Protein® Feed | To Tackle Global Warming, California Takes Aim at Sprawl
Interesting short notice by Adam Stein about California's proposal to "pass legislation that would harmonize regional planning efforts with the state’s overarching goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The most ambitious anti-sprawl legislation in the country, the bill seeks to coordinate housing, transit, and commercial development to reduce the impact of growth on the environment."
Stein reviews this in relation to Robert Bruegmann's "Sprawl: A compact history," which he happens to be in the middle of reading. Some interesting thoughts here on whether or not sprawl can really be mandated away. Also, not mentioned directly, but I can't help but hear Jane Jacobs, too, warning about restrictive overplanning...
more fromproteinos.com
The end of suburban sprawl
Well, well ...an opinion piece in the Ottawa Citizen (republished across the CanWest newspaper empire, therefore also in Victoria's Times-Colonist), unsigned, that lays out the tenets of anti-sprawl and pro-urbanist thinking succinctly and favorably. (Except that while the title calls it "suburban sprawl," the author calls it "urban sprawl" in the first paragraph. Odd.)
Of interest for a Canadian perspective is that the article hints at the realities of infrastructure funding in Canada.
more fromwww.canada.com
The painful cost of booming growth | Seattle Times Newspaper (Local News)
"Puget Sound is a funnel. Anything that we do at the top end of the funnel comes out at the bottom end." Sometimes painful reading, this article looks at the effect of bad wastewater runoff management and its deleterious effect on the environment. "Barbie Doll" housing colonies are the worst offenders, not least because old bylaws & regulations haven't kept up (or up to date) with new developments in treatment and approach.
more fromseattletimes.nwsource.com
New Urbanists Point the Way Forward by Catesby Leigh, City Journal 18 April 2008
"The New Urbanism and suburban sprawl have something in common: they’re uncool. New Urbanism is uncool because it is basically traditional; modernism is still the thing in architecture, notes Andrés Duany, the most influential New Urbanist."
For some reason, City Journal is impossible to annotate (neither highlights and consequently "stickies" work), which is too bad. Some good ideas in this article, but I can't mark it up.
more fromwww.city-journal.org
Modern suburbia not just in America anymore, by Haya El Nasser - USATODAY.com
Fascinating article on how planned "new urbanist" American suburbs are being studied by international delegations (specifically China) for replication in those countries. Kind of scary.... (Blogged this, April 18/08)
more fromwww.usatoday.com
A Daily Dose of Architecture: AE2: Highway Noise Barrier
John Hill has an excellent entry on highway noise barriers, those typically uninspired, unattractive, fake brick walls that are supposed to address a particular problem of sprawl, "dispersed living patterns and the high-speed roads that allow access to them" (as he puts it). Mercifully, there are attractive alternatives, ...and alternate solutions: "...the best case for raising the bar on the design of these barriers is to make them part of a building; in other words bring the architecture to the road, don't use the barrier to separate the two." Brilliant!
more fromarchidose.blogspot.com
The Next Slum? by Christopher B. Leinberger - The Atlantic, March 2008 |
Found via Richard Florida's "Creative Class" blog, Leinberger's article builds in part on a story that was reported in The Charlotte Observer a while back. With foreclosures on the rise and houses being abandoned, the absence of any sort of on-site amenities acts like an accelerant toward slum-hood.
more fromwww.theatlantic.com
Radiant City :: A Documentary About Urban Sprawl
This seems kind of apropos in view of Victoria's development in the so-called Western Communities, called "Bear Mountain" (perhaps more appropriately, "bare mountain").
more fromwww.radiantcitymovie.com
This Land: Visual Pollution | The New York Times
Fascinating slide show narrated by Kevin Fry of Route 1 (which runs 2000 miles from Maine to Florida), and which is in too many places a godforsaken strip mall. Fry's argument is that these places, built for cars not people, alienate us from any kind of authentic sense of place, and in turn this alienates us from citizenship, which is (and must be) local and specific. Relates to this article: http://tinyurl.com/2hkf25 too. (Slide show link via pricetags)
more fromwww.nytimes.com
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