Those purple markers (which are clickable at the map’s website) indicate how much or how little night sky is visible. For the ones near the city core, the emphasis is on “little.” In 2007, the city passed regulations aimed at reducing the amount of light that brightens the night sky, but old fixtures — and the city’s highways — were grandfathered in until 2015.

Photo by rutlo on Flickr.

Yesterday, they took more direct action. The city council approved spending up to $15 million to replace or upgrade half of Austin’s streetlights. The decision will result in the removal of existing plastic domes from under the lamps, which tend to diffuse the light broadly (and inefficiently). More importantly, it will also buy 35,000 LED lights, which use half the power of the existing bulbs and which last up to 15 years.

You know who’s excited about this move? Astronomers, professional and casual. Take that map at the top of the page — it was built using data from the Royal Astronomical Society. Astronomers dig dark skies. Even in Austin.

Stargazing in Austin is “rather limited,” said Dawn Davies, outreach chair of the Austin Astronomical Society, an amateur group. “One can see the moon, can make out the planets and key stars and constellations. But it’s not what one would consider an ideal situation.”

From an astronomer’s perspective, Davies said, the “remedy might be expensive, but it’s rather straightforward.”

Good job, Austin! But that’s only part of the story I came here to tell.

The earliest high-tech facility in the Silicon Valley was not Fairchild Semiconductor. It was Lick Observatory at Mt. Hamilton.

Barely visible from the valley floor, the observatory is a small white bump on the surrounding hillsides, as it has been since it was completed in 1887. In 1888, scientists moved in, and have been there ever since. It’s been up there as the valley floor beneath it filled in first with fruit trees, then houses, then San Jose, the 10th-largest city in the country.

This posed a problem. By the 1970′s, light pollution from the valley was obscuring the Observatory’s ability to see the night sky. So in 1980, the observatory worked with the city of San Jose on a then-innovative solution: introducing low-pressure sodium streetlights that not only used less electricity, but also produced a light wavelength that could be easily filtered from the observatory’s telescopes.

To this day, San Jose glows a dull yellow at night. Slightly confusing when approaching a yellow traffic light, but a masterpiece of balancing the needs of the city with the broader good.

That’s precisely what Austin has done. At a moment when Detroit’s budget issues demand it turn off some of its streetlights entirely, it’s commendable — and, of course, fiscally smart — that Austin is investing in upgrades. That it has the ancillary benefit of opening up the night sky to residents and scientists alike is icing.

Delicious, science-y icing.

Everyone knows that “Obamacare” was modeled on Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health-care law. But did you know that a key Obama “smart growth” initiative — the Partnership for Sustainable Communities — was also created in the mold of a Romney program?

Tea Partiers rallied to quash funding for this Obama partnership last fall. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), conservative darling, criticized the idea for the partnership when it first arose and accused the Obama administration of trying to impose “an urban-utopian fantasy through an unprecedented intrusion of the Federal Government into the shaping of local communities.” The Republican National Committee recently warned that smart growth is part of a U.N. conspiracy (green helicopters, anyone?).

This is yet another issue on which the party’s presumptive presidential nominee looks to be seriously out of sync with the GOP base.

Romney’s “get smart” phase

As governor of Massachusetts, Romney actively fought sprawl and promoted density. He ran on a smart-growth platform: “Sprawl is the most important quality-of-life issue facing Massachusetts,” he said in 2002.

After winning, Romney swiftly set about remaking state government to encourage smarter land use. He created a powerful new Office for Commonwealth Development, and appointed an aggressive environmental activist to run it — Douglas Foy, who for 25 years had headed the Conservation Law Foundation, a litigious regional environmental group. The state’s business community was appalled.

The Office for Commonwealth Development served as a “super-secretariat” or umbrella office for state agencies dealing with transportation, housing, energy, and the environment. It made sure the agencies were all pulling in the same direction toward smart-growth goals — concentrating development in town centers, constructing housing near transit stations, fixing existing roads instead of building new ones.

“I think [Romney] views sprawl as inefficient land use, and he’s all about efficiency. From a business perspective, he thinks smart growth makes a lot of sense,” says Anthony Flint, who served as a policy advisor in the Office for Commonwealth Development under Romney, and is now a fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a think tank in Cambridge, Mass.

The Romney administration pursued smart growth not through strict regulation but through incentives. The Office for Commonwealth Development channeled hundreds of millions in state funds to cities and towns that changed zoning rules to allow more high-density housing and adopted other smart-growth policies.

