Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
The time is now to invest in walkable neighborhoods accessed by mass transit with opportunities for cultural coming together and societal participation, instead of environmentally-destructive sprawl, cultural intolerance, societal alienation, and personal anonymity.
What about energy conservation, as well as cogeneration, wind power and cheaper, more–efficient forms of renewable energy? Physicist Amory Lovins from the Rocky Mountain Institute argues that shifting investment of tens of billions of dollars from nuclear into renewable energy would reduce far more carbon per dollar.
Anaheim’s conflicted planning is ruining the opportunity to create a dense urban village, high-speed-rail-friendly for tourists, sports fans, and 25,000 new residents.
Helicopter photos by Christoph Gielen reveal the beautifully-designed patterns and shapes of our auto-dependent homes on the range, walking not preferred, neighbors as yet uncontacted, wildlife unwelcome, sustainable future in question.
One method to rescue this unsustainable, fossil-fuel-addicted, disease-inducing polluted mega-metropolis from its sterile streetscape of cars, exhaust, and non-descript sidewalk-life, is to provide alternative transportation that cuts out the need for parking and forces people to walk.
Unsustainable urban sprawl continues to spread through the world responding to massive population growth and poor planning practices, as people clamor to escape the crowded, contaminated, crime-ridden urban miasma like Cairo.
Called Astana, it is the world’s latest example of a rare but persistent type, the capital built from zero. It is in a line that includes St Petersburg, Washington DC, Canberra, Ankara and Brasilia and like them it provokes a question: can a city, in all its teeming complexity, really be planned? Or does the attempt lead only to a synthetic simulacrum, a kind-of city that is not quite the real thing?