The Daily Climate: Envisioning the Sustainable City

by Emily Gertz

Published November 20, 2008 @ 10:31AM PST

If I ask you, 'What does living in a sustainable society look like?", what immediately comes to mind? A vast field dotted with wind turbines stretching off to the horizon? Farm fields with diverse food crops poking out of rich black dirt? A city laced with zippy, torpedo-shaped trains elevated over streets filled with pedestrians?

Well, most of us around the world live nowhere near farms of any sort, anymore. We live on City Planet: slightly more than half the world's people live in urban areas now, and that percentage is only going to increase in the coming decades.  I'm one of 8.2 million people living in New York City, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world, and we're expected to hit 9 million by 2030.

When I walk around New York's car-clogged streets, lined with buildings erected before World War II, struggling street trees, and a full trash can on every other corner, I have a hard time imagining how we'll transform this city, and what it will look like when (if?) we ever get a grip on living in a post-oil, climate-disrupted reality -- a New York with systems that, say, manufacture goods with cradle-to-cradle materials that virtually eliminate consumer trash. Or where people make their own stuff instead of buying it.

A city with systems that generate clean energy locally, cache rainwater, retrofit existing buildings to conserve energy and clean up indoor air. Prioritize cycling, walking, mass transit over car-clogged streets -- or at least clog the streets with cars that run on something a lot cleaner than fossil fuels.

And what about the concerns of daily life: access to and advances in health care, education, economic opportunities, and communications? Creating all of the above in the context of shifting economic systems, social strife, political uncertainties, and plain old human inertia? Seismic shifts in how we get, and create, news and information?

Happily, many of my fellow journalists and bloggers cover this stuff. Here's a roundup of some of the latest:

An old textile warehouse in San Diego has been transformed into solar-powered lofts. Dubbed The Union, the building now "receives 50% of its energy from photovoltaic panels and integrates a variety of urban living environments for a mixture of very low income (50% of the median), affordable and market rate units," according to Inhabitat. It's "a truly beautiful project that recognizes that one of the best ways to build green is to revitalize something old to become new."

Can creative uses of wireless technologies help solve social inequities? The Vodafone Americas Foundation thinks so: it's launching the Wireless Innovation Challenge, which will provide funding for projects that use wireless tech to address acute social problems including "access to communication, education, economic development, environment, or health. The technology should have the potential for replication and large scale impact." Mark A.M. Kramer at SmartMobs suggests that wireless developers "[S]et aside any preconceptions of why businesses engage in corporate responsibility schemes," and take advantage of this unusual opportunity.

Balkanology, New Architecture and Urban Phenomena in South Eastern Europe is an ongoing exhibition at the Swiss Architecture Museum. Regine DeBatty of we-make-money-not-art reports on the exhibit:

Balkans generally refers to South Eastern Europe, a region with varying geographical definitions. Going beyond clichés and the pathos, the Balkanology exhibition focuses on the impact of recent socio-political changes on architecture and urban planning, drawing a variegated picture of urban development in the region and the forces that determine it.

...Since the collapse of the socialist economic system in ex-Yugoslavia and Albania and the war that lead to the split of Yugoslavia, a new form of urbanisation typified by extensive informal building activity has appeared on the territory. Taking advantage of sketchy legal frameworks and governments initially too weak to enforce rules and regulations, inhabitants have taken the issue of housing shortage in their own hands, they started building new dwellings from scratch and adapting existing edifice for their own purposes.

In this context, a term often used in all its negative connotations like Balkanization takes a radically different meaning: it stands for the improvisation and adaptation skills of architecture. Some of the many questions the exhibition aims to raise iinclude: how can a combination of governmental and social control offer the best possible basis for a successful retro-active 'post-regulation?

CRAFT Magazine's blog caught this article in the U.K.'s Telegraph newspaper: Sewing machines and "shoe cleaning equipment" are the hot new consumer items in the United Kingdom. People are keen on maintaining and repairing their clothes and shoes instead of letting them fall apart, and on making gifts instead of buying them:

Last month peers on the Science and Technology Committee called for a return to post-war thriftiness with an attack on 'fast fashion'. They criticised the rising popularity of High Street clothes which are so inexpensive that there is no incentive to repair them. At the Paris fashion shows this month Dame Vivienne Westwood championed clothes created from off-cuts. "There is status in wearing your favourites over and over again until they grow old or fall apart," she wrote. "Make necklaces out of safety pins, shawls from blankets, tablecloths, curtains or towels", the notes suggested.

[[Hm, maybe I'll finally sit down and figure out how to use my sewing machine, finish those quilting projects, etc.]]

And over at sister publication MAKE, there's a fresh new alternative energy gift guide, featuring solar, wind, fuel cell, biodiesel energy kits and resources. "Solar, wind, biodiesel, nuclear - these are all things we explore in the pages of MAKE, online, in our videos and with the kits we carefully select for our Maker Shed," writes Phillip Torrone. "We're not going to get out this current crisis with the same thinking that got us here, we need to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers...[W]ill our education system do enough? No - we'll all need to do something."

Image: The Union loft development, via Jonathan Segal Architect