A New Urban Environmentalism?

I'm not sure if there's anything left to say about Van Jones, the Obama administration's special adviser on green jobs. An article by Elizabeth Kolbert details his efforts to address urban poverty and global warming by putting people to work on green infrastructure projects. Jones explains his plans in a recent NPR interview. His work has captured the imagination of many, but does it represent a promising new form of urban environmentalism?

Jones is a political star. After graduating from Yale Law School in 1993, he moved to the Bay Area and began advocating for human rights in urban communities. He fought effectively to keep people out of jail, in gainful employment, and safe from police brutality. Jones traces his environmental interest to a talk by Julia Butterfly Hill, explaining that he admired and identified with her efforts to save a redwood tree. The two found common ground in helping people and things considered disposable.

At a meeting with Nancy Pelosi in 2007, Jones brought up the need for a Clean Energy Jobs Bill. The idea caught on and was included in the Energy Independence and Security Act less than a year later. He has since published a book called The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems. In today's political climate of economic crisis and recovery, this concept makes environmental concern more politically viable. It has rallied unions, corporations, politicians, and local activists behind alternative energy as an agent for job creation.

Still, there is skepticism about the merits of combined solutions to global warming and poverty. Some see a lack of environmental concern among less affluent communities as a major impediment. Others point out that environmental conservation places disproportionate strain on people living in poverty. Some policy experts see the two problems as too distinct to be addressed with a joint solution. Jones responds by explaining the benefits of a holistic approach that encourages combined efforts. He considers poverty alleviation without environmental consideration a short-term fix, resulting in greater problems down the road. He adds that people living in poverty will support environmental causes that address their most pressing needs.

Jones looks for points of agreement and makes the most of them. He peppers his speech with clear and memorable phrases that express shared interests, often playing with different meanings of the word green. At the same time, he's not shy about applying pressure against powerful opponents (skills sharpened fighting police brutality in the 1990s). Of course, it will take more than consensus and coercion for his current efforts to succeed. The jobs will have to be efficient and provide better sources of energy. A certain amount of financial loss is acceptable in return for long-term gains, but the gains have to materialize. Given the widespread support for these ideas, the timing is right to make them work.

So, is Jones at the forefront of a new urban environmentalism? His work is different from environmental justice movements that have fought to improve ecological conditions in marginalized communities. Jones adopts the discourse of sustainable development, with a focus on poverty alleviation. He aims for consensus around human needs, rather than proposing a radical alternative to current forms of environmental management. As far as labels go, his ideas integrate three potentially conflicting -isms: social, capital, and environmental. His emphasis is clearly on the social, but only in the sense of prioritizing human concerns. If this renders him a socialist, then even Milton Friedman would be socialist. In reference to the urban, now that Jones is advising on green jobs for the entire country, his focus will have to expand to include suburban and rural communities. He has successfully articulated a vision that links inclusive economic prosperity with long-term environmental care. While this isn't new urban environmentalism, it is something more comprehensive and very worth pursuing.

(Credits: Photo of Van Jones from Green for All; Photo of Julia Butterfly Hill from Earthfirst; Photo of smoke stacks from the Hunter College Department of Geography; Photo of Milton Friedman from In Defense of Liberty)

The Value of Scarcity

Urbanization is caused, at least in part, by scarcity. Certain resources are limited, and thus more efficiently used in a communal setting. Through urbanization, more people have access to these resources than would if settlements were less densely populated. This is true of everything from intangibles like creativity to more solid things like water and electricity, which are more cheaply and easily distributed to dense urban areas than rural places. Cities are often trumpeted these days as "the solution" to the challenge posed by global climate change because of this very phenomenon; as energy sources become more scarce, the efficiency of densely populated cities becomes the most viable way for developed nations to maintain a high standard of living while simultaneously reducing energy usage.

A recent article by Thomas Friedman gave me pause because of its implications for the scarcity of energy. Two weeks ago, Friedman wrote about a laboratory in the Bay Area that is optimistic about its ability to make cold fusion power a reality within the next decade. This claim has, of course, been made before, and as Friedman quips, such revolutionary technologies tend to be "20 years away and always will be." The successful commercialization of cold fusion would, at least in theory, solve the problem of the scarcity of energy once and for all; assuming that it were actually only ten years away, what would this mean for cities? How would patterns of urbanization change if energy were not an issue?

