A founding father of the Congress for New Urbanism talks about zoning reform, climate change, and the fate of greenfield development.

by Jenny Sullivan

There’s no shortage of elected officials betting their legacies on smart growth. Cities are increasingly embracing it as a way to curb sprawl, reduce greenhouse emissions, and build healthier communities. But the big question most have failed to address is how to turn the grand vision into a reality that has both momentum and traction. Continue Reading…..

By Andrew Burleson and Erik Johnson,
Fourth Environment, LLC

Understanding the Conventional Regulatory Framework of 20th Century Cities, and how we can achieve better outcomes by embracing a new paradigm in the 21st Century.

What is a city?
A city is a center of human activity. On a micro level, a city is a random collection of individuals living in self interest, relatively unconcerned with how the city functions as a whole. From a macro perspective, however, a city becomes an organism in itself, with its own personality, its own habits, its own reputation. Each city is unique. Indianapolis, Austin, and San Francisco have roughly the same number of residents, but differ dramatically due to geographical, cultural and historical factors. Every day the populations of these cities change. Some people move away, and some people move in, yet the identity of the city remains the same. Without knowing every person in Indianapolis, Austin, and San Francisco, we can still get a sense of the identity of the city. Continue Reading….

by Joseph A. Tainter, 1996

By Vincze Miklos

Piscataquis Village will have a clearly defined edge between the Village and the farm/recreational land that will surround it. – Piscataquis Village

“For thousands of years, humans have been defending their cities by building huge walls around them. Over time, the cities often spill over the walls — but sometimes they remain hemmed in. Here are some incredible images that show what happens to walled cities over time.” continue reading….

By Andrew Price

Andrew Price Blog

“I am a huge supporter of economic gardening – the idea that the economy and jobs are things we should grow locally, rather than economic hunting – searching for jobs and bringing them here. The problem of attracting jobs is that you rapidly dominate the scene with chain stores. When you become economically dependent on chain stores, you are no longer creating a unique urban environment, but a rather dull Copy-and-Paste town with a potentially fragile economy. ” Continue Reading…

“Rubbish trucks are the only motor vehicles on the island, as cars or motorcycles are not allowed by law. Donkeys, bicycles, and water taxis provide public transportation. The inhabited area, however, is so compact that most people walk everywhere.” Population – a couple of thousand.

The Two Minute Walk From Bill’s Bar to the Port

Strong Towns – Will Seath

“To put it bluntly, President Obama would like to abolish the suburbs… Moving to a suburb in pursuit of the American dream… looks to Obama and his [community] organizing mentors like selfishly refusing to share tax money with the urban poor.”

So begins Spreading the Wealth by Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Written before President Obama’s re-election, Kurtz’s book—whose prose reads like Harold Hill’s pleas to the people of River City in The Music Man—warns that the president’s sec­ond term agenda will impose regional tax sharing policies to redistribute suburban tax revenue to city coffers. Such policies, Kurtz argues, will result in a de facto abolition of suburbia, dis­couraging further sprawl and leading to metropolitan annexations. Whether or not there is merit to Kurtz’s argu­ments about tax policy, his impas­sioned rhetoric presents the preserva­tion of suburbia as a self-evident good, inseparable from the American Dream. There is broad popular assent to that position. Suburbia, after all, is right up there with baseball and apple pie in the list of things all-American. Continue Reading… 

No Tech Magazine-Kris De Decker

“We develop and provide a transparent life cycle inventory of conventional and electric vehicles and apply our inventory to assess conventional and EVs over a range of impact categories. For all scenarios analyzed, the use phase is responsible for the majority of the global warming potential (GWP) impact, either directly through fuel combustion or indirectly during electricity production.” Continue Reading…

Low-Tech Magazine – Kris De Decker

Electric motors and batteries have improved substantially over the past one hundred years, but today’s much hyped electric cars have a range that is – at best – comparable to that of their predecessors at the beginning of the 20th century. Weight, comfort, speed and performance have eaten up any real progress. We don’t need better batteries, we need better cars. Continue reading…

World Streets:The Politics of Transport in Cities

Upon closer consideration, moving from petroleum-fueled vehicles to electric cars begins to look more and more like shifting from one brand of cigarettes to another.

The critical consideration is this: Are EVs in fact part of the necessary move toward sustainable transport and sustainable cities? Many people will argue yes, and with considerable conviction and claims to authority. But is that really the case? From a policy perspective the rub is that the playing field is not level, neither when it comes to reliable information on their performance and potential, nor about the benefits that they convey to the community as whole.

Continued…