urban planning

The best thing greens can do is convince the public that eco-friendly lifestyles are healthier

Cardiovascular disease is the No. 1 cause of death in the U.S. and most European countries. In the latest issue of Newsweek there's a story about it called "Designing Heart-Healthy Communities." Here's how it starts:

Forecasting heart disease is becoming an ever-finer art, as researchers learn more about the risk factors. But here's a predictor you may not have heard about: street address. In a study published last year, scientists at the RAND Corp. scored 38 metropolitan areas on the "sprawl index" -- basically a measure of their dependence on cars. When the researchers tallied disease rates for the same areas, an interesting pattern emerged. Other risk factors aside, people in densely populated places graced with sidewalks and shops had the lowest rates of diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and stroke. ... Without even trying, the folks in those more-compact communities were apparently exercising enough to ward off chronic illness. As the RAND team deduced, "suburban design may be an important new avenue for health promotion."

To their credit , Newsweek teases out the more general point:

Why can’t we change our oil-sucking land-use preferences?

The other day I expressed disappointment at Kevin Drum's fifth peak oil post -- the one where he lays out his recommendations for oil policy. In my inimitably oblique and unfocused way, I was simply trying to say that I wish he'd been more imaginative.

If nothing else, peak oil is going to be a major inflection point in our collective history. It's a sharp turn in the road, and we can't see clearly around the bend. The stakes are huge, and call for a commensurate greatness of mind and expansiveness of thought.

What Drum did is basically gather the conventional wisdom in one place, without considering at all the myriad ways that the CW might be constricted and warped by the vested interests of society's current power brokers. Nor did he deign to consider things that might seem, in the current sociopolitical scene, impossible, or at least out on the fringe.

One example: U.S. suburbia, as Kunstler never tires of telling us, is built on cheap oil. It takes lots of oil to transport goods around the world to a Wal-Mart, and lots of oil for suburbanites to drive back and forth to it bazillions of times. The dominant land-use paradigm in this country is oil-sucking. If oil's running out, it's got to change, right?

Drum doesn't bother to mention the many innovative thinkers out there pondering how we can make cities greener and more attractive (the very subject of World Environment Day). He doesn't consider how we might refashion our remaining farm land and open spaces in more ecologically friendly fashion. He doesn't consider how we might encourage people to buy locally grown food and locally made goods.

Instead, we get this extraordinarily banal post on why people don't like mixed-use developments. (See also the Atrios post that preceded it and the Jim Henley post responding to it.)

It's late, so I'll just make two brief points:

Taking the LEED

Green Landscaping and Building Catches on in Cities Here at Grist, our unflagging good humor is bulletproof, but we imagine less-medicated enviros need the occasional boost. The place to get one, strangely enough, might just be in the crowded urban area nearest you. Property owners large and small are starting to think green. Urban landscape […]

Jesse Ventura wants to ride light rail

PR professionals the world over must be scratching their heads at the sudden surge of interest in sprawl. The topic has all the sex appeal of a zoning meeting or a traffic jam — being about zoning meetings and traffic jams — and its number-one spokesperson is V. (as in vanilla) P. Al Gore. The […]

Clustering — Good Idea, Hard to Do

“Our city is considering cluster zoning. Is this a good idea or isn’t it?” came a question from a friend the other day. I think clustering is a good idea. I’m about to live in a housing cluster myself. But, like many good ideas, it’s easier to say than do. Let me back off a […]

The Intermountain West becomes a California suburb

One does not expect enlightenment from a barber shop conversation, but there it was. I’d always had hunches about the nature of demographic change in Western mountain towns, nasty hunches, hunches counter to the conventional wisdom that immigration was motivated by the newcomers’ love of the land, so the newcomers would become allies in environmental […]