Bicycle and Sustainable Development Policy of Cuban Government

Riding bicycle is an urban recreational activity that I recommend to everybody who loves nature. In my previous post, I said that I ride my mountain bike in the afternoons as my way of maintaining my body in good health condition. The route that I choose is Kampung Ambon, Kwawi, Pasir Putih, Arowi, Bakaro. Actually this route is not suitable for my dirt jump bike - the Polygon Cozmic DX 2.0 whose gears are Shimano Alivio for mountain biking. The street along these places is smooth. After Pasir Putih beach, the number of motorized vehicles is fewer. The road between the Pasir Putih beach and Cape Bakaro is very good for cyclists who want to ride their bicycles, and at the same time enjoy cleaner air produced by trees that grow along the beach and the tropical rainforest of the region. Standing on the Pasir Putih beach, I can see the beautiful blue color of the sea in front of me and also the blue color of the Arfak mountains on the other side of the Dorey bay. Homes to various species of rainforest animals including the paradise birds. When I was still in elementary school, some cruise ships like to visit this small town. The ships brought tourists from Europe and the United States. But I've never seen Oasis of the Seas coming to this bay. It will be nice to see the largest and the most luxurious cruise ship in the world in this Dorey bay.  Oh, I was day dreaming, ha...ha.. ha....

Well, although bicycle is not considered as renewable energy resource, riding it is a way of reducing consumption of fossil fuel and at the same time fighting global warming through the reduction of CO2 gases emission.

Lesson Learned from Cuba
Several years a go I wrote an article about how Cuban government turned to renewable energy and urged people to ride bicycles when their country was suddenly entering economic crisis after the collapse of the Soviet Union. My article was published by Intisari - a national magazine in Indonesia. Cheap and subsidized fuel imported from Russia could not be enjoyed anymore.

To anticipate the energy crisis, Cuban government imported 1.5 million bicycles and tricycles from China. Domestic production of bicycles was increased to 100,000 units per year. At the same time, solar photovoltaic panels were introduced to provide electricity to homes, schools and health clinics throughout the country. In addition to solar power, Cuba built wind farms and installed hundreds of micro-hydro power and biogas plants that greatly reduced Cuba's dependency on fossil fuel. The policy of the Cuban government to tackle the economic crisis by relying on renewable energy attracted the attention of the UN. In 2001 Cuba received the UN's Global 500 award. Now Cuba is seen as a model for many countries around the world that want to develop their renewable energies. Engineers from Cuba help Bolivia, Honduras, Lesotho, Mali, Nigeria, South Africa and Venezuela in developing their renewable energy sectors.

Dutch Cycling Culture
Besides learning from Cuba, we - Indonesian people - can look at the Netherlands as a good example for renewable energy application. Dutch people ride bicycles to work. Install photovoltaic panels at the roofs of their homes and build wind farms at sea.  Cycling is not only a hobby but has been part of their lifestyle or culture. Dutch were the ones who introduced cycling to Indonesian people during the colonial period. Therefore, we can learn from them if we are serious in developing our country through sustainable methods.  

Also read:

• Bike to work following Dutch habit and Cuban experience
• Cycling can increase productivity
• Riding bicycle is one of the ways to create low carbon society
• Health benefits of cycling 
• Mountain bike for ladies 
• Mountain biking in the Table Mountain 

Think Big. Freak Out.

Daniel Burnham's line "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood" is probably one of the most famous quotes to come out of the field of urbanism. It's also one of the most thoroughly abused. Burnham's maxim about aiming high is used by proponents of megaprojects like Atlantic Yards (the poster child for megaprojects, you see) in defense of superblocks and devastatingly overbearing towers. In truth, Burnham did not stop where the quote does. The quote is almost always truncated, cutting off much of the great planner's intent. The full quote reads:

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big. (via)

The idea of a noble, logical plan becoming a living thing is about as far from the logic of the contemporary commercial megaproject as you can get. Giant developments that have become commonplace in cities like New York, London, and Chicago over the past two decades are designed to eliminate risk, to minimize mess. They are, in a word, sterile. Burnham was talking about creating plans that are dynamic, and that improve their surroundings, not wall themselves off from them.

