Anthony Flint / Feb 13 2010
For Release Saturday, February 13, 2010
Citiwire.net
SEATTLE — Members of President Obama’s “green cabinet” were greeted like rock stars by nearly two-thousand believers in a more sustainable future at the New Partners for Smart Growth conference earlier this month.
We know this in part because Washington, D.C. city planner Harriet Tregoning–who introduced Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Ray LaHood, secretary of the Department of Transportation, and Lisa Jackson, director of the Environmental Protection Agency–came right out and called them rock stars and everybody cheered in agreement.
This was a particularly friendly audience, to be sure, and predisposed to like the administration’s plans to bring smart growth and planning to the–gasp–federal level. The gathered planners and local government officials were also a technically knowledgeable bunch. Where else would it be an applause line to say that not only municipalities but regional planning entities could now apply for a particular federal grant program? Or that there are plans to put the “UD” back in “HUD”? Read More »
Anthony Flint / Oct 02 2009
For Release Friday, October 2, 2009
Citiwire.net
There’s cap-and-trade, the international accord emerging from Copenhagen, wind farms, hybrid vehicles, green buildings, solar panels, and carbon sequestration. But planners know well there’s another fundamental strategy in the challenge of climate change: achieving greenhouse gas emissions reductions through better land use planning.
Metropolitan regions across the country are now aligning growth plans with that one goal in mind–reduced emissions in both redevelopment and new development, linking land use, urban form, and transportation to help head off the planetary emergency. Good tools to help decision-makers at the local and regional level, however, are only beginning to emerge.
This is work in the trenches, and planners need help. Now more than ever, they need to rely on modeling and forecasts to make sure standards, guidelines, rules and regulations will get the most bang for the buck. There’s no point in making requirements that don’t truly result in emissions reductions, through lower vehicle miles traveled (VMT) or other means. Read More »
Anthony Flint / May 14 2009
For Release Sunday, May 17, 2009
Citiwire.net
As we stare down the economic recovery and a post-carbon future, we’ve got a lot of retrofitting to do.
Water heaters, furnaces, windows, and older buildings await energy efficiency upgrades. Transit systems need technology overhauls to communicate with riders on their mobile phones. Underground, aging water, sewer and steam pipes can’t stand much more deferred maintenance. Automakers need to revamp assembly lines to produce low-emission buses–and maybe even streetcars and trolleys.
Add one more thing that badly needs an update: governance.
At the local level, a more regional approach is necessary to marry land use and transportation, for example. “How else would we govern, except the way that we have settled?” asks Portland Metro councilor Robert Liberty in the recently released documentary film, Portland: Quest for the Livable City. Read More »
Anthony Flint and William Shutkin / Mar 12 2009
For Release Sunday, March 15, 2009
Citiwire.net
BOULDER, Colo. — For those concerned with sustainability, some big things are on the way from Washington. There’s the distribution of the $787 billion economic stimulus package for public works infrastructure. The reauthorization of federal transportation funding, which could finally shift significant funds from highways to transit. The Obama administration’s ambitious clean-energy plans, and its interest in a cap-and-trade system to start reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
We haven’t been used to such heavy lifting from the federal government. For years, the action has been at the local level, in metropolitan regions that have been engines of innovation focused on green, compact, transit-oriented settlement. In fact, during the final stages of the Bush administration and into these first days for President Obama, the bottom-up dynamic has led to a kind of Sustainability 2.0.
Consider the innovative practices of two Denver-based developers, Urban Villages and Zocolo Community Development. They’re building mixed-use, walkable, dense infill development that is integrated with transportation and open space, with all buildings constructed to last 100 years, powered by state-of-the-art heating and cooling systems–solar, radiant, thermal–that will use 80 percent less energy than the typical building today. Read More »
Anthony Flint / Nov 13 2008
For Release Sunday, November 16, 2008
Citiwire.net
Timing is everything.
As architects, planners, journalists, and city and nonprofit leaders gathered at the University of Philadelphia last week for the conference “Re-Imagining Cities: Urban Design after the Age of Oil,” the staggering challenges of our time prompted a subdued mood.
The gathering marked the 50th anniversary of the same conference attended by Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford and many others to chart a course of the urban future; this time around, Elizabeth Kolbert, Robert Socolow, Andrew Revkin, Alex Steffen, William J. Mitchell, David Orr, Harrison Fraker and many others, including Neal Peirce, sought to piece together what was needed to get us out of climate-change, peak-oil, financial-meltdown mess.
They could take comfort in the fact that a leader is about to take office who says he is serious about all these issues. President-elect Barack Obama has vowed to act on climate change, bringing the U.S. in from the sidelines after eight long years. He has promised to end dependence on oil and support renewable energy. And he seems to recognize that cities and metropolitan regions will play a crucial role, in these challenges but also as centers of innovation, economic activity, and housing opportunities, and that they deserve support. Read More »
Anthony Flint / Aug 02 2008
For Release Sunday, August 3, 2008
Citiwire.net
If there were ever compelling evidence that cities, regions and the natural world are co-dependent, take a look at the climate change news of the last year.
On the one hand, accelerated ice melting in the Arctic, plus growing concerns about the Antarctic’s long-term stability, raise fears of rapidly rising seas that could threaten many of America’s and the world’s oceanside cities.
And now comes the case of Dendroctonus ponderosae, otherwise known as the mountain pine beetle. By laying its eggs under the bark of mature jack-pine and lodgepole pine trees, this voracious insect is laying waste to millions of acres of forests in the Rocky Mountain West, from Colorado to British Columbia. Read More »