On the one hand, an endless supply of cheap, safe, clean energy would make currently-cost-prohibitive technologies like mag-lev trains and supertall skystrapers (we're talking about the kind of buildings that would make the Emirates blush) much more feasible. Mag-lev trains, in particular, would present an interesting challenge to cities by opening up an even more vast range of the exurban hinterlands to development. With the density-related benefits of energy rendered moot, how would urbanists need to re-think their arguments in favor of high-density urban cores?

On the other hand, it could be argued that the end of energy scarcity would make developed world-conditions in currently-developing countries much, much easier to achieve. This would be a massive economic boon to lower-income and impoverished people around the world, freeing up people previously locked into cycles with few or no opportunities for advancement, greatly accelerating the growth of the Creative Class across the globe. Innovation-intensive fields tend to encourage clustering, as Richard Florida has argued so thoroughly in his books, meaning that a massive shift like the advent of cold fusion power might actually be a boon to urbanism.

Whether or not cold fusion is possible within the foreseeable future, the idea that it is challenges some of the most basic tenets of urbanist thought. What might we learn about how contemporary cities work if we were to give such a seismic technological shift some serious thought? What value does the scarcity of energy -- or any resource -- have for cities?


(Photos from Where@FFFFOUND!. The originals can be viewed by clicking the photos.)

StimulusWatch and the Real American Housing Crisis

A couple of weeks ago, Drew posted about StimulusWatch, a site that lists all of the local projects in the United States that have been publicly announced as candidates for federal stimulus funds and lets the public vote on each project's merit. As luck would have it, my job involves researching construction projects, and I've been spending almost a month now combing through SW for several hours a day, looking for potential building projects. From what I've observed, it seems doubtful that the site will have any major impact on how stimulus dollars are spent ("Pork" is probably the most-used word in the very angry, uninformed comment sections no matter what state or city you're viewing). But SW does provide an opportunity for people working on the local level to gauge how their neighbors feel about a wide variety of public projects and services.

In the Energy category, for instance, one can see how effective the green movement has been on public opinion. Whereas a few short years ago Energy projects would undoubtably have been fewer in number and much lower in popularity, the Energy category seems to be one of the most popular, regardless of state or city, with the +/- ratio around half and half -- about the same as the ratio for Streets & Roads! Folks in small towns seem just as likely now to favor energy retrofits to their town hall and the addition of solar panels to school and library rooftops as urban and suburban Americans. People are still skeptical of hybrid vehicles, though, with many requests for money for hybrid or alternative energy-fueled municipal fleets meeting staunch resistance. But overall, the mainstreaming of energy efficiency efforts seems to have been a wide success.

It is seeing this shift that makes me hopeful that we can reverse what is undoubtedly the ugliest trend that I've noticed from coast to coast: the outright rejection of Housing projects. Items with "senior" or "demolition" in the title notwithstanding, Housing projects receive negative vote ratios so consistently that it's as if there was some sort of unspoken rule barring people from voting anything but "No." Even more disturbing than the negative vote ratios are the comments left by mostly anonymous posters at the bottom of each page. Affordable and public housing is called some terrible things, and there is more than anyone's fair share of racism, classism, and willful ignorance. Public housing in America, it is plain to see here, has still not recovered from the havoc wreaked by the slum-clearance-brought tower projects of the 1950s and 60s. Much like with Wall Street, American public housing is experiencing a crisis of confidence.

It would seem that, as much as we need the money to build units for the thousands of people who have lost or are about to lose their homes, it might not be a terrible idea to spend some of HUD's budget on increasing public awareness of the different kinds of housing available nowadays. Stigma attached to terms like "public housing" and "affordable housing" undoubtedly hampers efforts to create sustainable mixed-use communities, a contemporary goal of most major urban housing authorities, by keeping middle- and upper-income residents whose presence facilitates that integration at bay. The focus for housing advocates and agencies is no longer on concentrating poverty, but on economic integration -- and if it's not, it damn well should be. Without changing the conversation, attempts to tackle America's shortage of affordable housing will likely be uneven at best.

