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.
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.
Urban farmers and gardeners around the world transform abandoned lots into edible landscapes, improving human and ecological health as well as creating beautiful places. Richard Ingersoll surveys a myriad of concepts and projects from around Europe and the United States.
A visionary eco-city in the Arizona desert, Arcosanti is an urban laboratory created by Paolo Soleri. Based on the concept of Arcology, or ecological architecture, it presents a compact, sustainable, energy-efficient urban form that confronts environmental destruction, economic collapse, and social dislocation.
Bosco Verticale or Vertical Forest, the first phase of BioMilano, a re-envisioning of Milan, Italy, with an eye toward ecological urbanism, integrating tree and skyscraper, city and wild.
Southern California’s new Sustainable Communities Strategy plan posits that as a region, we have to grow up, not out. That doesn’t mean Hong Kong skyscrapers, but more apartments near light-rail stations and vibrant mixed-use areas like the ones in downtown Pasadena.
Detroit must overcome its landscape sprawl and its prime benefactor: the automobile, to revive the economy and become an environmentally sustainable 21st Century city.