An article from the New York Times about the architecture of parking lots, and how they might be much better used as public spaces with some design tweaks. Some cities like Houston and LA, dedicate a full third of their land area to parking lots, creating hard paved urban deserts and storm runoff disasters. They say that simply suggesting that we “buy fewer cars” is glib (I disagree) but clearly point out the folly of requiring vast quantities of parking by law, and then giving it away for free, thus hiding the true costs.
Tag: urban
Alex Steffen’s SXSW Eco Keynote
Alex Steffen gave one of the keynotes, at the first SXSW Eco Conference this fall, talking about good cities as the single best leverage point we have in reducing GHG emissions. It’s broadly the same collection of ideas as his forthcoming crowdfunded book Carbon Zero: A Short Tour of Your City’s Future. Looking forward to its eventual release.
The Joy of Slow Cities
It’s entirely possible that in The Future, we’ll come to realize that slower cities are better than fast. A city in which the fastest thing on the street is a bicycle is a place for living, for being, for enjoying in its own right. Walking, chatting, stopping on a whim at any shop or park or patio. We were lulled into a view of the future that was all high speed and high energy by the explosive industrialization of the early 20th century. But our visions of the future can and do change. We get to define what progress means.
Twelve Car-Free City Zones
Twelve Car-Free City Zones in photos, from National Geographic. Many north americans can’t really imagine what cities are like without cars. It took me a long time to realize that what I didn’t like about cities wasn’t the urban space, it was the fact that here, it tends to be infested with rude 1500 kg beasts.
The Death of the Fringe Suburb
News of Suburbia’s demise reaches the New York Times Op-Ed pages. Let’s hope someone out there allocating federal transportation dollars is reading.
Debunking the Cul-de-Sac
Highlights from a study looking at how different street network designs affect things like health and safety. Traditional interconnected grids fare better in just about every way than the dendritic cul-de-sac neighborhoods of the automobile dominated late 20th century.
Cities as the environmental solution, not the problem
A series of posts from the NRDC on how good, human friendly cities are actually the most sustainable places for people to live, in contrast to our fond fantasies about the country, and especially the suburbs.
Industrial Scale Urban Farming in NYC
TED fellow Viraj Puri talks about his Brooklyn rooftop farming startup. Gotham Greens has ~1500 square meters of hydroponic greenhouses producing herbs and salad greens in a very controlled environment… somewhere between a farm and a manufacturing facility. The system is solar powered, and can operate all year long. They currently produce ~100 tons of food a year, and they believe the business is viable at least in the urban foodie context. I was happy to see Puri readily (repeatedly) admitting (or even pointing out) that the system cannot scale up sufficiently to provide a large proportion of the city’s overall food requirements. This is in stark contrast to the idea of Vertical Farming, which is clearly bunkum — once you’ve covered the roofs with greens, there’s no more farming to be done unless you pipe in light somehow, which is much less efficient than simply farming where the light is naturally.
Just out of curiosity… I wonder how much food could be produced in Brooklyn at full capacity? And roughly how much does the city eat? The land area of the borough is 183 km^2 and it has 2,500,000 residents, or roughly 75 m^2 per person. Their production of 100 tons/1500 m^2 is roughly 66 kg/m^2 per year. So if the entire area of Brooklyn were producing like this greenhouse, you’d get nearly 5000 kg of food per person per year. The average American consumes about 1000 kg of food per year, so if you were able to use 20% of the borough’s area, you’d be close to meeting demand… at least by mass. Gotham’s 59kW solar array probably takes up ~590 m^2 (100 W/m^2 is typical of solar cell power production) and only provides part of the operation’s power. Probably there’s other infrastructure too that’s not actively producing food, so say they’ve got about half their total area dedicated to actual plants… then you’d need to get up to 40% of the land area being utilized to get 1000 kg of greens per resident per year.  However, most of the 1000 kg that we actually eat is a lot more energy dense than lettuce. I wonder how many calories per m^2 one can get out of these setups, and what the most productive crops would be? Honestly I’m surprised at how large the potential production is. I wonder what the actually available rooftop area is?
The American suburbs are a giant Ponzi scheme
Suburbia as Ponzi scheme. We have subsidized suburban growth through debt and taxes, and reaped the short-term financial rewards of that growth, but at the expense of taking on ever larger long-term liabilities in terms of infrastructure maintenance and a very energy intensive transportation system. I disagree with Strong Towns on the appropriate overall scale of habitation (more people and a much larger fraction of our overall economy live in cities, not towns), but this is (another) good critique of the American Nightmare.
Major developer to build car-free micro-homes in Portland
DR Horton, which has built nearly 20,000 mostly suburban homes across the US, is now pitching cozily downsized car-free living in SE Portland. It’s a development called Division 43, made up of 29 units, in 2-3 story buildings, on one third of an acre, with no on-site parking, and shared outdoor spaces including a garden plot. 350-700 square feet, 1-2 bedrooms and 1-2.5 baths, open floor plans, energy efficient, $120-180k. Sounds pretty awesome. Would be great to see similar stuff available in Boulder.