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[citygirl]

Any way to make this part of the General Assembly's agenda this year?  Instead of giving away tax credits for developers to build more soon to be dead malls and subdivisions?  


Can We Uninvent Suburbia?

By Andrew C. Revkin

There’s a fine story in our Sunday Styles section today by Alex Williams examining the environmental costs of suburban life, which evolved around the highway system, cheap oil, and the automobile and now typically consumes several times more energy per person (and thus fossil fuels) than urban living. There’s all that driving. There are the chugging mowers and fertilizers and pesticides used to keep all those lawns lovely. Lighting, heating and cooling those ballooning homes consumes vast amounts of energy compared to a city apartment — or a house half a century ago.

“The End of Suburbia,” an award-winning 2006 documentary, provides a fascinating overview of how the sprawled lifestyle evolved, the hidden — and not so hidden — costs, and what lies ahead. A trailer is on YouTube:

The Sustainable Home Blog recently described just how much the American home has changed:

    In 1946, when the American post war housing boom started, the average house was 1,100 square feet and housed 5 people. Fifty years latter, in 1996 the average house would grow to 2,200 square feet and house 2.6 people and by 2007, fueled by easy credit, the average American home would would become the equivalent of a Hummer, “weighing in” at super-sized 2,400 square feet.

I’ll be exploring efforts to “uninvent” suburbia in industrialized countries — and how to avoid having it be the new norm around cities in fast-growing developing countries. Experiments in the United States include turning old malls into walkable villages with housing, small retail businesses, and the like — somewhat like small-scale, less-grand variants of Masdar — the $22 billion car-free, solar-powered city for which ground was broken on Saturday next to the Abu Dhabi international airport.

Ellen Dunham-Jones, the director of the architecture program at Georgia Tech, calls the process “retrofilling.” A paper on this concept is here.

There’s plenty of fodder out there for such efforts. There’s a wonderful clickable map of “dead malls” online. Check out a few in your neighborhood.

Of course, the other goal of many designers, planners, and activists seeking to lighten humans’ environmental impact, put us back on our feet in walkable places, and generally invigorate communities is simply reviving cities and making them function better. (See a couple of my recent posts on mobility in cities here and here.

Alex Steffen, the founder of Worldchanging.com, a popular Web site and book on sustainability, recently posted an essay on this that is well worth reading, called “My Other Car is a Bright Green City.”

[frymasterspeck]

Just came across this conference in Bozeman. Urbanism in Montana... Who knew?