Urban Planning Blog

This blog will follow U.S. local governments that are curbing greenhouse gas emissions, reducing energy consumption, utilizing renewable energy sources, adapting to the impacts of climate change, and developing more sustainably. It will showcase their challenges, accomplishments, innovations, strategies, and lessons learned.

ICLEI’s Local Action Blog launches to make available information on cities and counties on the front lines of climate, sustainability, and energy action.

Beautiful pictures from the collections in the Earth Observatory. These images were taken from many different satellites and astronaut missions. You can see evidence of climate change and nature of human settlement especially in the images of a Las Vegas suburb and South of Khartoum, Sudan.

The extent of the spillage of an estimated 1 billion gallons of sludge containing years’ of waste from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s coal-burning power plant over an area of 300 acres cannot be better described than these pictures taken by Dorothy Griffith.

The entire region is a brownfield and I wonder how many years, resources, and money will it take to clean it all up. I wonder if anyone will be held accountable.

Just because you can doesn’t always mean you should. “This gleaming hunk of urban development is about to rise on an artificial, perfectly square island off the coast of Dubai” [source]. Dubai has been going crazy creating all these islands off their coast probably because coastal properties enjoy greater demand and thus elicit higher prices. But in the long run, these islands are proving to be an environmental disaster as they end up destroying the marine life and coral reefs in the vicinity which are an integral part of the ecosystem. This 6.5 square kilometer mini-city is being designed by noted architect, Rem Koolhaas. Why would you care for the environment when your paycheck from this job alone can let you retire in riches?

GROW, a project that develops innovative solutions on green technologies draws inspiration from ivy growing on the side of a building – resulting in a hybrid energy delivery device of leafy, fluttering solar shingles that provide power via both sun and wind. I would love a day when roof shingles that use solar power are just as cheap as regular shingles.

Architect Vincent Callebaut’s latest project balances public galleries, meeting rooms and gathering spaces over canals and abandoned railroad tracks in the 19th Parisian district. Callebaut describes the process as an intention to “absorb and recycle by photo-catalytic effect the cloud of harmful gases (Smog) from the intense traffic near Paris” [source: Inhabitat].

Definitely a worthy and proactive effort at going beyond the traditional green architecture.

“Try this experiment. Go knock on someone’s door in West Oakland, Watts or Newark and say: ‘We gotta really big problem!’ They say: ‘We do? We do?’ ‘Yeah, we gotta really big problem!’ ‘We do? We do?’ ‘Yeah, we gotta save the polar bears! You may not make it out of this neighborhood alive, but we gotta save the polar bears!’ ”

Thomas Friedman writes about including the minority low-income populations in the ‘green movement’. Imposing conservation and sustainability on people usually doesn’t work. Rather you have to make the case that it is beneficial to them in the long run. Only then will they listen. Just like the corporations listened when it affected not only their image but also their bottomline.

A new swanky possibly the greenest building comes up in Athens:

The five-story structure in southern Athens produces zero emissions, uses no fossil fuel and meets virtually all its own energy demands — in winter and in summer — thanks to a computerized system that draws on both solar and geothermal sources. It even produces electricity on the side, some for selling back to the state [source]

I hope you didn’t imagine a building with terraced gardens.

Ash talks about the adverse environmental impacts of religious festivities in India. But I am glad that things are changing and people are taking remedial steps to reverse such damage.

Ganesh Chaturthi is an annual religious festival celebrated by Hindus in India. It has grown from household worship to societal celebration involving huge idols of the elephant god.

China, India, and Russia each have two cities in the top ten list of the world’s worst polluted places. The primary factors behind the pollution was cited as mining, Cold War era pollution, and unregulated industries. Note that most of the these towns aren’t major urban centers but rather isolated industrial concentrations. However, the inordinate level of pollution cannot be justified.

As much as I am against wasting energy, I am not entirely comfortable with secret government monitoring. The city of Haringey, UK hired a spy plane to fly overhead and identify which households are wasting the most energy. They used this information and mapped it. Further more, to play the guilt card, they put this information online [via Techdirt]. Trying to ’shame’ people into conservation has honestly never worked but it definitely does freak them out and make them not trust anything the government says or does.

In today’s age of unpredictable weather and rampant flooding, the Dutch are leading the way with creating amphibious houses. As I mentioned before, we can forget about controlling nature (levees, etc.) and instead focus on adapting our living to minimize damages when weather turns foul.

Will the design community respond to the challenge of building the twenty-first century city? Will they rally around the mayor’s plan?

The Metropolis Magazine is asking whether designers and city planners will heed to Mike Bloomberg’s vision of creating a cleaner and greener New York City

Almost two years after Hurricane Katrina exposed the brittleness of New Orleans, New York Times reports that even after spending more than a billion dollars the city is still at risk. I had written earlier on how New Orleans might be the city that never should have been and if taken at face value, I can be acussed of undermining human tenacity and resilience. But at the core of the matter is our struggle with nature. To put it bluntly, we can never win. No matter how hard we try or how long we hold her off, nature will always win. Rivers that change their flow or sea levels that rise will not consider the fate of those millions living on its banks or the coastline.

Christopher Hallowell’s Holding Back the Sea documents man’s futile attempts in controlling nature. Hurricane Katrina not only exposed our societal inadequacies but also laid bare some of our massive engineering feats. No offense to the Army Corps of Engineers, but they will always be fighting a losing battle and can only hold the fort so long. Even if it was technically possible to hold off the inevitable for a longer time, I doubt we have the financial prowess to do it anymore. Other more urgent and important priorities have crept up the national agenda. At some point in time, we have to reevaluate our presence in the volatile Mississippi basin. Perhaps nature doesn’t want us there at all. We can claim that we have been there for over a hundred year but nature has been there much longer, right?