Sep 6, 08
More Parking! Chicago Discovers Their Curbsides are Lined with Gold
San Francisco may have the most technologically nifty new parking system in the U.S., but Chicago wins big points for the mercenary genius of their approach: the city expects to raise over a billion dollars by auctioning a 50-year...
Concrete Dragon, a Book Review
We've written a lot about China and the future of the planet. If you want to better understand the role China will play in the future, you might want to start with The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What...
A Prophetic Approach to Energy Efficiency
by Eric de Place Taking a three-day weekend for the planet. From the Beehive State, a gratifying way to reduce energy use (and carbon emissions): taking Fridays off. And it's mandatory. In part to deal with rising gas prices, Utah's republican...
European Union Poised to Increase Recycling
The European Union is currently debating waste management targets that could significantly increase recycling rates throughout Europe. Legislators on the European Parliament's Environment Committee overwhelmingly supported reforms earlier this year that would halt the steady rise in the region's...
The Geography of America's Carbon Footprint
When it comes to decreasing your carbon footprint, it may be better to change your location than to trade in your SUV. Although the more than two-thirds of Americans living in metro areas account for most of the greenhouse gas...
BIMstorm: Honing Bureaucracy, Giving Urbanism an Edge
by Justus Stewart As the recent discussions in the blogosphere attest – Andrew Rivken and Joseph Fromm in two prominent examples – we are at an interesting hurdle for climate action. Post-tipping point, we are in the exciting phase...
Smart grid, meet the product-service model
by Joy Green What happens when disruptive ideas combine? We’ve heard a lot about distributed energy generation and smart grids recently – cities could act as distributed power plants, channeling energy from hundreds of thousands, even millions of individual rooftops...
TheCityFix
Over half the world’s population now lives in cities, with more and more people moving to them every day. Urbanization is not a new issue – a search on Worldchanging for “transportation” in the “cities” topic area alone returns 277...
The Option of Urbanism
I'm in Barcelona, where I delivered a talk on sustainability and the future for the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona's remarkable NOW series, and where Erica and I have stayed on for a working vacation. Barcelona, people here will...
Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle
Our cities could be seen as machines for transforming water, biomass and minerals into people and pollution. If we're serious about building a bright green future, we need to redesign those machines, keeping the people, but bringing the mechanism into...
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
by Robert D. Putnam, (Simon & Schuster, 2000) If we want to learn to redefine our lives by the stuff we use, rather than the stuff we own, we need to search out the reasons why people don't share more...
City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village
by David Sucher (City Comforts Press, 2003) When we find ourselves in love with a particular neighborhood or city, the reasons sometimes escape articulation. Itï¿œs not necessarily about one feature, itï¿œs about the feeling we have when weï¿œre there. David...
Big & Green: Toward Sustainable Architecture in the 21st Century
ed. by David Gissen (Princeton Architectural Press, 2002) The best single-volume guide to the movement to design large buildings which protect the planet while improving their communities is this architectural showcase book. Big & Green shows us in beautiful illustrations...
Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination
by Lance Berelowitz (Douglas & McIntyre, 2005) Lance Berelowitz performs what he calls an act of ￜurban archaeologyￜ as he traces Vancouverￜs history of growth and its innovative urban planning. Although he writes with great affection about his city and...
Alternative Urban Futures: Planning for Sustainable Development in Cities throughout the World
by Raquel Pinderhughes (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2004) Raquel Pinderhughes' Alternative Urban Futures explains what we know how to do now better than nearly any other book we've yet seen. In a little over 200 well-footnoted pages, Pinderhughes covers...
Books: Nabeel Hamdi's Small Change (End-of-Summer Reading)
(Recently, my family went up to the edge of the Canadian shield and took an enforced media diet. It was an incredibly rare luxury: to read, uninterrupted, by a northern lake. So now, just before the equinox, here's the...
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