So if it's not the four-tower 3,000-condo 250,000 square-feet-of-retail megacomplex, what does a grand plan look like? What can we do to stir mens' blood, to re-engage the many millions of people who have become disconnected from the urban environment, who have willfully or accidentally removed themselves from the discourse? In the face of increasingly grave problems, how can citizens be energized to turn their cities into the viridian green, environmentally-restorative engines that we have heard so many advocates call for them to be?

There are no small changes that need to be made. I refuse to parrot, any longer, the absurd myth that changing your lightbulbs or using a fabric bag to pick up groceries will save the world. The words "hogswaddle" and "poppycock" come to mind (apparently climate challenge turns me into a Dickensian lower-class Brit). It's true that these things add up, but public opinion on fighting climate challenge is waning; people are growing tired of the issue. The public is, of course, fickle, so this should come as no surprise. The bite-size formula is not going to work. The ante must be upped.

For planners, architects, and urbanists, this necessitates a call for big plans. We need so many more Burnhamian Big Ideas. It's time to re-think infrastructure, and architecture, and every tiny component of every city. All things can be re-imagined; we're starting to see these kinds of big ideas in playful fits and starts. Defunct airports can become magnificent tree-covered mountains; parks can be used as psychological and environmental rehabilitation centers; whole cities can become stand-in icebergs; we could build rivers in the sky, and fill them with floating classroom-ferries. Nothing about our cities is set in stone -- not even their geography. And as nature starts to change our cities in new ways, we need to re-think how our cities interact with nature.

Perhaps the greatest piece of infrastructure that cities have at their disposal, in terms of reimagining and regenerating the cityscape, is often also the last remembered. People -- the citizens that use the city, kick it, punch it, pull it down and lift it up a hundred million ways each day -- are brimming with ideas about how to make their cities better. The images in this post, for example, are from a collection of entries to a public call for the reinvention of Coney Island. This is the crazy shit that people come up with; it follows that what they want to start seeing more of, in addition to genuine, solid plans for making cities work better, is some freaky, crazy shit.

Here's a proposal; the seed of a big idea, perhaps: let loose. Think about the most unchangeable features of your city, and try to imagine them changed. Don't just daydream; come up with Big Ideas, grand plans for revolutionizing the way that your city works. Get crazy, and put down on paper the ideas you wouldn't dream of bringing up in a meeting at work. Then upload them and share them with everyone who has a computer and a set of working eyes. We need more sky rivers, more radical civic interventions, and more acid-trip theme parks. More than ever, we need very, very Big Ideas. And if we try hard enough, if we come up with enough crazy shit, maybe we'll be able to shock more people into caring about how their city works, and what it looks like. No one cares if you tell them the airport is being turned into condos and a dog park. Heads turn when you suggest that it be geo-engineered into an urban Matterhorn. It doesn't have to happen. It just has to get people to pay attention.

Burnham wisely noted that each generation's sons and grandsons would do things that would stagger their forebears. Make your grandparents proud; go freak out on your city.


(Photo from MASNYC's Flickr gallery.)

Happy Whereday!

Well la-de-da. Exactly one year ago today, Where's first post went up. The site looked a lot different...no logo, basic Blogger format, very...yellow (not sure what I was thinking, there). And here we are, 365 days later, with the 250th post. Plus, since four regular weeks = one full year in blog-years, that makes today Where's 13th anniversary! Hip hip hoo-ray, and all that jazz.

For a bit of self-indulgent celebration, I've put together a list of the Top Ten posts (and series) over the past year. Each header links to the original post. The date of publication follows a brief sample quote, and the posts are listed in chronological order. Without further ado...

