Buildings

Investing in durability

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If you are planning to withdraw, please tell me where you’re going, and send directions. If not, it’s time to start thinking about how you and your family or tribe will muddle through the years ahead. One word comes to mind: durability. If that wasn’t the first word that came to your mind, I’m not surprised.

Vision 2050: A Sustainable future for Cheshire West and Chester

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This Vision for a Sustainable West Cheshire is intended to guide the Cheshire West and Chester Authority (CW&C) in taking decisions about the future of the area. It is centred on the premise that if we are to achieve a truly sustainable community by 2050 the direction of travel set now must be right.

Lighting a candle – June 21

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Transition communities gear up for society’s collapse with a shovel and a smile
Permaculture for humanity (Larry Santoyo)
WeCommune: tech support for communes
The promise of the future: Voided by our cleverness (Transition in Salem, Oregon)
Ecocities Emerging – June issue
Peak oil taskforce says PO could cause food shortages in S.F.

Survival isn’t cost-effective

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If industrial civilization perishes, this will most likely happen because the steps needed to save it weren’t considered cost-effective. In this first of a series of posts on the economics of the deindustrial future, the Archdruid explores the economic limits — some real, others conjured into being by mistaken ideologies — that stand in the way of constructive responses to the crisis of our time.

“Architecture 2030” plan to revive economy

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Message to Washington: You’re not getting it – we’re still out of work. WInd farms and energy efficient public buildings are important, but what about the housing industry? The recession started with the housing industry — and can end if we bring back construction — so lets focus on the real problem. That’s the heart of the message to Congress and the Obama administration from a group of architects and builders who are promoting a plan to end the recession by revitalizing America’s

Shattered and shuttered

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My daddy bought Chevrolets in the 1950s, marvelously crazy-looking machines with winged tail-lights that handled like pontoon boats, broke down after 30,000 miles, and were tossed out every couple of years not on account of their mechanical failures so much as their obvious lack of up-to-the-minute styling. The post-war prosperity dazzled his generation with its democratic cornucopian bonanzas. The innocence of all that is truly lost now. There is a dark sense of things shifting out there now in a major way.