built environment
-
Be more like Manhattan to save the earth, and don’t go halfway
The greenest place to live is a dense city like New York, David Owen argues in his book Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability. We chat about urban vs. rural living and pitfalls of "decorative transit" and "density light."
-
How to make Smart Growth affordable
If you live in a walkable, transit-connected neighborhood, you'll probably spend less on transportation. Perhaps mortgage lenders should take note. Here's how smarter mortgages could crack the Smart Growth housing premium.
-
Smart Growth is great, unless it created the housing bubble
Did land-use regulation contribute to the housing bubble? New research finds that any limits on where homes can be built corresponded to both higher price gains and steeper price drops for residential property.
-
Money magazine’s ‘Best Place to Live’ isn’t much of a place
Eden Prairie, Minn., gets top billing for its low unemployment rate (5.1 percent), and it seems like a very pleasant place -- except not quite.
-
London builds bike ‘superhighways’ with groundbreaking blue paint
To keep bikers safe and speedy, the two eight-mile tracks use the innovative technology of ... bright blue paint.
-
How Obama can wean the country off oil without help from Congress
Obama could kick off the “Big Green Buy.”Photo: Wikimedia CommonsThis article is part of a special issue of The Nation magazine about green energy, “Freedom From Oil.” In the wake of the BP oil spill, some captains of industry have begun calling for government leadership to spur a clean-energy revolution. In June, billionaire software mogul […]
-
Does New York City’s High Line park matter in the fight against climate change?
1 hr photo via FlickrThe best use for elevated transit tracks is running trains on them. But the next best use might be beautiful, innovative green space, like the newish High Line park built on a defunct railway trestle that runs through Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood and Meatpacking District. Cities around the nation want to emulate […]
-
Want a party? Kick cars off the street in Oakland
Shut down a street to autos and sunny revelry instantly breaks out with lots of happy Californians. OK, maybe not automatically, but a key appeal of Complete Streets is that human-scaled throughways tend to be much more social than environments designed for cars. Streetsfilms makes the case by chronicling the first-ever Ciclovía day on Oakland, […]
-
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 […]