For anyone interested in transportation issues (Transit, Airports, Streets & Roads, Amtrak), Community Development, Energy, Housing, Public Safety, Schools, or Water infrastructure, StimulusWatch provides an opportunity to better understand the challenges facing those fields. Whether you're for or against the federal stimulus package, that opportunity shouldn't be missed.


(Photo from Flickr users TheeErin and andyandrew. The original full-sized versions can be viewed by clicking the photos.)

Energie Tales

Like Fairie Tales, only a bit less connected to reality!

Case in point: Discovery News, today, brings us this report on a competition between several teams of researchers to find a way to turn car exhaust into an energy source. Sigh. Where will it end?

It may well be that recycled car exhaust winds up being a genuinely useful source of energy. I won't dispute that (nor do I have any sort of scientific background to back up such a dispute if I were to try). But doesn't it seem like the things that "researchers" are trying to cull fuel from keep getting more and more...far-fetched? Every time you turn around, there's another story about another mundane, thoughtless bit of waste from our society's daily workings that just may be the source of energy to rescue us from oil dependency! It's getting to be a bit hard to believe any of it.

What's next? A plan to collect dead skin cells from under the blades of used razors to create a biomass engine for powering Las Vegas? Or perhaps an ingenious discovery that shed cat hair is ten times more efficient, when burned, than gasoline if mixed with a teaspoon of the sludgy goop left in the drain-catch after you wash the dishes?

I can see it now: millions of people toss out their dishwashing machines (which will then be melted down to be used as another recycled fuel source involving dead fish and broken Tickle-Me Elmos), and buying cats. The cacophony of feline mating calls fills wealthy enclaves as neighbors cross-breed their pets in an effort to get enough kitty-biomass to get the Beamer to work and back. Driving to the grocery store for more cat food, you see a man hunched over a large, frantic Tabby, combing frantically as the cat claws the air; "Come ON, Patches! Goddamnit, I need to get to WORK!"

Or maybe ethanol will save us all. Oh, excuse me while I go fix my eyes. I just rolled them so hard that they got stuck that way...


Edit: I realized just after posting this that it contrasts pretty sharply with this post back in June. Oh well...chalk one up for fatigue.

Electri-City

From the look of things, the zero carbon high tech eco-city of 2030 might not really look that different from the boring old present of 2008. Innovative minds are coming up with new ways of harvesting power from just about everything, reducing the need for crazy-looking turbine towers or solar-paneled skylines. What happens if everything becomes its own source of energy? Obviously, this seems like a Green pipe dream, but speculate for a moment. What might humanity do with a global surplus of power?

In the meantime, we can marvel at the creative thinking below and wonder if, one day soon, our curtains might be powering our laptops and televisions.

So where might we be getting our electricity from in the near future?

Our toilets? (Architecture.mnp)

Our walls? (Jetson Green)

Our clothes? (MIT News)

Our curtains? (Electricpig)

Our sidewalks? (core77)

What are some common, overlooked aspects of the urban environment that might be able to generate usable energy if harnessed in a new way? With suburbs densifying and evolving and becoming more self-sufficient nodes in polycentric megacities, the potential seems endless. So many people, so many opportunities for a volt or two.

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

New York, Paris, London...Vegas?

Fast-forward a bit. Let's say that it's 2050, since that seems to be a popular year for speculation these days. You're living in a stylish downtown penthouse a few blocks from a gleaming transit station servicing three different high-speed lines. You work in an office building as a Chief Innovation Officer -- not a light title to carry, by any means -- for a major technology firm. One day after work, you take a train a few miles west of the bustling commercial hub where you work to a rapidly-gentrifying neighborhood to meet a friend at a sunny sidewalk cafe on a dense street filled with shops and new condos. You are living the American Dream, with a beautiful home and a fantastic job in the heart of a dynamic urban center with its finger pressed firmly against the pulse of globalized culture. You are a proud resident of one of the world's Great Cities, capital letters required.