Open Spaces, Non-Places
"People have idealized 'open' space when what they should really be focusing on is 'quality' space...[And when] the distinction between 'open' and 'quality' public space is ignored, it allows not only for the types of ridiculous arguments used by the 'concerned neighbors' mentioned above, but on a more subversive level it devalues public space in general." (4/10/07)

Community 2.0 and the Built Environment
"Just as each technological revolution has had to prove its mettle over time, so has the internet; at first, there was a great deal of fear surrounding the dot com revolution...Physical communities, we feared, would become a thing of the past. But now, it seems, we have reached the critical point at which people trust the web -- trust it enough to really take control of it." (5/13-18/07; weeklong series)

Speeding Succession
"Why not help along the process of ecological succession? As urban areas around the world begin to reimagine and reconfigure themselves as more localized, sustainable places, people stranded by a fuel crash or a series of eco-disasters could get work replacing suburban communities with trees. For every house torn down and mulched, ten trees could be planted." (5/29/07)

A True Alternative
"Of late, we have been plagued in our building and planning practices by an intense mediocrity, a society-wide indeciciveness. What we want, of course, is the best of both worlds: the convenience, community, and culture of the city, and the peace, privacy, and pastoral scenery of the small rural town. What we've wound up with is suburbia: the best of nothing." (6/21/07)

The Dawn of Digital Urbanism
"'Who will watch the watchers?' This, I think, will be the most fundamental challenge of Cyberspace: in a universally connected world, the unwatched watcher has more power than ever, as they will have unprecedented access to the masses." (6/28/07)
(Also: from the response post a few days later, Everyone is Watching You: "To paraphrase that famous line: when everyone is a watcher, who's watching the watchers? Everyone.")

Resident Experience Master Planning
"New advances in crowd simulation technology are making Resident Experience Master Planning more and more possible and, with the economic potential of such a development so high, indeed more probable...If urban planning could figure out exactly how to get people to do specific things or behave in specific ways, it would give new and rather intense meaning to the term 'master planning.'" (7/13/07)

Eat Your City
"Urban farms could become for the 21st Century what large, elaborate central parks were in the late 19th and early 20th. Frederick Law Olmsted famously described Central Park in Manhattan as the lungs of the city, but with new green technologies these farms could become more than lungs -- they could be the heart and brain of the city as well." (7/25/07)

The Possibilities of the Post-Retail City
"It's interesting to imagine a world in which shopping took a back seat to other social spaces as the dominant street presence...To get an idea of what might fill the void [left by retail], it might be interesting to see how social space is structured in places where gift economies (or at least barter systems) often already exist and retail strips are few and far between, at least in the traditional sense: slums." (8/13/07)

World Urbanism Day
"[Presented here] is a simple visualization of the landscapes of twelve major coastal cities around the world in three imagined futures: red overlays represent areas that will be submerged after a 50 foot (15.2 m) sea level rise; orange overlays represent areas submerged after a 150 foot (45.7 m) rise; and yellow overlays represent areas submerged after a full 250 foot (76.2 m) rise. The colors represent the fire-like spread of the ocean inland." (11/8/07)

Living in SimCity
"In an existing version of SimCity, a player could cover an empty triangular plot with parks and watch the land value of surrounding blocks rise. Imagine a SimCity that allowed users to completely re-design the Polish Triangle so that any player walking through the area could access this visionary public space and interact with it." (2/13/08)


Have a wonderful weekend. Thanks for a great first year!

Joie de Vivre Urbaine

"...And joie de vivre [joy of living] may be seen as a joy of everything, a comprehensive joy, a philosophy of life..."

Long ago, writers disparaged cities like London, New York, and Paris, labeling them as hives of disease and destitution. But over time, industrialization and economic growth powered by these urban centers lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, creating a prosperous and secure middle class like the world had never seen. Over the past few decades, we have seen this happen again in China and India. With the rise of ideas like common wealth and the urban planet, it seems less naive each day to believe that this trend could continue moving upward, creating a globalized standard of living (not to be confused with a singular global culture, which would be intensely boring).

But the current model of urban living, with its sprawl, auto-dependancy, and tokenization of nature, is unsustainable at best. If economic development in developing world-cities is to diminish poverty at any notable rate, everyone -- in worlds both "first" and "third" -- must work to bring about the evolution of their cities into healthy, green, globally-minded places. The City As Solution to Climate Change and Globalization Pains has been a popular topic of conversation of late. But how can people in developed countries be persuaded to agree?

As we step into this new Urban Age, those of us arguing for the City As Solution must focus on the joie de vivre urbaine. For cities to reach their full potential as engines for change, the urban chorus will need to grow louder and brighter. The masses should be reminded of the joys and conveniences of living in vibrant, eqitable urban neighborhoods, not guilt-tripped out of their McMansions and driven into gentrifying neighborhoods to exacerbate socioeconomic inequality. Only when a person believes that they will enjoy something -- and that they deserve to -- will they make a real effort to change their way of life.