Romney was a vocal advocate for the cause. “I very much believe in the concept known as smart growth or sustainable development, which is the phrase I used in the campaign,” Romney told CommonWealth magazine in 2003. “You do not want to deplete your green space and air and water [in order] to grow, and the only way that’s possible is if your growth is done in a thoughtful, coherent, strategic way.”

As Romney put it in 2005, “By targeting development to areas where there is already infrastructure in place, not only can we revitalize our older communities, but we can also curb sprawl as well.” His administration actively pursued a “sustainable development agenda” and promoted “transit-oriented development,” “multi-modal transportation,” “village-style zoning,” “green building,” “mixed-use” development, “mixed-income housing,” and other approaches that would delight any green-leaning city planner — and rile up any red-blooded Tea Partier.

Environmental activists still found plenty to criticize in Romney’s approach to land use and development, but many greens and smart-growth advocates were pleasantly surprised, at least in the first half of Romney’s term. In 2006, the U.S. EPA gave Massachusetts’ Office for Commonwealth Development its National Award for Smart Growth Achievement.

Obama follows Romney’s lead

Under President Obama, the EPA moved from praising Romney’s smart-growth office to mimicking it.

In June 2009, the Obama team created the Partnership for Sustainable Communities in the silo-busting mold of Romney’s Office for Commonwealth Development. The partnership brings together the EPA, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development to jointly promote smart growth.

“We want to make sure that when we’re building infrastructure, we’re considering how housing, transportation, and the environment all impact each other,” Obama explained in 2010, sounding an awful lot like the Romney of yore.

Just as Romney’s Office for Commonwealth Development incentivized local communities to embrace smart growth by offering grants, so does the Partnership for Sustainable Communities. Since its launch, the partnership has helped to allocate about $3.5 billion in grants and other assistance to more than 700 communities that want to better coordinate housing, transportation, and economic-development projects and make neighborhoods more walkable, transit-accessible, and sustainable.

Tea Partiers go nuts

You might think this all sounds benign or common sense, or even classically conservative — conserving land, conserving gas, and conserving taxpayer dollars by preventing the construction of new roads and sewer systems for sprawling new communities. But that’s not how today’s Republican Party sees it.

Tea Partiers are fighting smart-growth programs tooth and nail, believing them to be part of an insidious U.N. plot. Their fears center around a once-obscure, non-binding U.N. sustainability plan called Agenda 21, which came out of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and called for, among other things, “fulfillment of basic needs, improved living standards for all, better protected and managed ecosystems” and — gasp! — “sustainable land-use planning and management.”  Like most non-binding U.N. documents — in fact, like most binding U.N. documents — Agenda 21 was widely ignored. That is, until American right-wingers latched onto it a few years ago.

Last fall, Tea Partiers erroneously linked Obama’s Partnership for Sustainable Communities to Agenda 21, and groups around the country mobilized to fight its funding in Congress. “This funding has been using YOUR tax dollars to promote the United Nations’ plan to control our government,” warned the Gainsville Tea Party. It’s an “assault on property rights and America’s way of life,” railed the Sandia Tea Party of New Mexico. “STOP THE GRAVY TRAIN!!!” demanded the Southwest Virginia Tea Party. Congress did cut some funding for the partnership’s grant making, but the partnership lives on and continues to help allocate funds to local communities.

Meanwhile, as the Agenda 21 conspiracy theorizing has grown louder over the past year, big-name Republicans have joined in. Newt Gingrich inveighed against Agenda 21 on the campaign trail last year, and even mentioned it during a debate in November. That same month, Rick Santorum warned about Agenda 21 in a Facebook post.

In January, the Republican National Committee adopted a resolution “exposing” Agenda 21 as a “comprehensive plan of extreme environmentalism, social engineering, and global political control.” In an apparent slam against the Sustainable Communities grant program, the resolution called for “rejection of any grant monies” linked to Agenda 21. The resolution could make it into the official Republican Party platform that will be decided upon at the national convention in August.

Where’s Mitt now?

As you might expect, Romney has not been talking about sprawl or smart growth on the campaign trail, and his campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

With other issues — like health care, abortion, and immigration — Romney has flip-flopped from the centrist views he held as governor to right-wing positions now preferred by the GOP base. Because smart growth hasn’t risen to the level of national discussion, Romney hasn’t had to clarify his position on this topic.

Romney told a small group of donors last week that he might completely eliminate one of the departments involved in the Partnership for Sustainable Communities — HUD, which his father headed during the Nixon administration. A few months ago, Romney said the EPA under Obama was “out of control,” though he’s stopped short of calling for it to be abolished. Considering those views, it seems highly unlikely that Romney would want anything like the partnership operating under his watch.