Now, imagine that that city is Las Vegas.

It sounds like science-fiction, no? But, in a recent post written from the American Planners Association convention in Sin City, California Planning & Development Report contributor Bill Fulton argues that Vegas is on the track to claiming a spot on the shortlist of the most exciting urban places on our already highly-urbanized planet. While your initial reaction may be something along the lines of "Say whaaaaat?" (mine certainly was), there is something very refreshing -- even inspiring -- about this idea.

Fulton's argument, in a nutshell: "Vegas is a not-too-subtle reminder to planners about how great cities are really created: You stuff vast amounts of money into a tiny space for decade after decade until the mixture of wealth, commerce, entertainment, and culture becomes so combustible that it finally explodes. Paris, London, Tokyo, San Francisco, Chicago, New York – all were built on this model."

There are so many ways to poke holes in this idea, which is oversimplified almost to a fault, and in fact this post was intended to do just that. But soon after the writing began, I realized that Fulton's speculated future for Las Vegas was far more interesting (not to mention uplifting) than much of urbanism discussion today. Contrast the idea of Vegas, one of the least sustainable cities in the country, as changing its tune and reinventing itself with the Die-or-Be-Drowned harping of James Howard Kunstler, a pundit whose bullheaded pessimism and truly shocking lack of imagination have just about made him a caricature of himself. Mr. Kunstler's tireless drumbeat: "Our gigantic metroplex cities will prove to be inconsistent with the energy diet of our future. I think our smaller cities and towns will be reactivated. We are going to be a far less affluent society."

Perhaps what's missing from the debate over how cities will deal with climate change is something as simple and extraordinarily difficult as optimism. After all, the combination of wealth, commerce, entertainment, and culture is, when you boil it down, mostly what accounts for the rises of cities like New York, Paris, London, and Tokyo. But there was more to it than just a healthy skeleton; there was meat on them bones, so to speak. These Great Cities were places that generated potential as much as they generated wealth. Many millions of people moved to these cities not on the promise of a better future, but on the hope thereof.

The city of Indianapolis is easily one of the least-interesting large cities in America, if not the world. But there is a pride of place there nonetheless, and on several occasions I have read or heard discussions about how to make Indiana's capital a "world-class city." What if talking the talk is an effective way to learn how to walk the walk? The verdict is still out on Indy, but look a little to the west for an idea of what could be. After all, a good deal of Chicago's greatness came from early residents, who were famous for their ability to bluster and boast, claiming greatness long before it was actually achieved (which, incidentally, earned Chicago its most famous nickname: The Windy City). These boosters and bright thinkers pushed and shoved their city into greatness, and without them Chicago would likely be a very different place today.

So who says that Vegas can't become, as Fulton suggests "the next New York?" While it would seem like a miracle to most of us living today, stranger things have certainly happened, and in less time. Thomas Friedman wrote in a recent column for the NY Times that "[Americans] want to do nation-building. They really do. But they want to do nation-building in America...They want our country to matter again. They want it to be about building wealth and dignity — big profits and big purposes. When we just do one, we are less than the sum of our parts. When we do both...no one can touch us."

There is a palpable desire in this country for very real and serious change (notably reflected in the presidential candidates' impassioned adoption of that very term in the current election season). Who are we to look to to shape how we think about the future? People like Fulton...or people like Kunstler?

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


Links:
APA Conference: Love It Or Hate It, Vegas Is A Great City In The Making (CDPR)

Suburbia's End? (Richard Florida)

Who Will Tell the People? (NY Times)

Urbanffffinds 022

Architectural Revision

The term "revision" means, literally, to "see again." And in a recent article for the Toronto Star, Christopher Hume inadvertently showed how revision is sorely missing from the urban design dialog today.

Early in the article, which discusses the gentrification of Toronto's Liberty Village neighborhood: "Speaking of parks, there is virtually no green space anywhere here; perhaps the city should finally grapple with the issue of Lamport Stadium, which is so rarely used it could easily be demolished to make way for a park." And then, shortly thereafter: "recycling...old structures ensures a level of integrity and sustainability vital in an age of global warming."

