urban planning

Coming to a city near you?

The New York Times ran a story this week on a grassroots effort that aims to demonstrate the potential for growing food in our cities. NY Sun Works' Center for Sustainable Engineering has a sustainable energy and hydroponics project floating on a barge in the Hudson River, and it's causing a minor buzz ...

There’s more to freedom than free parking

I keep seeing the phrase "social engineering" used to describe policies that don't kowtow to the car. See, for example, this inexplicable subhead about a third of the way through this Seattle newspaper story. Not only is this usage annoying, it's exactly backward (as others have noted before me).

First, let's look first at specifics. The paper reports that the city will put parking meters on some formerly-free spots in a rapidly urbanizing district near downtown Seattle. The newspaper calls this "social engineering."

I suppose that's right, at least to the extent that parking meters alter the incentive structure for parking, which ultimately may change some people's behavior. But if anything, the alternative to the city's plan -- continuing to provide public rights-of-way for exclusive, uncompensated use by a handful of private car owners -- is closer to "social engineering" than charging a small fee for the privilege. Really, the question is not whether the city will engage in "social engineering," but what kind of social engineering. And in particular, will government continue to use public resources to subsidize private cars?

Speaking more generally, just about any transportation policy -- or any policy at all, for that matter -- can be described as "social engineering." And using that inflammatory language is a game anyone can play. Consider some (slightly) overheated rhetoric: today's car-centric system is the result of Soviet-style social engineering.

Governments used the awesome power of the state to take money from the populace. Then central planners used the money with an ethic of brutalism, forcing gigantic car thoroughfares across neighborhoods, into the hearts of cities, and then out into far-flung farmlands and wild places.

In town, America's Soviet-style planning wasn't much different.

Realizing that freeways are not free

Every once in a while there's a truth that everybody knows, but that no one will acknowledge. And when someone finally says it aloud, it sounds shocking. Like this:

... what we're doing now isn't working. Not for drivers, taxpayers or the environment. We can't tax and build our way out of this.

That's Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat in his column this week, talking about what most people in Seattle already know: the area's freeway system is flat broke and busted. Even the biggest package ever to go before voters -- this fall's $16 billion roads-and-transit measure -- won't pay for the toughest infrastructure problems, like rebuilding the 520 floating bridge, and is only a fraction of the estimated $40 billion needed over the next few decades. Moreover, even that full $40 billion isn't expected to reduce congestion much. So what can we do?

Enter the occasion for Westneat's column: King County executive Ron Sims, who has stepped up (big PDF), yet again, with a remarkably visionary plan: region-wide congestion pricing. Wow. Without getting into the details here, Sims is proposing what is perhaps the only thing that could simultaneously generate the money, reduce congestion, and ease environmental impacts -- all without raising taxes. (In fact, that's why Sightline Institute has been preaching congestion pricing for years.)

If it all sounds too good to be true, it is.

Cities find that people like not being killed by cars!

Good story in the Christian Science Monitor about places that are taking steps (albeit tiny, tiny baby steps) to take back some of the public space given over to cars and letting people use it:

Building the world’s largest eco-city

The May 2007 issue of Wired Magazine has a piece about the development of the world's largest eco-city, Dongtan, underway on the outskirts of Shanghai (as we reported in May of last year). The article focuses on Alejandro Gutierrez and his team from Arup (project info here).

Recommended reading.

Happy birthday!

Peter Madden, chief executive of Forum for the Future, writes a monthly column for Gristmill on sustainability in the U.K. and Europe.

"Sustainable development" is 20 years old this week.

On April 27, 1987, after four years of deliberation, the World Commission on Environment and Development released its report. The inquiry -- also known as the Brundtland Commission -- was led by the prime minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland.

I was at university then, and devoured the contents of the report, which was later published as the book Our Common Future. Here, at last, was someone tying together the environment and development agendas. The report had much to say, too, about the relationship between poverty and environmental degradation. And as a female leader, Brundtland was such an antidote to our own prime minister; she was pretty much everything Margaret Thatcher was not.

The report gave us an enduring definition of sustainable development: "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own need."

So 20 years on, what is the legacy of sustainable development as a concept?

Who’s the biggest fattest liberal?

Over at National Review, Deroy Murdock is eager to assure his fellow right-wingers that Rudolph Giuliani is no liberal! What’s his evidence? Why, when he was mayor Giuliani doused the city with toxic insecticide! He built dirty power plants in poor parts of town! He privatized the management of Central Park! No liberal would ever […]

Can we live with skyscraper farms?

I find ideas like this stimulating, if only because it shows some creativity: skyscraper farms.

Basically, the idea is to build multi-story enclosed greenhouses near the cities where most food is consumed, thus reducing the acreage required to grow the crops and the energy needed to transport them. Some of the work done by Columbia University suggests the "vertical farm" could produce at least twice as much energy as it consumes from burning the biomass wastes.

What would we do if bikers’ lives were worth as much as auto convenience?

Great idea for a new law: Spouses and children of all traffic engineers must travel on the streets planned by their loved ones using a bike at least 50 percent of the time.

What would happen then? Probably this.