Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The consequences of car parking include the atrophy of many inner-city communities; a crisis of affordable housing; environmental damages including but not limited to greenhouse gas emissions; and the continued incentivization of suburban sprawl.
A very typical response to my writing can be summarized as: “But… cities?!?” How are we going to fit cities into this future world? My feeling is that we can’t. Mostly.
So what do we actually know about climate mitigation in cities? In our new paper, published in Nature Climate Change, we take stock of all the city case studies currently available in the peer-reviewed literature.
We’re developing the idea that because permaculture’s lessons apply so well in creating dynamic, healthy physical landscapes, they can probably do the same for cultural and social landscapes.
A techno-shamanic quest to reconnect urban life to ecological reality.
The project of modernity to achieve human self-determination and freedom is a struggle against the limits imposed by nature.
A new study has estimated that collectively the world’s large cities, defined as those with at least 750,000 people, move 504 billion liters (133 billion gallons) of water a day a cumulative distance of some 27,000 kilometers.
The agendas that are set so solemnly for international (or global) food and hunger problems cannot be used at the sub-national or local administrative level, which must analyse its own problems and find practical solutions, All too often, catering sensibly to the food needs of urban populations is ignored by policy makers, while economic ‘development’ (more infrastructure, more financing, more consumption, more personal mobility at the cost of public transport) is welcomed. The provisioning of food and the planning for shortening and localising food supply chains is usually abandoned by public administrators to the ruthless methods of the market
The National Climate Assessment findings mean that public policies will be of little value that are solely based on either past business or operating models, past (or even existing) resource or energy prices, as well as so-called “100-year” flood models.
Cities worldwide are increasingly becoming agents in the fight to mitigate climate change, while simultaneously aiming for other goals, such as improved accessibility and clean air. Indeed, one team of researchers assert that the kind of multi-criteria assessment of social costs and benefits that they employed in their recent study is a useful complement to cost–benefit analysis of climate change mitigation measures.
This post is a follow-up to last week’s post about our dialogue about big cities and descent.