Perhaps, in the same way he has defended his Massachusetts health-care program, Romney would argue that pursuing smart growth at the state level makes sense while doing so at the federal level would be overreach. But as both Romney’s Office for Commonwealth Development and Obama’s Partnership for Sustainable Communities used taxpayer dollars to influence what local communities do, is there really such a dramatic distinction between them?

People who worked with or closely observed Romney during his governorship aren’t sure what his current, or “real,” views on smart growth are.

Foy, the first head of Romney’s Office for Commonwealth Development, recently told The New Republic, “I’m proud of what we did, and I think he’s proud of what we did.” But Foy quit the administration after three years, shortly following Romney’s surprise move to pull Massachusetts out of a Northeast cap-and-trade program that Foy had helped to develop, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

Jack Clarke, director of public policy at Mass Audubon and a former environmental official under Massachusetts Gov. William Weld (R), credits Romney with appointing good people to work on smart growth, but says “it wasn’t a core value” for the governor. He doesn’t believe Romney would do anything to advance the cause as president.

Flint, who worked under Foy, says, “Romney the governor was very active on the environment and smart growth and, for a time, climate change.” And now? “His positions on those topics have certainly changed, so I’m not sure what to think.”

Ornamental fruit trees are the worst idea ever. And I’d argue they say a lot about our culture. As we’ve built and expanded cities, and planted public trees, we’ve decided that local fruit — fruit you could pick right on the street — was too messy. We wanted our fruit imported, wrapped in plastic, and safely compartmentalized in the produce aisle. So we bred trees accordingly. Pear trees with no pears. Cherry trees with no cherries.

Now this San Francisco-based group called the Guerrilla Grafters is challenging the very notion of the ornamental fruit tree. And they’re working outside the law (city officials don’t like rotten fruit on the sidewalk, nor the liability it suggests). They’re covertly grafting — a practice of connecting two branches in a way that will allow their vascular tissues to join together — fruit tree limbs onto the trunks of ornamental cherry, plum, and pear trees. (We’ve highlighted them before on Grist, but since NPR covered their illegal work again this weekend, I thought it was worth another mention.)

Grafting is fairly invisible to most city dwellers’ eyes, making it an easy, subtle way to fill a neighborhood with fruit-bearing branches over time. But grafting also makes sense on other levels. A strong root system takes time to develop, so branches grafted onto mature trees will grow faster and bear more fruit than they would on young trees.  In other words, adding back the fruiting function to established trees (which are also already absorbing carbon dioxide from the air), makes way more sense than tearing out ornamentals and starting from scratch.

Of course, slippery rotten fruit is a factor. (In the NPR segment, we hear from Carla Short, an urban forester for the San Francisco Department of Public Works. “It gets very dangerous very quickly,” she says.) But Tara Hui, the grafters’ spokesperson, has that scenario covered. For every tree that she and the other Guerrillas have added a fruit-bearing branch to, she’s assigned a “steward,” or a designated fruit picker/sweeper. (In this video, for instance, we meet a young steward whose office is located right beside a tree that will soon bear big fat Asian pears.) Assigning individuals and groups with “public” trees to care for is an approach that The Boston Tree Party’s Lisa Gross has also taken, and I’m guessing there is no shortage of people willing to adopt a tree — especially in cities like San Francisco, where one must literally wait years to land an urban garden plot.

Of course, I’ll really start worrying when our cities have more trees than people (I’m not holding my breath). And call me a daredevil, but a few squashed plums on the sidewalk seems like an acceptable hazard if it also means a healthy snack for the walk home.

Loren Amelang is a pioneer in C++ programming, and his homebrewed live/work space is a monument to sustainable geekery, says Fair Companies.

The entire south side of his home is covered in solar capture devices: 1600 watts of photovoltaic power, solar hot water panels, a sunroom/greenhouse and a solar hot air collector.

This isn’t just your usual passive house or living building, either: Amelang can control the entire thing from a smartphone.

Amelang wrote over 10,000 lines of code so that his home’s water and electric systems could be operated more efficiently and automatically.

The home includes other innovations, such as a vehicle-style “central locking system” that locks all of the building’s 12 doors and windows when Amelang turns a single key.

The entire house is custom and DIY, so god knows what hoops he had to jump through to get it certified as safe. Which speaks to a larger issue: As often as not, it’s building codes and the conservatism of homebuilders that hold back green homes.

When most folks think “wooden building,” they conjure up images of rustic log cabins or ye olde fashioned outhouses. Architect Michael Green wants to whittle something decidedly more modern out of wood: skyscrapers.

Green is currently building a 30-story skyscraper in Vancouver, but instead of steel and concrete, appropriately named Green is crafting his structure from sustainable wood. He says that other architects would be wise to follow his lead — if they care about the environment, that is.

