urban planning

How design must change in a warming, oil-scarce world

This week I was able to attend a conference on urban planning hosted by the Penn Institute for Urban Research and the Rockefeller Foundation. Fifty years ago, the same entities had put together another urban conference, at which gathered names like Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford, intellectuals who shaped the design world’s thinking about cities […]

Gas shortages plague the Southeast

Gas lines snake through parking lots, independent gas retailers ration supplies, and fights break-out at gasoline-starved filling stations across the Southeast … Gas shortages throughout the Southeast continue after several oil refineries in the Gulf Coast region were knocked off line after the double whammy of Hurricanes Gustav and Ike. Though two refineries have plans […]

Let’s hear it for floor area ratio

There’s an interesting exchange going on between Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias regarding the reasons that some communities may or may not be walkable. It seems that the Woodbridge section of Irvine, where Kevin Drum lives, is quite walkable, but hardly anyone does it. Yglesias seems to feel that if an area is made fairly […]

More ideas for a post-oil society

This is the fifth in a series on how we can build an energy future based on our best science and no longer critically dependent upon exhaustible and polluting fossil fuels. Promoting battery and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles Governments can play a key role in promoting electric vehicles by buying electric vehicles en masse and […]

Leading indicators

When the conservative Washington Post editorial board is stumping for smart growth and transit-oriented development, you know the tide is turning!

Some disappointments in Obama’s new energy proposal

Joe Romm isn’t off the wagon in calling Barack Obama’s latest energy policy outline [PDF], “easily the best energy plan ever put forward by a nominee of either party,” particularly given its release during a general campaign targeted at purple state voters. All the same, I found the plan to be … a little meh. […]

Amid climate crisis and rising costs, big media discovers city-grown food

Back in 2006, a Los Angeles developer, Ralph Hurwitz, bull-dozed a highly productive 13-acre farm in the city’s South Central neighborhood. In its place, he intends to plunk down a vast warehouse designed to facilitate trade in goods shipped in from Asia destined for our great nation’s big-box stores. (I wrote about the South Central […]

Matt Yglesias is making sense

On Republican gas price demagoguery: [Anti-density zoning and minimum parking mandates] are regulatory barriers to solving our energy problems every bit as much as the ban on offshore drilling is. And conservatives are against regulation, right? Except the anti-drilling regulation is good for the environment and for coastal economies whereas anti-urbanist regulation is economically inefficient […]

Nashville mayor stumps for public transit

Here’s Mayor Karl Dean of Nashville, Tenn., on MayorTV talking in almost jarringly common sense terms about the challenges facing cities and the solutions — public transit, diversity, economic development — that can overcome them: Good stuff.