Climate Cities

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  • Reclaiming the streets

    Cars promise mobility, and in a largely rural setting they provide it. But in an urbanizing world, where more than half of us live in cities, there is an inherent conflict between the automobile and the city. After a point, as their numbers multiply, automobiles provide not mobility but immobility, as well as increased air […]

    Lester Brown Cities

  • David Brooks to old folks: cities are better now

    David Brooks writes about the ’60s and ’70s crime wave that scared a generation of Americans–or a generation of white, mobile Americans–away from urban living: [P]eople in all classes lived in fear. “Mugging was nothing unusual. Everybody got mugged,” [John] Podhoretz writes. A serial killer nicknamed Charlie Chop-Off menaced the Upper West Side, emasculating little […]

    Jonathan Hiskes Cities

  • Living Buildings, Living Cities, and $125,000 up for grabs

    $125,000 to play SimCity? Sort of. A new contest from the Cascadia Region Green Building Council is offering serious cash for the best visual renderings of an existing city transformed into a place that’s sustainable. Like, really sustainable. The Living City Design Competition is calling for: Photo-realistic three-dimensional modeling and renderings (a napkin sketch won’t […]

    Jonathan Hiskes Cities

  • Dmitry Orlov on why the U.S. is headed toward Soviet-style collapse

    Dmitry Orlov“Really, there’s no one at the helm now,” Dmitry Orlov says nonchalantly. We are talking about the economic crisis and the way that the destructive system of our economy operates without anyone really leading it. It’s a perfect statement from a man who has traded in his house and car to live on a […]

    Andrée Collier Cities

  • Away from the oil spill, signs of local progress

    The Gulf oil spill story is too big to ignore right now. It’s a massive, toxic indictment of our dependency on fuels that fill our atmosphere with heat-trapping pollutants even when everything goes right. But there are other stories too big to ignore, including the story of people finding creative ways to escape the death […]

    Jonathan Hiskes Cities

  • 14 buildings compete to be the Biggest Loser (of energy waste)

    The EPA draws inspiration from The Biggest Loser in a new competition that pits 14 buildings against each other to see which can trim its energy usage the most. The National Building Competition is explicitly modeled after the weight-loss reality TV show, spotlighting structures that include a 23-story Manhattan office building, a San Diego Marriott […]

    Jonathan Hiskes Cities

  • Los Angeles without traffic—in pictures

    Courtesy Tom BakerToday in happy urban eye candy (previous installations here and here), photographer Tom Baker gives us a look at what some Los Angeles thoroughfares would look like without traffic. Point being, L.A.’s built environment is one manner of placemaking — one that uses a lot of cement, takes up a lot of space, […]

    Jonathan Hiskes Cities

  • TED talk on building a greener house

    Robotics engineer Catherine Mohr is tired of enviros “long on moral authority and short on data.” She’s got a smart TED talk clip about the greenest options for (a) wiping up a yogurt spill and (b) building a house. The point in each case is that the best option is often not what you’d expect. […]

    Jonathan Hiskes Cities

  • NYPD trashes hundreds of bikes in security response

    Well, so much for Earth Day. Since yesterday morning, the blogosphere and Twitter have been in a tizzy over the disposal of hundreds of bikes by the NYPD due to President Barack Obama’s visit to New York City yesterday. The story, accompanied by a photo, was initially sent in to the blog This Is Fyf: […]

    Keith Caswell Cities

  • Britain’s ‘Coed Darcy’ shows the value of sparkling new towns

    Sim Darcy: An illustration of the Welsh urban villageCourtesy The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment Coed Darcy is an oddly named urban village that’s going to be built from the ground up over the next 20 years in southern Wales. It’ll have an impressive 4,000 compact homes, plus commercial space and 1,300 acres of […]

    Jonathan Hiskes Cities