The modern wood materials that Green mentions are laminated strand lumber (a composite of wood strands glued together) and cross-laminated timber (layers of wood fused together at right angles to each other). Since the newly developed materials use wood fibers, they eliminate the need for cutting down large trees. Sourcing wood from sustainably managed forests also creates a more environmentally sensitive process.

Looks like trees won’t be the only wooden structures reaching for the skies anymore.

We can say this for our Great Urban Freeway Experiment: It seemed like a good idea at the time.

The time was the 1950s and ’60s, specifically, and U.S. cities were watching their residents flee to the suburbs in alarming numbers. Their solution: Build giant freeways connecting city centers to the ’burbs, thereby allowing citizens to live the good life on the outskirts and commute to work in the urban core. It was an attempt to hang on to urban industrial might even as the city’s population bled (or drove) out.

When all was said and done, these freeways did salvage some downtown commerce, but they only accelerated the flight from the inner city. At the same time, they carved up historic urban neighborhoods, turned whole sections of cities into slums, and cut off many downtowns from their waterfronts. Legendary urban activist Jane Jacobs was among the first to fight the scourge of the urban highway, and by the late 1970s and early 1980s, it had become all but impossible to gain approval for new highways through urban areas.

It’s one thing to stop building urban freeways, however, and another thing entirely to tear down existing ones. For many city centers, those highways still look a lot like lifelines.

But over the past few decades, urban freeways have begun to come down — from the West Side Highway in New York to the Embarcadero in San Francisco — and if a growing urban transportation reform movement has its way, many more will fall in the coming years.

This is the thrust of a report just released by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and EMBARQ, two organizations that promote equitable and sustainable transportation projects around the world. The report, called “The Death and Life of Urban Highways” — a tribute to Jacobs’ groundbreaking 1961 urbanist manifesto, The Death and Life of Great American Cities — declares that “the urban highway is a failed experiment,” and describes cities that have traded in highways for parks, mixed-use developments, and all manner of urbanist bliss.

At last! City leaders have seen the light! Power to the people! Critical mass!

Well, not really.

“Cities are not removing all highways because of a sudden awakening of environmental consciousness or realization that car culture is bad,” the report says. Instead, they’re doing it because they can’t afford to keep aging freeways from crumbling, and they’re realizing that the space these roads take up is a hell of a lot more valuable, both socially and economically, when it’s used for houses, businesses, and parks. And then there’s the raft of studies showing that freeways don’t relieve traffic congestion — they actually make it worse.

Death and Life documents all this, and then provides five case studies of cities that have removed freeways, starting with Portland, Ore., which in the 1970s tore out Harbor Drive, a freeway that walled off the downtown area from the Willamette River, and replaced it with a waterfront park that to this day is a central attraction in Stump Town. San Francisco tore out a raised freeway that was critically damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, replacing it with Embarcadero Boulevard, replete with palm-tree-lined pedestrian promenade. Most recently, in the early 2000s, under longtime Mayor John Norquist, Milwaukee dynamited the unfinished Park East Freeway, making room for three new neighborhoods, a boulevard, and a street grid that reconnects the city to its downtown.

In all three cases, land values around the demolished highways have skyrocketed, the areas have served as hubs for economic redevelopment, and, according to the report, the impacts on traffic congestion have been minimal — thanks in some places (Portland) to the construction of parallel roads, and others (San Francisco) to an increase in mass transit ridership. And just as remarkably, all three cities saved money over what they would have spent widening, rebuilding, or completing their existing freeways.

The report finishes out with a look at Seoul, South Korea, which in 2003 demolished the Cheonggyecheon freeway, “daylighting” the river buried beneath and turning the whole thing into a miles-long urban park; and Bogotá, Colombia, which chose not to build a planned Inner Ring Expressway, opting instead to invest its money in mass transit, bicycle paths, pedestrian walkways, and promenades. Too cool.

It’s pretty inspiring, especially when you compare it to what we would have been left with if the highway engineers had their way. In a recent interview with Next American City, John Norquist, the former Milwaukee mayor who is now CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism, described where that dream would have taken us:

The Detroit metropolitan area is covered with freeways … More than any other place in the country, the Michigan DOT pretty much got its way. And they have solved the problem that they identified, which was congestion … So by creating a transportation system that encouraged people to leave town — the population of the city is about a third of what it was since 1950.

[Detroit] had 300 miles of streetcars at the end of the war. That’s all gone … The street grid has been cut up, so it’s hard to move around on the surface streets. [But] the stated goal was to battle congestion, and in Detroit, they did it. And there are side effects.

