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Rail-Volution conference: Building Livable Communities with Transit
Rail-Volution
The organization has a mission to:
Create a national movement to develop livable communities with transit. Livable communities are those that are healthy, economically vibrant, socially equitable, and environmentally sustainable.
Contributor EDA writes:
Nov 5-8, 2006 was the annual Rail-Volution conference. This year it was held in Chicago. They had a session on Peak Oil. [At the conference papers page], scroll down to: “Oil or Not — Are We in a Transportation Energy Crisis? “
In addition, there are good presentations on Transit-Oriented Development, bicycles, car sharing, etc. – all of which are needed pieces of the puzzle to deal with peak oil.
(Nov-Dec 2006)
UPDATE: Just added this entry.
Spaced out: The collective costs of suburban sprawl
Matt Fleischer-Black, Village Voice
…Why have Americans climbed over hills and fanned through valleys to move into new exurbs, even as traditional cities have revived?
The plainest reason, Anthony Flint writes in This Land: The Battle Over Sprawl and the Future of America, his crisp new dissection of how suburban development steamrollered its foes, is that Americans want roomy and affordable houses located in safe places near edge-city jobs. The heart of Flint’s book, though, is his tracing of the repercussions of this shift. His report: Moving to the fresh air, opening the door, and shooing out the kids-the American dream-has devolved into an unhealthy, financially unsustainable, and ecologically destructive habit. Glimpsed through Flint’s eyes, suburban development looks unstoppable, too bound up with the American pursuit of material comfort. The suburban split-level has become an addictive drug, offering a fantasy of escape. But after a blissful honeymoon, a new development rises next door, and traffic grows constipated. Local taxes rise to pay for new pipes and schools and wider roads. Craving cash, the town welcomes big-box stores and office parks. The physical toll keeps growing; water bans and power brownouts increase.
Flint zeroes in on suburbia’s layout, which wastes fuel, land and water.Developers scatter the key parts of life, creating a jumble of thrown-together anyplaces where (as Tom Wolfe noted) you can’t tell where towns start and end until the 7-Elevens and Home Depots repeat. Flint, who created a development beat for The Boston Globe, observes that the suburban landscape dictates the routine of tens of millions of people, yet it seems to have been built by stoners: “The guiding principle for arranging the physical environment isn’t feng shui. It’s nonsequitur.” And now suburbanites winding trips between work, school, store, and home have grown longer than ever. They compensate by recovering in big garage-Mahal homes that require lots of fuel to heat and cool.
(15 Dec 2006)
Not So Wonderful
Jim Kunstler, Clusterfuck Nation
It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra’s 1946 Christmas card to America, is full of strange and bitter lessons about who we were and who we have become. It also illustrates the perversity of history — the fact that things sometimes end up the opposite of the way we expect.
The movie concerns the life and career of one George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) and his neighbors in the prototypical main street town of Bedford Falls. The story’s arc runs roughly from about 1910 to the 1946 “present.”
… It’s a splendid, heartwarming movie in many ways (and I am not being facetious). It was released a year after the awful ordeal of World War Two ended — which itself had followed the decade-long tribulation of the Great Depression. America was weary but victorious. …The Jimmy Stewart portrayal of George Bailey was supposed to embody all the home front virtues in our national character that made victory possible.
Here’s the weird part though. The main business of Bailey Building and Loan was financing the first new suburban subdivisions of the automobile age. In one of the movie’s major set pieces, George Bailey opens Bailey Park, a tract of car-dependent cookie-cutter bungalows, and turns over the keys to the first house to the Italian immigrant Martini family. Had the story continued beyond 1946 into, say, the 1980s, (with George Bailey now a doddering Florida golfer), we would have seen the American landscape ravaged by suburban development, and the main street towns like Bedford Falls gutted and left for dead. That was the perverse outcome of George Bailey’s good intentions.
(18 Dec 2006)
The way we will live
Lucy Alexander, The Times (UK)
Houses of the future will be on stilts and have removable walls
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The Government’s pledge to carbon neutralise every new British home by 2016 may sound ambitious now, but will appear pretty basic to the homeowners of the future, for whom zero carbon living will be a given. By 2080, the avant-garde may be living in houses on stilts (far right) with removable walls, kept cool by dirty bathwater, according to a new study by Arup Associates and Zurich Insurance.
In a separate report announced this week, the first steps on the path to sustainable housing were outlined by Ruth Kelly, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. By 2050, according to Ms Kelly, a third of the total housing stock will be less than 44 years old. And everything post-2016 will, of course, be zero carbon, which means producing enough clean energy to cover any power taken from traditional sources. Plans for increasing the eco-friendliness of the existing housing stock will follow next year.
(15 Dec 2006)
Related: Zurich reveals a new house design for the future:
Zurich Insurance is proud to announce the launch of a new study, ‘House of the Future’, in association with award winning architectural practice, Arup Associates. The study investigates the implications of environment, social and energy-source changes on future house design. The study has been produced by Zurich to help the company better understand the future needs of homeowners and business.