So what gives, Mr. Hume? Why no love for Lamport Stadium.? Surely, if Vienna can figure out how to turn gasometers into a dazzling residential complex, Toronto can pull off the conversion of a stadium into a park without wasting all of that energy by tearing down the existing structure, no? As the urban affairs critic of the largest newspaper in one of the world's few truly global metropoli, Hume is, by default, a major voice in the current discussion on how cities should evolve. It is telling that he would so quickly dismiss a stadium that would probably be relatively simple to convert to public green space.

Culturally, many of us still think of old buildings as things that should be demolished to make way for that which is new, shiny, and more immediately perceived to be "green." But while converting stolid brick warehouses into luxury condo complexes is all well and good, architectural revision is a field with no horizon. Every underused or unattractive building can be rethought and retrofitted to become something that better serves the needs of a surrounding community. It just takes some spitshine and imagination.

How could Lamport Stadium be revised, as a piece of architecture? While an actual Torontonian would probably have the best answer, let's give it a shot. First off, as can be see in the above image, there is very little physical structure to the stadium. The bulk of the site (the playing field) is at-grade, or at least near it. The elimination of any gates or perimeter walls and the conversion of the obscenely large surface parking lot on the southeastern end of the site would create a sizable, T-shaped open green area that could be made quite lovely by a good landscape architect. The wings of green space that currently flank the stadium could be converted to community playing fields with shaded seating areas under the bleacher structures.

The bleachers themsevles provide the best opportunity for out-of-the-box thinking. How could large, clunky concrete structures be revised to serve optimally as part of a public park? While there are many possibilities, the first that comes to mind is: terraced community gardens. With the removal of most or all of the seating and the addition of some permanent soil beds, the porous concrete structures would be the perfect support system for a vertical farm, to be tended by Liberty Village neighbors.

Check out the picture of Lamport Stadium to the right. Cover the steeply-sloped back sides of the bleachers with solar panels or photovoltaics, retrofit what are assumedly locker rooms in the podium under the arched structure, and you've got a zero-energy community center for cold or rainy days. Heck, once you get going, this is more fun than it is challenging.

Revising and rethinking our buildings is a critical step that needs to be taken for us to move closer toward a truly sustainable form of urbanism. What are some strange buildings that could be revised to better serve your city's needs?

(Photos from Google Maps and Flickr user antifuse. The original full-color versions can be viewed by clicking the photos.)


Links:
Liberty Village highlights poor planning (Toronto Star)

Creative Recyling: Gasometer City (Treehugger)

Mixed-Use Infrastructure

Cities are extremely complex organisms made up of hundreds of independent and interdependent systems. The most basic and oft-overlooked of these systems are some of the most vital. Sewers, which remove waste and excess water, keep our streets clean and dry. They do this out of sight. Canals, rivers, bridges, and roadways allow for the transportation of goods and people within densely populated urban centers. We take them for granted. We have many large facilities for cleaning our water, recycling our trash, and producing our energy, and we hate it when we have to look at them. We so often forget to appreciate the importance of having a strong network of well-maintained public and green spaces. We get so involved in our own social systems that we forget that the larger framework of the city is there, making it all possible. We forget that cities themselves are living things, and that, ours are just tiny parts of a huge, interconnected process -- of creation, of destruction, of life.

What if more of the overlooked nerves and veins could be brought out into the open, or highlighted in some way? What if we had to interact with filtration systems and electric grids in a more direct way? What if we had to live on and in our bridges and tunnels instead of just passing over and through them. What might our cities look like if none of the processes that supported its existence went overlooked? How could we create an urban environment that helped citizens to better understand how their city works, and how they work within that system?

