Climate Cities
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Retrofitting suburbia: The task at hand?
“The big design and development project of the next 50 years is going to be retrofitting suburbia,” architect Ellen Dunham-Jones says in an interesting TED talk. Much of that work will be repurposing shuttered retail spaces — redeveloping dead malls and big box stores and turning empty parking lots back into wetlands, she says. For […]
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Brooklyn’s Eagle Street is poster child for urban farming
January 2011 update: Many of the photos have been removed from this series so they can be published in a Breaking Through Concrete book, forthcoming this year from UC Press. Karen Turner, 25, wants to farm 100 acres in Texas. Her family has lived on 10 acres in San Antonio since she was a child. […]
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Portugal’s eco-city, Amazon’s ugly HQ, and more urban notes
Progress toward a sustainable future may be stalled in the Senate, but there’s a ton of news and interesting research happening at the local level on the broad topic of improving built spaces — cities, towns, buildings, transportation systems, etc. A quick roundup from the local solutions beat: Living-PlanIT.comPlanIT Valley: Portugal’s planning to build a […]
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Fannie and Freddie bring down Boulder clean-energy finance program
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac claimed the first casualty in their attack on a promising clean-energy financing tool when Boulder County, Colo., canceled the latest round of its popular ClimateSmart Loan Program on Tuesday. “We are extremely disappointed by the lack of flexibility and vision we’ve encountered with the FHFA [Federal Housing Finance Agency], and […]
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Charlotte does light rail right
Charlotte is car-loving NASCAR country, a vast suburbia of cul-de-sacs and strip malls. Yet its new light rail line is a national model for success, outstripping ridership projections and inspiring millions of dollars in high-density development. How did sensible transportation planning come to sprawlburbia? Not by appealing for “sustainability,” that’s for sure. In the end, […]
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Planning politics: How Charlotte’s mayor championed light rail
Pat McCrory, former mayor of Charlotte, speaking at a transportation summit in 2009.Photo courtesy Willamor Media via FlickrPat McCrory, elected mayor of Charlotte in 1995 at the age of 39, had no idea transit would be the defining issue of his tenure as leader of the city. “I did not run on the issue of […]
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Tell me again why we mandate parking at bars?
They’re not all this big, but you get the pointPhoto: jgrimm FlickrOne of the silliest barriers to green urban development is mandatory sprawl, i.e. local zoning codes that require sprawl-style development, even when consumers (in the “free” market) want to buy property in walkable, compact developments. And one of the craziest examples of this dilemma […]
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Measuring neighborhood diversity and liveliness with ‘JaneScore’
Perhaps you know about Walk Score, the delightfully intuitive tool that calculates how walkable a neighborhood is and ranks it on a 100-point scale. (My Seattle neighborhood gets an 85; my suburban Chicago hometown gets a 31.) It was cooked up by Seattle developer Mike Mathieu and others to help quantify walkability and promote its […]
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Hottie bikers in Miami Beach, Complete Streets in St. Louis
Ten minutes of biking a day and you too can look like this.Decobike.comSpend enough time watching the Senate dither on the climate threat/energy quest/defining challenge of our time and it’s easy to lose sight of the sanity and localized progress happening around the world. A few quick examples: Miami Beach added a bike-sharing program to […]
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Portland Mayor Sam Adams wants ’20-minute neighborhoods’
Newish Portland Mayor Sam Adams wants to build more “20-minute neighborhoods” in his fair city. From a Fast Company interview: We’re also working to make every section of Portland a complete 20-minute neighborhood to strengthen our local economy. Two-thirds of all trips in Portland and in most American cities are not about getting to and […]