This week, as Where wraps up its first year in the urblogosphere, each day will feature a post that celebrates the excitement, promise, and possibility of the urban environment. It's Urbanism For Fun (but no profit). A preview:

Monday: EXPLORE
We'll start off by looking at how Google Earth and online mapping sites are making urban places more exciting by helping urbanites develop a better understanding of their cities, and how this type of technology could affect urban culture and society in the future.

Tuesday: PLAY
Taking another look at mixed-reality gaming, Where will consider this emerging form of entertainment as a possible catalyst for economic development in the near future.

Wednesday: IMAGINE
If you could rethink how cities are built, how would you do it? It's a question many of history's most famous architects have taken on with relish. In a guest post by SOM design associate Ella Peinovich, who participated in an architecture studio that took on this very daunting challenge, we'll learn more about what it's like to go through the process of radically reimagining the urban form.
(This has been edited to reflect a change in content).

Thursday: LEARN
Thursday will feature Where's full review of the buzz-heavy book The Endless City, compliments of Phaidon.

Friday: CREATE
March 21st marks the 365th day since Where's first post. To celebrate this blog's "birthday," a special edition of Weekend Reading will look back on the top ten posts of the past year.

--

DON'T FORGET
The Blogedanken game will be open to entries through 11:59pm CST, this Saturday, March 22nd. Go play and submit your favorite results for your chance to win a copy of PA Press' Hyperborder.

(Photo from Flickr user Shimrit&Yaar. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)


Links:
Joie de vivre (Wikipedia)

Hyperborder (Princeton Architectural Press)

WEEKEND READING: March 8-14, 2008

Lots of good stuff this week, but Item One is a must-read for everyone.

ITEM ONE: This week marked the (unfortunately early) end of South Central Tour, a fantastic, photo-rich blog documenting an epic trip through South and Central American cities with two infamous street artists, Above and Ripo. Take a look back through the group's stops in Rio, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Santiago, and a bucketload of other cities. (Photo credit)

ITEM TWO: Speaking of South American cities, here's a great article on the idealism, overpopulation, and developing crime problems of Brasilia.

ITEM THREE: Kazys wins for title of the week -- "Take the bus to the internet." The post doesn't disappoint.

ITEM FOUR: Another literary excerpt from Archidose, this one examining the struggle between technology and nature in architecture and urbanism.

ITEM FIVE: Space & Culture provides some great links about "desire lines."

ITEM SIX: Another eloquent commentary on how cities can be used to combat global warming. (Via Civic Nature).

ITEM SEVEN: Karrie Jacobs goes searching for the soul of Times Square, with interesting (and, of course, beautifully-written) results.

Traffic has been abnormally high lately at Where; thanks for the great week. Now you have a great weekend.

WEEKEND READING: December 15-21, 2007

Welcome back to another Weekend Reading session, everybody! We have another good batch this week, but if you've only got a little time, make sure to check out Items One and Two.

ITEM ONE: A spectacular piece in The Walrus' Cities Special Issue on suburbia, commute times, and the economics of happiness. Don't miss this one!

ITEM TWO: Simmons Buntin, founder of Terrain, blogs at TNAC on the role of beer in creating the urban-rural society.

ITEM THREE: Some interesting musings on gentrification from a recent transplant to Brooklyn.

ITEM FOUR: Airoots on high-rise squatting in Mumbai.

ITEM FIVE: Megacities all over the world are starting their own climate change initiatives, including one Cuban city that's using horse-drawn carriages for mass transit!

ITEM SIX: The Economist on the Bali climate talks.

ITEM SEVEN: Planning a trip to Rotterdam this February? Make sure to check out The Mobile City conferrence on the 27-28th.

While I have your attention, I want to mention that I've just started blogging over at The Next American City's blog, The Street. I'll be covering all things related to leisure and public life in American cities. If you're interested, you can check out my first post here.

(Photo from Flickr user sarako. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

WEEKEND READING: December 8-14, 2007

Oh, this is an exciting week. There is a lot of really fantastic reading for you, if you are interested.

