Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
We survey different aspects of urban and regional sustainability having to do with real estate development, design and construction, environmental regulatory policy, and the creation of a visionary tomorrow, learning the lessons from history’s good, bad, and ugly.
We must view the fragility of the planet, the disaster of our resource addiction, the warming of the earth’s atmosphere as an immune response to our daily environmental mis-stepping, a call for a re-conceptualization of our cities. We must demand a retrofitting of our urban environments to live together more efficiently, giving credence to community, allowing space for the open wild in us and them.
Detroit must overcome its landscape sprawl and its prime benefactor: the automobile, to revive the economy and become an environmentally sustainable 21st Century city.
With “ambitious but achievable” transportation and land use proposals left off the table, California’s first climate protection mandated Sustainable Communities Strategy aimed high but did not quite achieve setting the San Diego region on a long-term course toward sustainability.
We must re-create cities greener and more sustainable from the ground up. The goal: compact living environments requiring less resources that maximize utilization of land, water and energy. Here are some suggestions.
Even Houston, the fossil-fuel-driven, no-zoning-free-market-build-here-there-everywhere-city has found its sustainable voice with the water-park-wildlife-habitat reclamation of Buffalo Bayou.
San Diego, a militarized metropolis with a deeply stratified economy, began as a series of villages amid canyons served by public transit, transformed into freeway-close suburban sprawl, but slowly reimagines the sustainable village model.
A pioneering green developer in Philadelphia plans the largest “Passive House” mixed-use energy-net-zero redevelopment along the banks of the Schuylkill River.