Category:Land
Land is a broad category, including land use, soil, and urban planning. See Sustainability and Transportation
Contents
Audio
Shrinking Cities The economic downturn has further blighted and depopulated many already ailing urban areas. In response, some land use experts are pushing the idea of demolishing abandoned buildings -- and even whole neighborhoods -- as a way to revitalize these cities.
== Images/Visualization == (see also Place page)
You can identify poor neighborhoods from space.
Video
James Howard Kunstler (TEDtalk video) "Public spaces should be inspired centers of civic life -- the physical manifestation of the common good. Instead, he argues, what we have in America is a nation of places not worth caring about." note: political views and some profanity).
Robert Moses embodied many of the ideas that green design now rejects (see Majora Carter's TEDtalk on the Bronx).
End of Suburbia video excerpt see also website.
At TEDxPortofSpain, Mark Raymond encourages city governments to let go of their old notions of success and consider the balance of environment, economy, and society to design cities for social change. (video) 3/12
Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David R Montgomery (book trailer) professor of geomorphology, University of Washington discusses the problem of global soil degradation and soil erosion and why it is one of the most significant environmental crises that face our species and planet for the next 400 years to come. another talk.
Building Community with Greenspace. Yale students work together with many different urban New Haven neighborhoods to create green spaces, urban rehabilitation, safety and pride.
Detropia What makes the dreamscape of Detropia so powerful is the fact that it’s rooted in reality. Throughout the film (whose name is a mashup of “Detroit” and “dystopia”), the directors drop a succession of shocking facts: Every 20 minutes, another family moves out of Detroit. In 1930, Detroit was the fastest growing city in America; it is now the fastest shrinking. In the last 10 years, Michigan has lost 50 percent of all its manufacturing jobs. The geographic areas of Boston, San Francisco, and Manhattan can fit within the city limits of Detroit, yet the city itself has fewer people than Fort Worth, Texas.
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Cities outpace the ‘burbs for the first time in almost a century 7.12.
America has 40 million McMansions that no one wants
Kenneth T. Jackson Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States McH Stacks HT384.U5J33 1985
Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, & Jeff Speck. Suburban Nation: the Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. New York: North Point Press, 2000. McH Stacks HT384.U5 D83 2000.
Steven Erie, a professor of political science at UCSD is author of ‘Beyond Chinatown’ on water; short overview of LA and SF infrastructure.
A number of smart people have recently written about green cities (including Stewart Brand, see above, who says that slums are green). Now, we've got economist Edward Glaeser talking up skyscrapers in The Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier. David Owen made a similar case with Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability. Kunstler says" alot of this misunderstanding derived from David Owen's 2004 New Yorker article, "Green Manhattan," which declared that stacking people up in towers was the ultimate triumph of urban ecology. Owen is a very nice fellow, but this thesis was a crock."
Catherine Tumber's excellent new book, Small, Gritty, and Green: The Promise of America's Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World, finds potential in many busted and booming-again cities in the Northeast and Midwest. These places, she writes, are both big enough and small enough to manage a coming societal transition, in which people may have to live on constrained oil supplies and rely more on local networks for food and other goods. link. 11/11.
Island Press (go Slugs!) has a number of books on sustainability and urban planning. Global City Blues by Daniel Solomon " is a book about the making of cities and the buildings that compose them. It is about the conditions under which an architect engaged in those activities now works, how those conditions evolved and why they are changing. Another is Stewardship of the Built Environment: Sustainability, Preservation, and Reuse by Robert A. Young.
American Green book on lawns.
ReThinking a Lot, a fascinating-sounding book by MIT landscape architecture and urban design prof Eran Ben-Joseph. Ben-Joseph is obsessed with the odd role that parking and parking lots play in our urban landscapes, and ReThinking a Lot looks at the weird world of American parking, where the available non-residential parking spots cover a landmass the size of Puerto Rico, often sitting on prime real-estate in the middle of cities.
The downfall of urban freeways: The report, called “The Death and Life of Urban Highways” — a tribute to Jacobs’ groundbreaking 1961 urbanist manifesto, The Death and Life of Great American Cities — declares that “the urban highway is a failed experiment,” and describes cities that have traded in highways for parks, mixed-use developments, and all manner of urbanist bliss.
Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David R Montgomery (book trailer) professor of geomorphology, University of Washington discusses the problem of global soil degradation and soil erosion and why it is one of the most significant environmental crises that face our species and planet for the next 400 years to come. another talk.
Update on soil 8/12.
Automobiles
True Cost of Cars 5/30 $142 billion in obesity-related health care costs and lost wages due to illness. As much as $80 billion in health care costs and premature death caused by air pollution from traffic. A whopping $180 billion from traffic crashes - lost wages, health care costs, property damage, travel delay, legal costs, pain and suffering. These are some of the hidden costs of a car-centric society. The American Public Health Association, in a recent report, argues that these costs have been ignored for too long as decision-makers hash out transportation policies. Instead, transportation projects usually focus on construction costs, acquiring rights of way, expected revenues (such as tolls), and operation and maintenance. More
Health Effects of cars cites Richard Jackson, who acknowledged that his assertions were based more on intuition than research, but he pushed ahead, following up with a book-length treatment called Urban Sprawl and Public Health: Designing, Planning, and Building for Healthy Communities,
== Green Design == (for more related, see Sustainability )
The thin green line: Investing in urban parks. PBS Need to Know 9/10. TEDtalk on NY High Line.
Articles in category "Land"
The following 3 pages are in this category, out of 3 total.
