An Array of Utopian Flowers
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The Literary Labyrinth of Stephen T. Vessels
Posted on November 27, 2022 | No Comments - Indigenous Voices from the Northeast: Past, Present and Future
Posted on November 26, 2022 | 1 Comment - Microplastics Are Everywhere: What’s The Risk?
Posted on November 22, 2022 | No Comments - Solving the Climate Crisis Through Global Soil Health with Didi Pershouse
Posted on November 20, 2022 | No Comments - Visionary Art of Lakota Sundance Chief Marvin Swallow
Posted on November 14, 2022 | 2 Comments
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WilderUtopia in 102 Languages
‘Medicine Walk’ Featured in SBLitJo
Santa Barbara Literary Journal released ‘Bellatrix: Volume 3’ in June 2019, which among adventurous fiction, poetry, essays, and lyrics, features an excerpt of Jack Eidt’s psychic-animism fiction, Medicine Walk. Buy the book!
suburban sprawl Archive
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Centennial Project: Suburbs Sprawl, Health & Environment Suffers
Posted on November 26, 2018 | No CommentsTejon 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 and the Notion of a Cosmic Utopia
Posted on February 21, 2018 | No CommentsIannis 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. -
Sprawl vs. Open Space: “Rio Santiago” Again Threatens Orange
Posted on May 13, 2014 | 1 CommentJack Eidt writes on the dangers of proposing mixed use development far from urban amenities and alternative transportation. The real estate industry in Orange County, California and beyond, has consistently violated engineering and planning wisdom by building in floodplains, paving over precious open space land and losing opportunities to preserve wildlife habitat and recreation opportunities amid the suburban sprawl at the edge of the wilderness. -
Detroit Future: Landscape Urbanism, Antidote to Industrial Blight
Posted on August 17, 2013 | 4 CommentsFor the last 40 years, Detroiters have fled the once-majestic downtown core for the bucolic image of sprawling suburbia. Now an urban revival in the name of "Detroit Future City," complete with forests, parks, farms and waterways, is planned to overcome the financial mismanagement and industrial blight that have plagued the city for far too long. -
Wildlife Crossings: Animals Survive with Bridges and Tunnels
Posted on May 19, 2013 | 6 CommentsProviding crossing infrastructure at key points along transportation corridors is known to improve safety, reconnect habitats and restore wildlife movement. Throughout Europe, Asia, Australia and North American, wildlife crossing structures have been implemented with demonstrable success. -
Arcosanti: Paolo Soleri’s Visionary Eco-City Prototype in Arizona
Posted on January 18, 2013 | 6 CommentsA 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. -
BioMilano: Italian Eco-Vision Grows 26-Storey Vertical Forest
Posted on January 15, 2013 | 2 CommentsBosco 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. -
Extreme Water: Tapping the California Desert to Feed Growth Addiction?
Posted on May 19, 2012 | 4 CommentsCadiz Inc.'s potentially lucrative groundwater mining proposal for the Mojave Desert intends to water lawns and pools for suburban Southern California at the expense of taxpayers and ultimately the desert ecosystem. The company could realize $1 billion to $2 billion in revenue over the plan's 50-year life. Opponents say public resources are being used for private profit. -
Santa Ana Mountains: Vestige of Wild Coastal Southern California
Posted on May 5, 2012 | No CommentsFollowing the footsteps of Willis E. Pequegnat, a biologist from the 1930s who explored the wild Santa Ana Mountains in Orange, Riverside, and San Diego Counties, this video field journal logs the wonders and threats to this thriving resource. -
Hello Urbanism: Southern California Sprawl Grows Up
Posted on April 18, 2012 | 3 CommentsSouthern 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’s Sprawling Legacy: How to Overcome the Automobile?
Posted on March 18, 2012 | 7 CommentsDetroit must overcome its landscape sprawl and its prime benefactor: the automobile, to revive the economy and become an environmentally sustainable 21st Century city. -
Smart Growth: San Diego’s Approach to Sustainable Communities
Posted on March 10, 2012 | 4 CommentsWith "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. -
San Diego: Sprawling Under Sunshine and the City of Villages
Posted on February 9, 2012 | 1 CommentSan 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. -
Newhall Ranch: Feds OK Massive Flood Plain Development
Posted on August 10, 2011 | 1 CommentThe US Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers resolved their differences and advanced one of the largest sprawling developments ever contemplated in California on 12,000 acres along the Santa Clara River in northwest Los Angeles County. Newhall Ranch would create a city for 60,000 on a six-mile stretch of the wild, open, agricultural, free-flowing river flood plain. -
Urban Humanity Revival: Walkable Neighborhoods and Mass Transit
Posted on April 25, 2011 | No CommentsThe 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. -
Suburban Sprawl: Serpentine Sameness from the Skies
Posted on November 18, 2010 | 3 CommentsHelicopter 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. -
Megacities Rise from the Egyptian Desert
Posted on August 31, 2010 | No CommentsUnsustainable 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.
