Urban sprawl has rightly been blamed for contributing to increasing fuel consumption in the United States, since many commuters have little choice but to drive to work. But policies designed to make cities more compact will do little to reduce gas consumption by 2050, in time to prevent the worst effects of climate change, according to a new report from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
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Despite our romantic ideas about nature, it will be well-run, energy-efficient cities that ultimately save us from ourselves.
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Sometime in the last two years, the world crossed a threshold. For the first time in history, more people lived in cities than in rural areas.
For Carolyn Steel, it begs one of the great questions: How do you feed a city? We take food for granted, she says. We assume that it will magically always be there in our restaurants and supermarkets, but “it’s remarkable that cities get fed at all.”
We are as dependent on the natural world as our ancient ancestors were.
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You’ve heard all the reasons before: We drive too much. We eat too much meat and processed food. We spend too much time with plugged-in devices—computers, TVs, air conditioners.
But what problem are we talking about—climate change, or the worldwide rise in obesity?
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As a U.S. citizen I’m trying to decide my own position on climate legislation “The American Clean Energy and Security Act,” aka the Waxman-Markey bill (pros/cons via Worldchanging), now going through congress. Should my letters to congressional representatives be for or against? At the same time, last Thursday I attended “Sustainable Lives? The challenges of low-carbon living in a changing economic climate” a conference in London by the RESOLVE research group. I’m interested in their “lifestyles” strand looking at sustainable consumption.
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A while ago, I heard an American scientist address an audience in Oxford, England, about his work on the climate crisis. He was precise, unemotional, rigorous, and impersonal: all strengths of a scientist.
The next day, talking informally to a small group, he pulled out of his wallet a much-loved photo of his thirteen-year-old son. He spoke as carefully as he had before, but this time his voice was sad, worried, and fatherly. His son, he said, had become so frightened about climate change that he was debilitated, depressed, and disturbed. Some might have suggested therapy, Prozac, or baseball for the child. But in this group one voice said gently, “What about the Transition Initiative?”
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As the population rises, underused and empty spaces are going to fill in. How well the transition works depends on shifts in demographics and infrastructure, as well as architecture. A studio of UCLA architecture students were asked to plot that transition. But before they could be architects, they had to be planners.
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Eco-towns are dead. Architects, planners and developers alike are asking: who killed them?
Gordon Brown wanted to unveil plans for 10 carbon-neutral communities that would deliver up to 200,000 new homes on cheap government-owned land in the greenbelt by 2020. The idea was that the eco-towns would be so enthusiastically received that they could simply be parachuted into existing local authority development plans and fast-tracked through the system so that building could get started as quickly as possible. Developers flocked to get involved in what they saw as a great commercial opportunity – all in the name of being green.
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The buildings will be the latest word in energy efficiency: 60% of all waste will be recycled, and the settlement will be laid out in such a way as to encourage walking and discourage driving. But this is not the latest experiment in European green living. This is a ground-breaking mega development in China that could serve as a model for eco cities across the developing world, say to its backers.
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Pastures, forests, suburbs, cities, farms, and so on, all affect the skies in very particular spatial ways. Deforestation, for instance, has “substantially altered cloud patterns” in the Amazon; specifically, we read that “patches of trees behave as ‘green oceans’ while cleared pastures act like ‘continents’,” generating a new marbling of the local atmosphere.
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