Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
In search of an urban plan
How design must change in a warming, oil-scarce world
Ryan Avent, Gristmill
This week I was able to attend a conference on urban planning hosted by the Penn Institute for Urban Research and the Rockefeller Foundation. Fifty years ago, the same entities had put together another urban conference, at which gathered names like Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford, intellectuals who shaped the design world’s thinking about cities at a time when many urban places were facing crisis. Those thinkers faced a world in which the city no longer seemed necessary, and where planners were increasingly tearing downtowns limb from limb to make them safe for the coming car-tropolis.
Now, of course, the consequences of those actions have become clear. Our dependence on oil has made us financially vulnerable to any little change in petroleum prices, and decades of heavy driving have helped push the global climate toward the brink. This urban conference, then, held up cities not as treasures to be saved but as saviors.
Called “Re-imagining Cities: Urban Design After the Age of Oil,” the convocation brought together academic and professional designers, planners, and architects with governmental leaders and scientists from around the world. The goal? To throw out ideas and craft a manifesto. To create, in short, a blueprint showing how countries might build themselves out of the danger of imminent catastrophe.
And I enjoyed myself. Designers are wonderfully creative people, and the conference was littered with ideas for ecological city systems, green roofs and walls and floors and roads, buildings covered with algea and windmills able to provide positive power to the grid, and so on. I’ve felt for a while that existing conventional technologies were more than sufficient to solve our climate problems. I now feel that if they aren’t up to the task, the design world has plenty of existing unconventional technologies waiting in the wings.
(10 November 2008)
Extra! Extra! Urban Design Revolution in Philadelphia!
Lloyd Alter, Next American City
Re-imagining Cities
Urban Design after the Age of Oil
… When I practiced architecture I thought it was a slow-moving profession, but compared to planning and urban design, it is positively giddy. So I should not be surprised or disappointed that the participants were not drawing new urban design solutions on the walls of Houston Hall; it seemed most of were here to learn about the problems rather than talk about the solutions. Many presentations focused on the issue of climate change, which really is less about “design after oil” than it is “design after coal”, and where, as Alex Steffen pointed out, we know what to do: more insulation, conservation, alternate energy sources and efficiency. As Andy Revkin pointed out on the media panel Saturday night, climate change is a hard thing to get newspapers and readers worked up about; it is still seen as our kids’ problem, important but not really immediate. If it isn’t happening tomorrow, it ain’t news.
There was less discussion about the impact of peak oil, which from a planning and urban design perspective, will have a more immediate impact. On the Revkin Scale, it’s news. Only 20% of carbon emissions come from oil, but almost 100% our cars run on it, so a world after oil is a world after cars as we know them. This is why I thought that the preoccupation with carbon dioxide and climate change was a misdirection; what we have is a planning and design issue, that we have planned our nation around cheap individual transportation. The main impact of peak oil is not that we will run out of the stuff, but that it will get more and more expensive as the supply dwindles.
… That will affect planning and urban design in real, not academic time. When gas hit four bucks a gallon the value of suburban real estate took a severe hit. Sales of sophisticated personal alternate power sourced vehicles, called bicycles, soared. Business owners started questioning why they pay for office space when they can have people work from home. Trains still didn’t run on time but they suddenly were filled. Everything we wanted people to do to mitigate climate change, they were suddenly doing out of economic self interest, more rapidly than the transport infrastructure, the real estate market or even the bike repair shops could cope with. One only has to imagine what will happen when gas hits ten dollars a gallon in 2010 or twenty in 2020. When I came to this conference, that is exactly what I thought we would be doing.
My hope is that somewhere in that conference, among the presenters, observers or students, there is another young woman or man putting these thoughts together like Jane Jacobs did fifty years ago. I hope she writes more quickly and that the professions are quicker on the uptake. Frankly, I hope she blogs, it’s faster and we don’t have a lot of time. We have a little economic time-out right now to put our thoughts together, to consider what we have to do to respond to the problem of Re-imagining Cities: Urban Design After the Age of Oil.
Lloyd Alter has been an architect, developer, inventor, and builder of prefab housing. He now writes for TreeHugger and Planet Green, is an Associate Professor at Ryerson University teaching sustainable design, and has written for Azure and Ontario Nature magazines.
(9 November 2008)
Recommended by Jim Barton. MORE blog entries at the site.
Edmonton to develop strategy reducing energy consumption
Frank Landry, Edmonton Sun (Canada)
Worldwide oil reserves drying up, city warned
—
The city is hearing dire warnings to cut energy use amid fears of skyrocketing oil prices in the coming years – costs which would be passed onto taxpayers.
A committee of council today was cautioned the situation could get even worse once worldwide oil reserves begin to dry up.
“We’re at the age where we’re going to have to see this whole thing through,” said Coun. Don Iveson, whose council portfolio includes environmental issues.
The city does not have an official position on the concept of “peak oil,” according to a report to council.
The document, however, notes at some point oil stocks will become so depleted that it will no longer be technically or economically feasible to continue extracting it from the earth.
But “there is significant global disagreement around the definition and potential impacts of peak oil, including disagreement on when it may occur,” states the document.
“There are also opposing and extreme views regarding the cause of the recent increase in energy prices and the future direction of these prices.”
Joseph Saunders, with the University of Alberta’s energy club, urged the city to address some of these issues now by stopping urban sprawl, promoting the use of public transit and making civic buildings more energy efficient, among other things.
(5 November 2008)
Green spaces promote good health, says study
Sarah Boseley, The Guardian
Living in a green area can lengthen your life, according to research published today which shows that the difference in life expectancy between rich and poor shrinks among those who live in an environment with parks and trees.
Richard Mitchell, from Glasgow University, and his colleagues, found that the gap between the numbers of deaths of people on high incomes and the numbers of deaths of those on low incomes in green areas was half that compared with figures relating to built-up areas.
Green spaces, classified by the researchers as “open, undeveloped land with natural vegetation”, encouraged people to walk and be more active. But exercise in these settings could have greater psychological and physiological benefits than exercise elsewhere, the researchers said.
The benefits potentially go beyond exercise. Studies have shown that being around green spaces can reduce blood pressure and stress levels, and possibly help people heal faster after surgery…
(7 November 2008)
