urban planning

Weird but true

Another blog that’s recently become required reading for me: Mode Shift, a blog on urban sustainability from Keith Schneider, founder of the Michigan Land Use Institute. Yesterday brought a somewhat surprising post on big plans afoot to make Knoxville, Tenn. (among other places) a model of sustainable, healthy living. Y’all may or may not know […]

Ten things

I doubt we have many sprawl-lovers in the audience, but just in case you need the comprehensive case against sprawl in one convenient location, check out “Ten Things Wrong with Sprawl” by James M. McElfish, Jr., director of the Sustainable Use of Land Program at the Environmental Law Institute. Here are the ten things, in […]

Green urban development, in just 12 years!

If you can ignore the egregious lede — did green building really come from hippies? — there’s much to celebrate in this article on Sonoma Mountain Village, “a community of about 2,000 homes and businesses, centered around a town square, using the latest principles of sustainability, green technology and new urbanism.” It’ll be about 175 […]

This climate hero may be more of a Forrest Gump

I've been waiting for someone to write this article.

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels is rightfully lauded for kicking off the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, which now has 326 mayors committed to helping their cities meet Kyoto emissions targets. It's a BFD, and Nickels will earn a small place in history for it.

Still. It's always been my sense that the initiative was cooked up by clever and persuasive staffers in the mayor's office, and that Nickels was, in Forrest Gumpian fashion, in the right place at the right time. I don't think he's really taken a concern about global-warming emissions to heart.

Seattle’s — possibly the country’s — coolest new neighborhood

This past Sunday, I went out to the Highpoint neighborhood in West Seattle to attend the Green Living Expo.

Highpoint is extraordinary (check out this map of the master plan). When it's completed (about a third is finished at this point), it will be the largest interurban redevelopment in the country. I won't get into all the details -- check out the website -- but here's the short summary:

The community will be mixed-use, mixed-income, and mixed-ethnicity. They're connecting up the streets with the surrounding grid. All the sidewalks (and one test street) are made of permeable concrete that allows rainwater through. They're reserving fully half of the (eventually) 1,600 housing units for low-income buyers and renters. They've developed a massive, award-winning drainage plan based on bioswales, to naturally clean water as it drains into the neighborhood's stream and pond. The housing units are all built to Energy Star and Built Green standards. Housing styles and colors are purposefully diverse. Walkways connect pocket parks, green space, and community gardens throughout.

This was all done with intensive community involvement. It's really a remarkable achievement.

Anyway, I took a bunch of pictures -- on, I should caveat, a very cloudy day -- some of which are below the fold.

The most noteworthy features

Just to follow up a bit on Amanda's post, it seems to me that there are three particularly newsworthy features of Gore's speech:

• A "carbon freeze"? I've never even heard of that. But if we took it seriously -- if we really halted, immediately, the growth of our collective GHG emissions -- it would functionally amount to huge cuts. Those new coal-fired power plants in Texas would certainly be off the table. In fact, the coal industry would be forced to shift entirely to IGCC/sequestration. Needless to say, coal barons aren't going to like that.
• With Gore's backing, a revenue-neutral carbon tax -- the best immediate policy available to us -- is now squarely in the mainstream. Thanks, Al!
• He conspicuously failed to endorse nukes. He didn't oppose them, he just dismissed them as unworkable. That's just the right stance to take.

More later, maybe, after I look at the speech more closely.

Here, for your reading pleasure, is the speech in its entirety:

Sprawl bribery is beating smart growth

The following is a guest essay from Joel S. Hirschhorn, author of Sprawl Kills: How Blandburbs Steal Your Time, Health and Money. He can be reached through sprawlkills.com.

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When the small town of Warrenton in sprawl-rich northern Virginia received an offer of $22 million in cash from Centex Homes, one of the nation's largest developers and home builders, one reaction of concerned parties was, OK, sounds like an environmentally acceptable plan for nearly 300 new homes. But closer examination reveals a development plan that comes nowhere near meeting smart-growth values. It also illustrates the tactics of large sprawl developers as they face opposition from those concerned about uncontrolled growth gobbling up rural America. Sprawl bribery is just another dimension of sprawl politics: using money to buy off government officials. And using just one aspect of good smart growth design -- clustering of homes -- creates the illusion of environmental benefit.

A positive environmental program that can (almost) fit on an index card

Without further ado, here's the first draft of my index-card manifesto. It turned out to be two index-card manifestos, with five points each: one for stuff I consider immediately urgent, and a second for what I consider longer-term goals. Feedback is welcome -- nay, requested. (I'll discuss the whole project more in a subsequent post.)

WHAT A GREEN WANTS: IMMEDIATE PRIORITIES

Energy efficiency: Proven techniques can get the same amount of work with 50% of the oil.

Tax/subsidy shifts: Markets should tell the ecological truth. That means shifting subsidies from industries and practices that harm us to those that help us -- and doing the reverse with taxes.

Diverse clean energy: Our economy must move from reliance on a single concentrated source of energy (oil) to reliance on a distributed array of small-scale, renewable energy sources appropriate to local conditions. That means staying within our solar budget, using wind, solar, biothermal, and hydrodynamic energy.

Electric vehicles: Flex-fuel and plug-in hybrid automobiles are necessary transition technologies, but in the long-term we need vehicles that run purely on electricity, stored either in hydrogen fuel cells or advanced batteries.

Smart grid: The electric grid should be agnostic (accepting inputs from any source of any size), intelligent (able to apportion based on shifting demand and supply), transparent (providing data on price and supply to all consumers), and scaleable (capable of building out, or degrading, gracefully).

The city has transformed itself into one of the nation’s most forward-thinking

I've always thought that if I had to move back to my home state of Tennessee, I'd kill myself live in Chattanooga. It used to be one of the most polluted cities in the country. I remember driving through it on the way to Atlanta -- it was nasty, dirty, bleak, and oh my god, the smell. A real shithole.

But in the last 20 or 30 years, the city has completely turned around, and now it's one of the most forward-thinking, progressive cities in the Southeast.

Sprol has a great piece on the transformation:

While most cities, nationally and globally, make an effort to reduce negative affects on the environment; few (if any) have attained the level of success enjoyed by Chattanooga. Here, industry is not the enemy, but instead has offered viable and effective solutions. Here, the citizen and the government official aren't at odds. Rather, they work together to creatively address the environmental challenges the city has faced.

Chattanooga has become one of the few cities designated as an EPA attainment city. This has been due, in large part, to combined efforts of Chattanooga citizens and city officials.

An inspiring read.