Side effects. Sure — if you consider your city turning into a wasteland a “side effect.” (Sounds like a potentially terminal illness to us.) But if there’s a silver lining here, it is this: Highway construction ground to a halt much earlier in most burgs than it did in the Motor City, and now those freeways that were built are coming of age. It’s a perfect time to reconsider our approach to urban transportation.

In fact, we really have no choice. Being broke has a way of narrowing your options. Besides, with huge latent interest in urban living, it’s time to get serious about making cities work for city residents again, not just the folks who drive in from the ‘burbs.

This theoretical skyscraper, the winner of eVolo’s annual skyscraper design competition, would collect, purify, and store water in the Himalayas, helping to conserve and regulate it. It looks like a half pack of cigarettes in fancy holders, but it’s not even the weirdest-looking skyscraper, not by a long shot. Below are some of the strange shapes that might crop up in the skyline of our more sustainable future.

Image by Yiting Shen, Nanjue Wang, Ji Xia, and Zihan Wang.

Runner-up “Mountain Band-Aid” could save over-mined mountains and displaced peoples simultaneously, by relocating China’s Hmong into a restored mountainside.

Image by Kim Hongseop, Cho Hyunbeom, Yoon Sunhee, and Yoon Hyungsoo.

The “Plastic Fish Tower” would collect and recycle plastic from the Pacific Garbage Patch.

Image by Chipara Radu Bogdan.

Bulbous “Coal Power Plant Mutation” would sit over a coal-fired power plant, collecting and filtering the exhaust before it has a chance to reach the atmosphere.

Cross-posted from Next American City.

Ellen Dunham-Jones is a professor of architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology and coauthor of Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs, the quintessential guidebook for making sprawl more sustainable. She will be one of the featured speakers at the 20th Congress for the New Urbanism in West Palm Beach, Fla., this May. Here, she discusses vital demographic shifts, different redevelopment strategies, and some of the more impressive retrofitting projects going on in the U.S.

Q. A recent survey found that for the first time, most Americans prefer a walkable neighborhood to a large house. What do you think accounts for this shift, and what does it mean for how we plan our suburbs in the near future?

A. I think it reflects some of the changes in demographics. The reality is that the generations we have designed the suburbs for have grown up to the point where the Baby Boomers, who were the original babies for the suburbs and are now mostly empty nesters, no longer need minivans to cart kids around. In fact, their households, for the most part, don’t even have kids anymore.

And then you have also got an enormous number of Gen Y folks, in their 20s and 30s, whose jobs are out in the suburbs. But they’re frankly looking for some nightlife. They’d like to meet people. They don’t want to just go around in cars everywhere. They are looking for those kinds of walkable neighborhoods where they can socialize.

I think that’s the same dynamic at work with a lot of the Baby Boomers: Two-thirds of suburban households do not have children in them, and as people desire to get a little more social, they are finding that walking is great. They’re really looking for that life that exists in those walkable places.

Q. In suburban communities around the country, have you found that local leadership and developers are heeding the public’s growing penchant for more urban-like places to live, or are they still caught up in the thirst for sprawl?

A. In different markets you see very different dynamics happening. But overall, one thing the recession has done is it has given the municipal planners a chance to catch their breath and talk to their communities about what kind of future they really envision.

Before the recession, most of the redevelopments that were trying to be more walkable were really developer-led — developers who saw the underperforming asphalt in suburbia as an opportunity to address growing markets. But zoning codes and buildings codes had not caught up with that. The recession has allowed many communities to revise their regulations and really position themselves to capture that coming demand as the economy fully recovers.

But it varies: There are certain communities that are still very interested in going back to the old model of sprawl, and there are plenty of developers who do that too.

Q. What suburban redevelopment projects stand out in your mind, and what types of receptions do they get?

A. What’s interesting is there are so many different projects. [Retrofitting Suburbia coauthor] June Williamson and I have been cataloging these for many years. We’ve got about 250 projects in the database right now. We categorize them according to three different overall strategies.

The first is simply re-inhabitation with more community-serving uses. There are loads of examples of dead big-box stores, or dead malls, that have been re-inhabited with libraries, schools, medical facilities, [or] religious facilities, and some of them are really creative. Lots of gyms and recreation facilities going in. On the other hand, often there’s a holding pattern until the economy recovers and more investment might be possible. But they tend to really help the social sustainability of a community, and they provide that cheap space that Jane Jacobs wrote about years ago, that allows the low-profit to come in and, in many ways, to complete a suburban community that hasn’t had space for the arts or for new schools. [There are] a lot of charter schools going into these spaces, and a lot of artists and theater groups going into old spaces.

