investigate how a suburban home could be upgraded to help reduce CO2 emissions…
(2 October 2008)
San Francisco Speaks: Q&A with City Sustainability Staff
Jordana Gustafson, SustainLane
In August of 2008, SustainLane spoke with David Assman, deputy director of San Francisco’s Environment Department and communications manager, Mark Westlund. The city had just passed an ordinance requiring every employer to offer commuter benefits to employees. Assman and Westlund told us that one of the major challenges San Francisco faces in the next 50 years is sea level rise. If the ocean rises one meter, Assman says, the city’s international airport will be under water.
Read the full Q&A below:
SustainLane: How was San Francisco founded, and how did it develop?
ASSMAN: We are a peninsula, surrounded by water on three sides. Sir Francis Drake came by the San Francisco Bay, but what really put San Francisco on the map was the gold rush. That’s when people came to San Francisco .
Originally the whole western half of the city was sand dunes. There were farms in the southern part of the city, and there wasn’t much towards the ocean. A lot of the building happened in the 1870’s and 1880’s, including Golden Gate Park, which, again, was also all sand dunes.
A very significant percent of the city was rebuilt in the early 1900’s. …after the earthquake in 1906. The actual destruction in the earthquake wasn’t the earthquake itself; it was the fires that came afterwards.
There’s still development going on today. Since there’s no room to expand, an expensive city gets more and more expensive, so affordable housing is a challenge here. I reviewed an article for the San Francisco Examiner about affordable housing in general that outlines all the developments planned for the future, and a very significant percentage, in many cases up to 35 percent, is set aside for affordable housing So there are 60,000 plus units that are going to be built [in the Fisher Island development at Hunters Point].
SustainLane: What are some of the city’s geographical limitations when it comes to sustainability?
Ever since the 1800’s, the city has been pretty densely populated, and obviously we have some limitations. We can’t expand, which is both good and bad, from an environmental perspective. The land has been in high demand and there has been pressure. We’ve basically lost our industry and it’s hard, for example, to set up recycling facilities within the city that are going to remanufacture, because there is a limited amount of space.
On the other hand, it enabled us to do things like have pretty dense housing. Sprawl was not an option because we simply don’t have anywhere to sprawl to with ocean on three sides. We have been the same forty seven and a half square miles ever since the city got incorporated…
(2 October 2008)
Contributed by Ken of SustainLane who writes:
Long read but worth reading!
New York Speaks: Q&A with City Officials
Jordana Gustafson, SustainLane
In August of 2008, SustainLane spoke with Rohit Aggarwala and Ariella Maron, Director and Deputy Director, respectively, of New York City ’s Office of Long-term Planning and Sustainability. Maron and Aggarwala spoke to us about the challenges of sustaining a centuries-old city with aging infrastructure and about how the city will accommodate an estimated influx of one million people by 2030.
Read the full Q&A below:
SustainLane: How did New York City (NYC) develop spatially and physically? And what are some of the challenges unique to your city because of its geographical location – what are some built-in limitations when it comes to environmental sustainability?
Aggarwala: New York is the largest city in the United States . We are currently at just over 8.25 million people.. Development started in lower Manhattan in 1624. The biggest land use development in the city’s history was the creation of the subway system, which, over the course of only ten or twenty years, actually cut down Manhattan ’s population. The transit system allowed the city, which at that point had been clustered pretty much below today’s 34
th Street , aka the Lower East Side , to really expand all the way up the island and into the outer boroughs.
In about 2000, NYC had finished recovering from the collapse of the quality of life that took place in the 1970s. Between 1969 and 1977 or 78, which we think is the low point, NYC went from over 8 million people to just about 7 million. So we lost a million residents in the space of 10 years. And since that low point, we have been building that back up. We hit our historic population-high again in 2000.
Then in 2005 we had another historic population-high of 8.2 million or thereabout, and it was really that realization – that despite the impact of 9/11 on the city, which of course led to a number of businesses leaving and a number of people leaving – the net growth in the city was still dramatic. So the mayor decided that he needed to start thinking about how a city like New York … would absorb the increase in population. [We project reaching] 9.1 million residents in the year 2030.
One of the ways we think about sustainability in NYC is about ensuring a quality of life that is attractive. It is not just about the environment…
(1 October 2008)