ITEM ONE: A short but stunningly effective piece at Spacing Wire on the need for humanism in the environmental movement proves that, sometimes, you really can say the most with the fewest words. It's a must-read.

ITEM TWO: The Burgh Diaspora puts out a call to all Rust Belt bloggers (and citizens).

ITEM THREE: Critical Spatial Practice takes a look at the history of labor struggles in urban America.

ITEM FOUR: Airoots goes gangbusters on Tokyo retail and high-end boutique architecture. This is another must-read.

ITEM FIVE: Does Marseille hold the key to Europe's future? The Smithsonian mag thinks so.

ITEM SIX: David Adjaye's Whitechapel Idea Store gets the Flickr treatment from Life Without Buildings.

ITEM SEVEN: And to finish up this wonderfully weighty edition of WR, a good, old-fashioned traffic joke that will at least inspire a chuckle.

Have a great weekend, and enjoy the reading!

(Photo from Flickr user hampshiregirl. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

World Urbanism Day

In honor of World Urbanism Day (aka Town Planning Day), I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what might become of some of the world's great cities if global warming's worst case scenario came to pass. Scientists estimate that, were all of the ice caps and snow pack on earth to melt, the sea level would be somewhere between 230-260 feet (70-80 m) higher than it is today.

While no one reading this post is likely to see this kind of damage, it's interesting to imagine what today's cities would look like in such a radically different world -- but the scale is so vast that it's hard to fathom. The following is a simple visualization of the landscapes of twelve major coastal cities around the world in three imagined futures: red overlays represent areas that will be submerged after a 50 foot (15.2 m) sea level rise; orange overlays represent areas submerged after a 150 foot (45.7 m) rise; and yellow overlays represent areas submerged after a full 250 foot (76.2 m) rise. The colors represent the fire-like spread of the ocean inland. Take these pictures for what you will; they are what they are.

While many of the cities represented were included for their global importance today, the visual impact of the colored overlays played a big part in determining what cities made the list. The numbers below each square image describe the approximate length of one side in miles/kilometers.



New York City, United States
(74.5/120)



Montreal, Canada
(54.7/88)



Rio De Janeiro, Brazil
(26/42)



Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire
(28.6/46)



London, Great Britain
(16.8/27)



Stockholm, Sweden
(22.4/36)



Istanbul, Turkey
(22.4/36)



Mumbai, India
(53.4/86)



Sydney, Australia
(22.4/36)



Hong Kong, China
(18.6/30)



Pyongyang, North Korea
(20.5/33)



Tokyo, Japan
(83.9/135)



------------------------


The images above were created using Google Maps and a filter from Hey What's That dot com.


Links:
World Urbanism Day (Wikipedia)

Google Maps

HeyWhatsThat.com (EDIT: I found a direct link to the tool that I used.)

The Effects of Non-Sustainable Transit

Shocking!

Addressing the Sub/Urban Divide

The following post is part of Blog Action Day 2007, in which more than 15,000 bloggers around the world are posting about the environmental challenges that we face today as a society. For more info, follow the link at the end of the post.

---------------------

These days, cities and suburbs are locked in a seemingly intractable struggle. Cities are understood to be the dense urban cores bustling with pedestrians and laced with mass transit lines, while suburbs are viewed as the stomping grounds of the wicked and immoral Sprawl Monster that devours land at alarming rates and drives up demand for auto traffic and freeway construction, adding untold millions of tons of carbon into the air and accelerating global warming. It's a typical Western dichotomy: dark vs. light; right vs. left; good vs evil.

What often gets brushed aside as a result of this oversimplification is the fact that urbanity has little to do -- especially in the United States -- with political boundaries. The average densities of American cities and suburbs are almost the same. In fact, if you look at the 43 American municipalities with a density above 10,000 people per square mile, only six of them -- New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and Miami -- are the central cities in their metropolitan areas. (That number rises to eight if you include Trenton and Newark, both in New Jersey, whose smaller metros are usually absorbed into the CSAs of Philadelphia and New York). Granted, some of the suburbs that reach this density are far more auto-centric than some of the less densely populated central cities, but the point here is that questions urbanity cannot be boiled down into easy, diametrically opposed sides. Density, sprawl, city, suburb -- all of these things are involved in the equation, but they don't always line up as neatly as we might hope.

