urban planning

15 Green Buildings

Green building has grown up, from a tiny movement of hands-on idealists to an increasingly mainstream business sector that erects office towers and research centers. Sure, the structures on this list aren’t as low-impact as yurts or straw-bale homes, but they represent green building on a broader, more public scale — where energy efficiency and […]

Can it happen here?

From CNNMoney.com:

It may seem strange that the emirate of Abu Dhabi, one of the planet's largest suppliers of oil, is planning to build the world's first carbon-neutral city.

But in fact, it makes a lot of financial sense. The 3.7-square-mile city, called Masdar, will cut its electricity bill by harnessing wind, solar, and geothermal energy, while a total ban on cars within city walls should reduce the long-term health costs associated with smog.

Masdar will be filled with shaded streets to encourage walking. A solar-powered transit system will take you to the airport.

Masdar is still on the drawing board -- construction begins in January, with a very tentative completion date of 2009 -- but the result will be watched closely around the world.

Maybe they read Car Free Cities by J.H. Crawford.

The question must be asked

The thought didn't cross my mind until my Minneapolis-based brother suggested it. I had asked him for his thoughts on the collapse, and that is the question he posed.

I was skeptical at first, but after doing a Google search -- and after NBC reported Sunday that National Transportation Safety Board investigators are "looking at everything" including "the weather" -- I think it is a legitimate question to ask.

First, though, why is it an important question to ask? NASA's James Hansen says we are on the verge of turning the earth into "a different planet," thanks to uncontrolled greenhouse-gas emissions. We've seen the Brits and Chinese link recent flooding tragedies driven by extreme weather to climate change.

We are all facing far more extreme heat waves, floods, wildfires, rainstorms, droughts and hurricanes -- yet our infrastructure apparently can't handle the weather we have today, as Hurricane Katrina revealed. If we don't adopt aggressive actions to prevent catastrophic climate change, we need to seriously climate-proof our electric grid, our levees, and our water and sewage systems.

The question remains, do we need to climate-proof our bridges? Does a connection exist between climate change and the collapse of the I-35W bridge? Consider what a meteorologist who worked in the city for years blogged:

Bridge to the 21st century?

Since 1998, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has been publishing an "infrastructure report card" detailing the sorry state of the various parts of our infrastructure. Unfortunately, national attention on the physical infrastructure only rises when something catastrophic happens, as it did in New Orleans in 2005, in Minneapolis on Wednesday after the collapse of a large bridge, or during an electrical blackout.

Like our ecosystems, the physical infrastructure is an essential part of the economy; the economy literally rests on the foundation of ecosystems and the infrastructure. Like the various ecosystems, such as forests and grasslands, lakes and rivers, the infrastructure has increasingly been treated like an asset that can be milked for all its worth, without investment. Like our ecosystems, the neglect of our infrastructure is the result of maximizing income in the short term; instead of insuring that there is some slack in a bridge or a forest, the economy has become nonresilient.

How does the Home Interest Mortgage Deduction affect sprawl?

Now that the housing market is tanking, is it a good time to talk about the absurdity of the Home Interest Mortgage Deduction?

I mean, it's truly crummy social policy. The biggest benefits go to the people in the highest tax brackets, own expensive homes, and earn enough income that they can itemize their deductions. So in essence, the HIMD is a ginormous housing subsidy for the well-off -- and one that dwarfs all of the housing subsidies to lower-income folks. This NY Times article lays out the case nicely: apparently, half the benefit of the deduction goes to the 12 percent of taxpayers who make at least $100 grand per year.

But the conventional wisdom is that the home interest mortgage deduction isn't just crummy social policy, but crummy environmental policy as well. Allowing homeowners to deduct mortgage interest on their taxes gives people an incentive spend more of their money on housing than they otherwise would. And people with extra money to spend on housing tend to buy larger homes on bigger lots -- which, in theory at least, means that the HIMD primes the pump for low-density sprawl.

But is this really true? Does the HIMD really accelerate low-density sprawl?

Calculate how walkable your home is

Some of you may have missed it, as Odograph introduced it down in comments, so I thought I’d bring it up front: Check out Walk Score, where you can plug in your address and find out how walkable your home is, on a scale of one to 100. My old place — a condo near […]

Britain’s gonna build some

Britain’s building five new "eco-towns": The towns, each with a minimum of 5,000 to 10,000 houses, will be built to meet zero carbon standards and will each showcase a specific project promoting energy preservation or green technology, the Communities and Local government office said. Projects to be showcased could include use of communal heat pump […]

Walkable town centers are hip

In "Center points: Urban lifestyle gains foothold in growing list of suburbs," a Chicago Tribune journalist describes the beginnings of a new phenomenon that could have a bigger impact than better CAFE standards, carbon taxes, or cap-and-trade of emissions, in my humble opinion: walkable town centers.

If people could actually walk from their residence to a store, train station, or even work, perhaps the constant rise in miles driven in automobiles would start to come down:

At opposite ends of the generational spectrum, Baby Boomers and buyers in their 20s are getting credit for supporting the emergence of suburban centers where people live close to restaurants, stores, theaters and even boutique hotels and spas. The key is to find housing that is an integral part of a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood.

Necessary

This op-ed from Rick Cole, city manager of Ventura, Calif., will be music to the ears of all you Gristians: The feel-good stage of California’s leadership on global warming is unsustainable. Kudos to the pop stars with their calls to switch lightbulbs and unplug cellphone chargers when not in use. But we can’t pretend that […]