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17 May 09

Germany Imagines Suburbs Without Cars - NYTimes.com

Discussion of Freiburg suburb, Vauban, and its "car-free" environment:
QUOTE
Street parking, driveways and home garages are generally forbidden in this experimental new district on the outskirts of Freiburg, near the French and Swiss borders. Vauban’s streets are completely “car-free” — except the main thoroughfare, where the tram to downtown Freiburg runs, and a few streets on one edge of the community.
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www.nytimes.com/...12suburb.html - Preview

suburbia cars green_strategies vauban germany

  • In Germany, a country that is home to Mercedes-Benz and the autobahn, life in a car-reduced place like Vauban has its own unusual gestalt. The town is long and relatively narrow, so that the tram into Freiburg is an easy walk from every home. Stores, restaurants, banks and schools are more interspersed among homes than they are in a typical suburb. Most residents, like Ms. Walter, have carts that they haul behind bicycles for shopping trips or children’s play dates.
  • The original buildings have long since been torn down. The stylish row houses that replaced them are buildings of four or five stories, designed to reduce heat loss and maximize energy efficiency, and trimmed with exotic woods and elaborate balconies; free-standing homes are forbidden.
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NYT: No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in Innovative ‘Passive Houses’

  • And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses.
  • Ironically, however, when California inspectors were examining the Berkeley home to determine whether it met "green" building codes (it did), he could not get credit for the heat exchanger, a device that is still uncommon in the United States. "When you think about passive-house standards, you start looking at buildings in a different way," he said.
    • heat exchangers are relatively better known in Canada, though - I think...? - on 2008-12-29
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21 Nov 08

The Gospel of Green | CBC News: the fifth estate

CBC portal page for a program on Germany's shift to a green(er) infrastructure/ economy, w/ focus on Hermann Scheer, parliamentarian who helped make it happen.
QUOTE
Hermann Scheer is a German parliamentarian who has turned ideas into practical solutions. Because of the laws that bear his name, Germany is now a solar-paneled, windmill-building, job-producing green powerhouse of the industrialized world. Fifteen per cent of Germany's electricity now comes from renewable energy systems. Scheer predicts that, if his country continues on this course, that number could be 100 per cent by 2030.
UNQUOTE

www.cbc.ca/...the_gospel_of_green - Preview

cbc hermann_scheer environment economy green_strategies germany

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