It is often said nowadays that cities produce the majority of carbon emissions (roughly 80%) and therefore these areas must be the solution to the problem. This is entirely true, but we have to realize that "city" in this instance refers not to central urban areas, but entire metropolitan regions. One of the greatest challenges that US cities face, then, is how to undo the damage that poor land use policies and auto-dependancy have done to our suburbs. Many of the suburbs in the 10K+ density range are older places that were established before or during the early years of the automobile age: Paterson and Jersey City across the Hudson from New York; Somerville and Cambridge across the Charles from Boston; Cicero and Berwyn on the western edge of Chicago. These suburbs often have their own commercial areas, neighborhood shops and restaurants, and immigrant communities priced out of central cities. They are densely populated and often less reliant on cars than postwar suburbs. Many are connected to transit systems. In short, these suburbs are very urban places.

In the same stroke, some very large cities can be very sparsely populated places. San Jose, the center of Silicon Valley, is half as dense as Lakewood, Ohio, an historic streetcar suburb of Cleveland. Alexandria, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC, is twice as dense as Las Vegas. And how about this one: the most densely populated municipality in the US, Union City, New Jersey, has a population density 54.5 times higher than that of Jacksonville, Florida, one of the country's largest cities.

Numbers and boundaries have never been very good ways of defining places. They're too clinical, and they often substitute statistics for the human element. This has led to a critical misunderstanding on the part of the general public in the US of terminology pertaining to the built environment. As a result, people here are having a lot of trouble figuring out how cities should address climate change. There is a consensus that something must be done, but people can't seem to agree on what that might look like. City-dwellers pat themselves on the back and blame climate change on amorphous "sprawl," anti-urbanists twist stats to try to turn the tables on urbanists who are ill-equipped to deal with public perception, and suburbanites guard their turf rather fiercely, fearing that "density" will translate to more hellish commutes and the loss of "local character" that often doesn't exist in the first place. As a result the US plods along slowly toward a drastic change in the coastline with no solution in sight.

There is a near-total lack of vision in how we deal with urbanization and development in this country. However, this is starting to change. Hopefully, a rather damning trifecta of recent reports will give urban planners and civic leaders the tools they need to redirect the conversation.

First, it was revealed by the New York City Department of Health that New Yorkers lived, on average, nine months longer than the average American -- a fact linked to New Yorkers' more active lifestyles and the city's dense, walkable streetscape. Next came a report from Smart Growth America with the claim that "the projected 59 percent increase in the total miles driven between 2005 and 2030 will overwhelm expected gains from vehicle efficiency and low-carbon fuels." Finally, the American Public Transportation Association announced that "when compared to other household actions that limit carbon dioxide (CO2), taking public transportation can be more than ten times [more effective] in reducing this greenhouse gas." It was a three-strike, rapid-fire attack on auto-centric development patterns. The message was made very clear: if we want to seriously address climate change in the United States, we must walk more, improve our public transit infrastructure, and drive much less often. All of this is reliant upon the existence of one thing: an urban environment.

At some point it must be acknowledged by a majority of Americans that if we want to change the way we impact our climate, we have to change the ways that we build and live. Making the switch from regular light bulbs to CFLs is all well and good. But understanding the way that land use and transportation actually work, and accepting the fact that we must be more responsible in these areas, is critical to finding a real solution. If the public is to come to this better understanding, recognizing and explaining the difference between straight statistics (city/suburb, density/sprawl) and genuine urbanity should be the first items on the urban agenda.

(Photos from Flickr users jimheid and mirkob. The first shows Cambridge, MA, rising across the river from Boston's Back Bay neighborhood; the second is an image of Jacksonville, FL's hollowed-out core and the sparsely populated surrounding neighborhoods.)