An ice skating rink at the Belmar. (Photo by Todd Carpenter.)

The second category, redevelopment, is where you tend to get the environmentally sustainable features. That’s where you see an underperforming property more or less bulldozed and urbanized — building on top of parking lots and putting in much more up-to-date green infrastructure. And those projects that stand out — places like Belmar in Lakewood, Colo., outside of Denver — have done a remarkable job of replacing a 100-acre big mall with 22 walkable blocks, lots of green buildings and public streets. It’s the downtown that Lakewood never had. There are about 15 of those projects built in the country now, and another 25 that are in various stages of development. The economy definitely slowed the progress on a lot of the big dead mall retrofit redevelopment. But there are all kinds of redevelopment. Sometimes it’s infilling office parks. In some cases it’s entire subdivisions or garden apartment complexes that have been redeveloped.

The third category, which is really quite surprising, is re-greening. It was very common, before the Clean Water Act, for commercial properties in suburbs to be built on the wetlands. We’d drain them and put in some culverts. Now that those properties are going dead, there is an opportunity to either reconstruct the wetlands or put in parks. We’re finding that dead property is reducing property value around it, but if you put in a park or well-designed bioswales and other kinds of green infrastructure, you are increasing neighborhood property value. These projects are seen as increasing sustainability and improving community.

Q. Among the three that you mentioned, how do you decide which approach is the best for a community?

A. There is definitely no one-size-fits-all. I’m based in Atlanta, and I think there are certain parts of Atlanta where greening makes great sense, and other properties where redevelopment makes sense. What June and I have been encouraging — and other new urbanists like Galina Tachieva and her book, The Sprawl Repair Manual — is more looking at metro-wide: Looking at where are all the vacant properties, the underperforming properties, and doing what we call a “gray field audit” so that strategic decisions can be made. Where are the ecosystems where we can reconnect and get in parks and re-green? Where are the transit and employment centers and the places where we really ought to be redeveloping? And also where should we be really trying to maintain affordable cheap space where we want to keep some re-inhabitation?

In general, I don’t think it’s so much that one region benefits more from a strategy. All three strategies are all useful within a metro, and they’re often even all useful within a single property. Northgate Mall in north Seattle is an older mall that is actually thriving. They wanted to expand, but they had to strike a deal with local environmentalists who were mad that the headwaters of a local creek had been paved over and culverted for a parking lot. So they re-greened that portion of the parking lot in order to get permission to expand. They also built new senior housing, as well as general mixed-use, around the new bioswale that they built there. All three strategies have been employed in different ways to help make the Northgate Mall function as a better neighbor and really be a community anchor.

Q. Are urban design students being taught these, or are they still learning the same things that they had been taught 5-10 years ago?

A. June and I have been incredibly gratified, constantly meeting professors at other schools who say, “Oh yeah, I assigned your book,” or “I had my students work on this.” I see an incredible outpour of interest. I just got back from a two-day workshop with June at the University of New Mexico, and I was astonished at the students who put in really long days and stayed even longer on a Saturday than they had to because they are really eager to learn this.

The argument that June and I make — and I think it resonates well with students — is that we spent the past 50 years designing and developing suburbia, and yet all of the unintended consequences of that, and the continued resource depletion that we’re very well aware of, means that the big design project for the next generation is going to be retrofitting suburbia.

Everything single part of a building, from the windows the the air conditioning and heating system, has become significantly more energy efficient over the past 20 years. And yet buildings, as a whole, are using more or less the same amount of energy they always have. What gives?

The problem is that most commercial structures are built by what amounts to an unruly mob, says Jim Freihaut, an engineer at one of the U.S. Government’s Energy Innovation Hubs, in Philadelphia. Electricians, plumbers, the architect who decides how many windows the exterior will have: They’re all struggling to create a structure that will function to spec. “None of them wants to be responsible for a building that is too hot or stuffy, can’t heat its water or is too dim,” notes Saqib Rahim at Climatewire.

The result is a structure that is overbuilt to meet the needs of its inhabitants — its air conditioning system is too powerful, the arrangement of windows has been made without consideration for how they’ll affect temperature regulation, etc.

“By the time you get to the end, everyone will have spent every effort they could to minimize their risk and maximize their profit,” he said. “What happens? You wind up with the same building you could have had 20 years ago. And the data indicates that’s actually what’s happened in the industry.”

Freihaut’s job is to transform a derelict building into not only the Energy Hub’s new headquarters, but also a showcase for energy efficiency. Of course, he’ll be solely responsible for the retrofit, since nobody knows better than he does that too many cooks make the soup unsustainably inefficient.

