Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
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.
Destroyed in a dramatic and highly-publicized implosion, the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex has become a widespread symbol of failure among architects, politicians and policy makers. A 2012 documentary unveiled the many witting and unwitting villains, including urban poverty, public policy enforced racial segregation, and urban disinvestment in favor of the White Suburban Dream.
Tiny Houses, although lauded as a green way forward in a world covered in wasteful McMansions and debt enslaving rent payments, must overcome health, safety, and building standard regulations that still consider this form of housing either illegal or difficult to approve. Alyse Nelson charts a way through the red tape.
Welcome to the Anthropocene age, where humans have transmogrified the planet, its oceans and atmosphere, caused mass extinctions and wholesale contamination that will remain for millennia. Beyond the politicians and scientists, the way forward remains in the hands of writers, artists, and designers taking inspiration from wild earth in a movement called Geo-Fauvism.