Climate Cities

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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 […]

    Jonathan Hiskes Cities

  • 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 […]

    Jonathan Hiskes Cities

  • 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, […]

    Mary Newsom Cities

  • 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 […]

    Claudine Benmar Cities

  • 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 […]

    Jonathan Hiskes Cities

  • 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 […]

    Jonathan Hiskes Cities

  • 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 […]

    Jonathan Hiskes Cities

  • 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 […]

    Jonathan Hiskes Cities

  • Local power: tapping distributed energy in 21st-century cities

    Hammarby Sjostad “eco-cycle”Source: HammarbySjostad.de Residents of Hammarby Sjöstad, a district on the south side of Stockholm, Sweden, don’t let their waste go to waste. Every building in the district boasts an array of pneumatic tubes, like larger versions of the ones that whooshed checks from cars to bank tellers back in the day. One tube […]

    David Roberts Cities

  • Can we just drive less after the Gulf spill? If only it were so easy …

    Photo: Stephan Geyer via FlickrNPR reporter Brian Mann went talking to gas-station customers in upstate New York to find out what they’re thinking about the Gulf of Mexico oil leak and their own responsibility as gas-buyers. He gets some interesting responses, but I’d like to engage in some bloggerly quibbling with his conclusion. Mann finds […]

    Jonathan Hiskes Cities