“It was predominantly the collapse of the car-dependent suburban fringe that caused the mortgage collapse… Simply put, there has been a profound structural shift — a reversal of what took place in the 1950s, when drivable suburbs boomed and flourished as center cities emptied and withered.” So says Christopher B. Leinberger [...] Read more »
“We have finally uncoupled VMT (Vehicle Miles Traveled) growth from GDP growth in the U.S., largely because Millenials don’t want to drive.” That was one of the fascinating tidbits which I took from the Smart Growth in Small Towns and Rural Communities Workshop that Katie and I checked out Friday in Salida. Here’s another one: [...] Read more »
Good urbanism has a hard time competing with solar panels and wind turbines as a symbol of sustainability. So it often takes one of those light bulb moments to realize the truth about Urbanism: it’s probably the most comprehensive way we can address climate change in this country.
Last night I was reading David Brower’s Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run. This is a guy who founded the Sierra Club and The League of Conservation Voters, helped prevent the damming of the Grand Canyon, and was designated by the New York Times as ‘the most effective conservation activist in the world.’ [...] Read more »
Here’s a little humor for you.
James Howard Kunstler is one of the most outspoken and well-known critics of sprawl and proponents of New Urbanism. This talk is Kunstler at his best- witty, humorous, inflammatory. Kunstler is a futurist who understands that we’re basically f*$#*d as a country if we don’t abandon our car-centric, sprawling lifestyles immediately and start building places [...] Read more »
In a recent post on his Original Green Blog, Steve Mouzon made the excellent point that while it might be gratifying and just to “take the hide off” BP’s CEO Tony Hayward, we are actually to blame, having created a suburban nation which continues to make us slaves to oil. Of course this is easy for New Urbanists to claim, but what else are we supposed to say about the emperor’s nudity? If all we do as a result of this disaster is make one multinational oil corporation pay heavily, we will have missed a huge opportunity to change our ways and begin to implement patterns of settlement that are actually sustainable.
I often wonder when I hear things like ‘change a light bulb, save the world’ just how deep our culture’s understanding of sustainability is. I’ll read an article that discusses how the American lifestyle needs to change, but the answer at the end has more to do with fuel efficient cars than urbanism or smart growth. This article is compelling to me because it demonstrates with solid data how New Urbanism and Smart Growth are a systemic approach to sustainability and dealing with the climate crisis…
The short film “Built to Last” won first place in The Congress for the New Urbanism CNU 17 video contest. I think environmentalism is often focused on symptoms rather than the underlying systemic cause of our global problems. Our automobile/ oil dependence is probably the largest man-made disaster in the world. What’s counter-intuitive is that [...] Read more »
One of our highest hopes for South Main is that it will serve as a model of what’s possible for future development. We’re looking to demonstrate the most sustainable model possible for new development in the west. The heinous effects of sprawl in the west and the alarming loss of cherished open space is certainly [...] Read more »