When we last spoke with Rocky Anderson, he was kicking some serious butt for the planet from his position as the supergreen mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah. Anderson, an unflinching champion of issues ranging from climate action to gay marriage, quit politics in 2008 after two terms in office. But now he’s back, and this time he’s trained his sights on the White House.

Running for president under the banner of the Justice Party (his Facebook followers reportedly came up with name), and backed by a tiny, mostly volunteer staff, Anderson promises a grassroots, social-media-powered campaign that will give Obama and his yet-to-be-determined Republican rival a run for their money.

It will be no small task: Obama has raised a war chest of close to $100 million, according to The New York Times. Mitt Romney is sitting on $32 million. Anderson, whose platform centers on ridding American politics of the “corrupting influence of money,” is remarkably uncorrupted by that measure. Accepting a maximum of $100 per donor, he has raised less than $1 million so far. Like, way, way less.

But Rocky is fierce and determined, and he’s pissed about what short shrift American workers and the environment keep getting while the political elite and Wall Street fat cats get ever fatter. Given the outrage we’ve seen in the Occupy movement in recent months, his message is bound to strike a chord.

We caught up with the former mayor this week to see what in the world has gotten into him.

Q. What possessed you to run for president?

A. I was very reluctant to do this but … this needs to be done. I think the American people are ready for fundamental change. There is utter disgust with Congress … the president has low approval ratings. Members of the two dominant parties are fed up … There really is a perfect storm in terms of the resonance that the idea of a major new political party has with the American people.

With people voting either Republican or Democrat, they’re simply reaffirming the system, and are contenting themselves with moving players within that system around. What the Justice Party and my campaign are about is to radically change that system so that we can eliminate the plutocracy — that is, government by the wealthy — and ensure instead that our government finally represents the public interest.

Q. Was the Occupy movement a part of your inspiration?

A. There’s an enormous convergence between the concerns expressed in the Occupy movement and what my concerns have been for many years. Except for the violence and destruction of property that we’ve recently seen, the Occupy movement as a whole has been a very healthy thing in this country …

One of the great inspirations for us was what we saw in much of the Arab world, where people were intent on overthrowing their nations’ dictators … They put their lives on the line, utilizing democratized means of communication through social networking and engaging in classic grassroots organizing — and they succeeded.

We can do the same in this country. We don’t need to raise a billion dollars from special interests … We can limit the contributions to a hundred dollars per person and depend on a lot of people helping out and becoming involved, so that we together can overthrow the dictatorship of corrupt money in our government.

Q. How much have you raised?

A. At last count, it was in the neighborhood of $10,000 or $12,000. But we really haven’t done much in the area of fundraising other than one e-mail solicitation. We had a lot to do before we felt we could persuade people to contribute to the campaign. I’ve been on a lot of national and local media all over the country. We’re revamping our website, voterocky.org. We’re putting together position papers. We’re working seven days a week, often 14 hours or longer. We’re now at the point where we think we can utilize, in a very intense way, social media opportunities and encourage people to help us meet our financial needs.

Q. You’ve said that your first move as president would be to pass a constitutional amendment overturning the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” ruling — to get money out of politics. What other issues are you trying to bring into this campaign?

A. First and foremost, the wars — I would end them immediately. They have been devastating to this country and to the world, and they just feed into the corrupt military-industrial complex.

Also, we know that whether the Republican or Democratic parties are in power, this country will not provide the essential international leadership on climate change that’s required to combat the most catastrophic consequences of the climate crisis. I’ve been working on climate change issues for more than a dozen years. I’ve spoken all over the world. I received the World Leadership Forum’s world leadership award in London for my work on the climate. I received the EPA’s environmental protection award for my work.

I reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 31 percent in three years in city operations when I was mayor, then took our successes and worked to communicate best practices and provide inspiration to mayors not only throughout United States, but many other countries. I co-founded, with Robert Redford, the Sundance Summit. For three years, we brought together dozens of mayors to learn about climate change, energy policy, and the vital role that cities have in addressing those issues. Cities can make all the difference if they have knowledgeable, committed leadership.

Q. In a recent speech at the United Nations, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that mayors “don’t have the luxury of simply talking about change but not delivering it.” Given what we know about the federal government, wouldn’t you be better off just working city by city?

A. The problem is that we don’t have a very large window of opportunity to take decisive action. Mayors and other city officials have a vital role in raising public awareness of climate change … because if we don’t move things rapidly in a more positive direction in terms of public support for climate protection policies and practices, it’s going to be too late.

As the science becomes more robust every year, polls show that public support for climate protection measures actually gets worse. That’s been happening for several years now. I think it’s because the … issue has been left by default with environmental organizations which keep fixating on polar bears — which may help bring in money from their base, but it does nothing to persuade the public about the urgent need to take measures to reverse the trend.