Links:
Blog Action Day

US Municipalities Over 50,000:
Ranked by 2000 Density (Demographia)

Why New Yorkers Las Longer (NY Magazine) (via All About Cities)

Less Auto-Dependent Development Is Key to Mitigating Climate Change, Research Team Concludes (Smart Growth America)

Taking Transit: The Most Effective Route to Cutting Carbon (WorldChanging.com)

Chicago Humaities Festival

The 18th Annual Chicago Humanities Festival runs from October 27th to November 11th here in -- you guessed it -- Chicago, Illinois. There's a great schedule of lectures, art installations, plays, panel discussions, and movies that are all focused on the festival's theme, "The Climate of Concern," which translates to global warming and sustainability issues. If you live in the Chicago area or are planning a visit some time during the two-week festival, you should definitely check out the website.

I just bought my tickets to a few archi/urbanism related events, so I wanted to throw it out there -- if any of you Where readers is planning to attend any of the following events, email me and perhaps we can meet up. The more the merrier, right? Hope to see you soon. ;-)

304: PANEL
Sustainable Building in Chicago -- A Scorecard
Tue, Oct 30 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
Museum of Contemporary Art, Theater
220 E. Chicago Ave.
FREE (Tickets still required)

903: FACETS FILM SERIES
Starship Troopers
Wed, Oct 31 6:30 PM
Facets Cinémathèque
1517 W. Fullerton Ave.
Tickets: $5.00

420: PANEL
Adaptation -- The Other Half of Our Response to Global Warming
Sat, Nov 3 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM
Thorne Auditorium, Northwestern University School of Law, Chicago Campus
375 E. Chicago Ave.
Tickets: $5.00
(I am also planning to walk down to Millennium Park after this to check out ARCTIC.)

809:
Douglas Kelbaugh with Harrison Fraker: The Greening of the Metropolis
Sun, Nov 11 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM
Thorne Auditorium, Northwestern University School of Law, Chicago Campus
375 E. Chicago Ave.
Tickets: $5.00

Why "Smart Growth" Isn't

"Smart Growth" (henceforth "SG") is a grossly misused term these days. Almost exclusively used to describe slightly modified suburban development -- moderately smaller lots, more narrow streets, excessive subsidies, "walkable" "communities", and those detestable Towne Centres all come to mind -- the term is a bit of old fashioned semantic smoke and mirrors. The promise is that we can continue to build much as we have for the past fifty years if we consume a couple less farms, or if we move things just a little closer together. Of course, the fact is that these minor changes are producing minor results.

The danger here is twofold: on the one hand, "SG" advocates and the people who choose to (and can afford to) live in "SG" developments pat themselves on the back and insist that they are doing their part to save the world from global warming, when in fact they have made very little difference (and are probably likely to make it up through other small indulgences with which they congratulate themselves for being such good citizens); even more foreboding is the fact that the failure of these not-so-smart "SG" projects provides the pro-sprawl, anti-transit crowd with ample ammo in their arguments against not only "SG", but cities and urbanism in general.

Case in point: a recent article by Wendell Cox of Demographia for the Toronto Star highlights the inability of "SG" initiatives, with their emphasis on (barely) higher density and driving less (sometimes), to curb greenhouse gasses. This is no surprise for reasons discussed above. But the article also cites a University of Sydney study that makes the deceptive argument that dense, transit-linked city neighborhoods produce higher levels of greenhouse gasses per capita than sprawling suburbs.

If this seems counterintuitive, that's probably because the findings are slanted. It is true that Inner Sydney has the highest per capita outpot of GHG, but there is no mention of the fact that a huge chunk of this area is taken up by office towers, which consume massive amounts of energy for heating and cooling, thousands of acres of fluorescent lighting, and other energy-consuming systems that often continue running long after employees have left for the night. Being the central business district, Inner Sydney is also the destination of much of the auto traffic that originates in the surrounding sprawl. Outside the CBD, other neighborhoods include other offices and large tracts of industrial land (and factories are often very large producers of GHGs) that are much less likely to take up space in more far-flung areas.

Of course, 43.3% of the eco-footprint for the average New South Wales resident is created by the hugely disproportionate costs for importing food. This gets at the true heart of the problem facing cities and suburbs around the globe: the need to live locally. Of course, neither the pro-"SG" crowd nor its detractors talk much about that.

More on all of this "SG" business next week...

(Photo from Flickr user pfrench99.)


Links:
Planners denying reality (The Toronto Star)

Australian Conservation Foundation's Consumption Atlas