Bridges like the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy, and the Chateau de Chenonceaux in France are evidence of the fact that bridges can be made into livable, functioning parts of the city. But what of the tunnels? In a twist of radical genius, a firm in Amsterdam recently proposed that the Dutch capital drain its canals and build an entire subcity of public, commercial, and parking (which, hopefully, could later be converted to other uses) under the canal system before re-filling the canals with water. No traffic topside would need to be disturbed, and a huge amount of space would be created, seemingly from scratch. There could be subterranean cafes dappled in light dancing through a glass ceiling open to the canal water overhead, movie theaters buried beneath bustling public plazas, perhaps even underground extensions of the city's many wonderful museums. No need for Renzo or Zaha; just dig down.

If these tunnels were to be dug, and another physical layer added to the fabric of Amsterdam, it would change the way that the canals were experienced by the public. Topside, they would remain serene, almost pastoral. But there would be the new knowledge that, once again, these canals were serving as a major thoroughfare, moving thousands of people through the city. Perhaps a public elevator system could be designed to access the tunnels using canal water in a hydraulic system, even more tightly tying the tunnels, the people, and the waterways together.

Speaking of water, Pruned recently took a detailed look at the work of Kevin Robert Perry, whose project on NE Siskiyou Street in Portland, Oregon, uses a system of landscaped "cells" reclaimed from parking space alongside the road. Water flows downhill into the landscaped areas, which use a series of checkdams to distribute water to the cells and prevent overflow, retaining and cleaning stormwater runoff on-site. While Perry's award-winning system only serves a small corner of the city, imagine the possibilities presented by a city-wide system. Much as Frederick Law Olmsted connected his parks with broad greenways, all of a city's streets could be lined with water retention gardens, with a hierarchical system designed to send all overflow, eventually, to parks specifically re-configured to collect and clean runoff. Think of Urbanlab's winning City of the Future entry, taken even further.

And what of our parks? While we take them for granted as part of the city's infrastructure, we certainly don't forget that parks exist like we sometimes forget about water treatment facilities. But couldn't parks be more than just gathering places? Couldn't -- and shouldn't -- they also be used as teaching tools? These public spaces provide a unique opportunity for showing urbanites how they impact their surroundings, and how their city works. In addition to cleaning wastewater and runoff, what other roles could re-imagined parks serve?

A contest was announced on February 15th by the Design Trust for Public Space and the Grand Army Plaza Coalition to generate ideas as to how Brooklyn's severely underused Grand Army Plaza, at the northern entrance to Prospect Park (which many, this blogger included, consider to be Olmsted's greatest park) could be redesigned as a more lively, energetic public space. The plaza, which sits atop a subway station, provides an excellent platform for any designer interested in creating a space that more clearly and fluidly emphasizes and integrates the transit system with the public space at street level. How do the public (park) and semi-public (subway station) interact, and how can design make this not only more enjoyable, but more informative?

Infrastructure could be an intriguing new frontier for the mixed-use movement. While inhabitable bridges seem long-overdue, there must be a thousand different ways of re-thinking infrastructure. Any ideas?

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


Links:
Gallery of Bridges in ArchitectureWeek (Civic Nature)

Amsterdam Subcity (BLDGBLOG)

Hyperlocalizing Hydrology in the Post-Industrial Urban Landscape (Pruned)

Growing Water (Urbanlab)

Reinventing Grand Army Plaza (Design Trust for Public Space)

WEEKEND READING: January 12-18, 2008

Stellar, stellar week, folks. I can't overemphasize the awesomeness of the links below. Do yourself a favor and set aside an hour or two this weekend for some solid online reading.

ITEM ONE: Airoots weighs in on The "S-word" -- Slums -- and, in particular, the clearance thereof. (For more on the subject, check out this Globe and Mail article).

ITEM TWO: Mike Lydon writes a stirring post on Interchange about the importance of teaching urban planning in public schools.

ITEM THREE: In the future, buildings will talk to each other. (Image credit)

ITEM FOUR: Majora Carter is a sustainable urbanism ninja.

ITEM FIVE: New City Magazine tracks the migration of hipsters in Chicago (focusing heavily on Where's new center of operations, Wicker Park).

ITEM SIX: You've heard of designing a better mousetrap? How about designing a better White House?

ITEM SEVEN: Springwise takes a look at a potentially revolutionary new technology that could make entire neighborhoods self-sustaining.

And we'll leave it at that. Adios, compadres.

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