In our cities, if leaders can adopt policies that save money … and demonstrate that all of this is really good for everybody, that can go a long way toward changing our nation’s policies. But we don’t have any time to lose. It’s absolutely vital that we have far more aggressive and honest leadership on the federal level, because for the long term, there is no more important issue for the United States and the international community to be addressing right now.

Q. What should the federal government be doing to make our cities work again?

A. There was enormous investment in cities under President Clinton. He was a president who understood the importance of cities not only in terms of quality of life for people in this country, but in moving the nation as a whole forward, providing good education, building a better future, and providing jobs.

During the eight years after Clinton, there was almost a complete abandonment of any interest in the [Bush] administration toward cities. The mass transit share from the federal government plummeted. The research and development dollars dwindled. We’re still spending far less on research and development as a percentage of gross domestic product than we did in the 1960s, and far less than many nations that are thriving …

We see countries like China doing far better work, and creating conditions where they will benefit enormously in the marketplace because of their commitment to developing clean, renewable sources of energy. China now makes more than half of the world’s solar panels. It manufactures more than half of the world’s wind turbines.

Q. Did you watch the State of the Union address last week?

A. I did.

Q. What jumped out at you?

A. A lot. President Obama started and ended the speech with a very militaristic, cheerleading appeal. I thought that he was channeling George W. Bush, claiming that through the extremely tragic and enormously wasteful illegal war of aggression in Iraq, the U.S. was safer and more respected around the world … If the American people still buy that after all the disclosures about the debacle of that war and the lies that led us into it, I really fear for this country.

Then he went on to talk about the kind of country we all want, and he said that it would be one where everybody plays by the same set of rules. And yet we have a two-tiered system of justice under this president and his predecessor that is unprecedented … President Obama has raised more money from Wall Street than any other candidate ever has. His administration has failed to prosecute one person for the financial fraud that helped lead to the economic meltdown from which the rest of us are still reeling, and from which these criminals are still benefitting. That’s a very good return on investment for these Wall Street bankers …

I barely heard him mention climate change. He had a throwaway line. It’s like he knew he had to at least use the term at some point because he didn’t even use it in his last State of the Union address.

On jobs, he’s been pathetic. Even if everything he says that he wants gets done, it wouldn’t come close to meeting the needs of working people in this country … How does he, with a straight face, talk about getting jobs back to the U.S. without even mentioning free trade agreements, and the need to significantly renegotiate those agreements to put them in better balance in terms of worker rights and environmental protections? Our government has been in collusion with the corporate sector, and providing them with very cheap labor under outrageous circumstances while the working people in this country have gotten absolutely shafted …

He doesn’t even have to be creative. He can just hearken back to what FDR did with the CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps) and the WPA [Works Progress Administration] programs, putting people to work in building up our nation’s infrastructure … The federal government should be retrofitting every one of its buildings over 30 years old. Bring them up to LEED certified standards. He’d be hiring hundreds of thousands of people, putting them to work, reducing energy usage, and ending up with a far improved federal infrastructure.

Q. To be fair, Obama is up against the Republicans in Congress.

A. He’s president of the United States and he can make the case to the American people the way FDR did on Social Security. FDR went out and fought for Social Security because it was the right thing to do. He didn’t throw it out there and let Congress fight over the little pieces and end up with this horrific compromise …

Sure, you’re always going to be facing opposition, but if you bring the American people along with you, that’s what real leadership is. It’s not just having an eye on the polls and being led along by them. It’s about standing up for what is right and making your case for it and getting the job done … And that’s what this president has utterly failed to do. He ran a great campaign. He was in a wonderful position with the support of this country for real change. And he has absolutely blown it.

Q. You’re expressing frustrations that a lot of people are feeling right now. How do we channel this outrage into meaningful political reform?

A. The best thing we can do is essentially occupy the elections. Stand up and say we’re not going to take it any more. As a citizenry, regardless of our prior political affiliations, we ought to be joining together and saying there are certain fundamentals we insist upon, and none of those will be met by either the Republican or the Democratic party because they helped create the system and they thrive from the corruption in the system …

President Obama didn’t wake up one day and say that it would be a great public policy decision to veto the EPA’s efforts to reduce ozone emissions. There’s only one reason he did that and it’s the corrupting interests of those polluting industries. It’s the same thing with climate change. We’re never going to see the kinds of fundamental changes that need to be made to reverse the tide toward catastrophic climate disruption unless we change our system — and to do that we need to get beyond this Republican and Democratic duopoly.