Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Tejon Ranch Centennial Specific Plan (or Centennial) is a massive planned city in a unique, rare, fire-prone wilderness of grasslands and mountains, a residential and commercial development in LA County. Nick Jensen from the California Native Plant Society, and Jack Eidt from Wild Heritage Planners and SoCal 350, discuss the dangers to urban sustainability, fiscal health of LA County and the impacts on wild and endangered plants and animals with host Jessica Aldridge.
As the Western U.S. continues with massive wind-driven, high-intensity wildfires that often turn deadly, Naomi Pitcairn recommends retrofitting homes on the Wildland Urban Interface for fire-resistant resiliency. This is Part I of a three-part series.
Iannis Xenakis, the Greek-French experimental composer and protege designer for the famous architect Le Corbusier, advanced theories of the vertical “Cosmic” city as the only sustainable way forward. Here, he wrote this essay in 1966, decrying decentralization (read: suburban sprawl) in favor of building up, up, up…5 million inhabitants to be housed in a single megastructure, a hyperbolic paraboloid of more than 3,000 meters high and 50 meters wide.
Alan Durning lays out how many cities have succeeded in building affordable housing with some lessons from unexpected places. Yet constrained housing markets come about from economics, environment, and geography, and sprawl remains a scourge that affordable cities have allowed. No silver bullet here, but ideas…
Urban sustainability depends upon reducing energy from automobile usage and maximizing transportation efficiency through public trains, streetcars, electric buses, and people movers. The companies developing autonomous cars could not care less: they offer on-demand private transport for the masses, with specific intent to move people back to cars.
Can re-purposed shipping containers become the next inexpensive, quick to construct, green building solution for affordable housing? Danish “starchitect” Bjarke Ingels, as well as a recent Orange County, California, project, assert yes to all of the above, but there are limitations.
Facing a major Coastal Commission decision, Newport Banning Ranch developers should adopt staff’s recommendation that all environmentally sensitive habitat should be protected and could be integrated in a vision for a small-scale visitor-serving development through Regenerative Design.