Prince's Foundation for the Built Enviornment

Hey yall,

This wasn't my expected first post, but it kicked something loose. In sifting through the digital flotsam on my bookmark lists, I rediscovered the work of the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment in England. Particularly, the response to the publication of the standing government's Localism Bill was interesting.

I am amazed at the lack of institutional attention that the challenge of building/retrofitting an appropriate built environment for ecological cities has gotten thus far. Its there, but its in the experimenting at the margins stage in the US, it seems.

As I say this, I am reminded that I should preface my comments with this. I'm an industrial ecologist by training. This means I know the science of many dire things. The science about impending materials and energy constraints is not a part of the built environment debate at all. As a consequence, the needs of the built environment to adapt and become a bulwark of resilience against ecological and social shocks is not yet happening. The known and circulating science of ecological change is a part of the debate. The social value of better/more cost effective housing has been a part of the debate for a long time. But without the other constraints as a part of the conversation, the true social import of transforming our built environment isn't quite materialized as yet. So, when I say we aren't really dealing with this yet, I mean we don't yet really grasp what our building are going to have to deal with in the next 30 years.

Also, I don't usually find diagrams of the balance required of sustainability either particularly balanced, or rich enough in breadth of understanding to be useful. I kinda like this one.

Their joural of urbanism might be somewhere that might writings find publishability. I doubt it'll be in APA Journal, that's for sure.

from "place and placelessness" by E. Relph (1976)

"The old road", writes Todd Snow, "was a definite place, a strip of land that went between other places." It was a road which had to be traveled slowly and which this encourages social contact as well as involving the traveler directly in the landscape. "Since the old road was basically an extension of a place it partook of the nature of all other places and was related to the geography beside the road as well as that of and at the end of the road." In contrast to this is the New Road, an essentially twentieth century creation and an extension of man's vehicle; it does not connect places nor does it link with the surrounding landscape. "The New Road generally seems to go between cities, but the primary requirement is that it start from where the people are and go on indefinitely, not that it go between places or lead to places. The Old Road started from and led to the city. The New Road starts everywhere and leads nowhere.

Snow and Relph are here talking about the fact that mass transit, mass communication have shifted away from a model based on facilitating the transfer of people, things and ideas between specific centers or places, and towards the facilitation of movement and transfer in general, as an abstract concept. The interstate highway, the internet, jet travel do not exist expressly to make possible the journey from Rome to Paris or New York to Atlanta, though they do make that journey more faster. Rather they exist to make possible rapid movement between any and all locations, reducing the friction of distance to such a degree that differentiation no longer occurs. Rather than roads coming to places, places become because of the roads. I live in Austin, which is located where the fertile plains meet the stony plateau and a great river flows through the landscape. There is a highway which tracks the path between San Antonio, Austin, Minneapolis. There are cities along its path which were settled long before the roads were built, in response to the natural landscape and the availability of natural resources and transportation (rivers). There are also places like Pflugerville and Round Rock that exist in response to the New Roads.

Kind of interesting!

Is anything new in the field of Planning? Thoughts on Two Movies

Movie Clip of The social life of small urban spaces
http://vimeo.com/6821934

I'm thinking about this amazing movie, and how I can't wait to watch it over and over once I acquire it.

       And also about the movie "The City" narrated by Lewis Mumford.   It was basically a straight propaganda piece for most of the ideas we in Planning take for granted now, but without the suave jargon we've developed.  It's a great challenge to take this and make it relevant and not classist and racist, which are still challenges today, classified under gentrification. 
Here is an excerpt.  
http://vimeo.com/3580199
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_%28film%29

The music was done by Aaron Copeland, highly dramatic following the propaganda idea.
Although we must remember the pollution, coal dirt, and contamination in food, all things very new for many people in this time.  I think this explains much of the reactionary vibe of the flic.

New Blog for Geography, Planning, and Design Brainstorming

http://books.google.com/books?id=hwAHmktpk5IC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_slider_thumb#v=onepage&q=finger&f=false

              This blog was inspired after meeting Robby and Sequoia at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Missouri.  Sequoia just finished his Masters in Urban Planning, and Robby is working on his PhD.    I realized that, with my new friend Alan & my good friend Greg, there were a large amount of people in my life studying how people plan for interaction with their surroundings on the city/human-scale (As opposed to micro-biology, nor macro-economic Herman Daly Green Economics type work here).  Greg is pursuing his Masters in Geography, and Alan his PhD.   I am pursuing a Masters in Urban Planning as well, in the first year of my program.  

          For the last few years I've been studying how groups come together to form Intentional Communities in order to form my own (see: http://greenintentionality.blogspot.com/ ). Three of the key projects I'm thinking about as I start graduate school are 1) How to bridge bring serious financial debate into green and progressive debate, 2) how sustainable can a city be?, & 3) what are ways to prevent an Eco-village from being merely a "Green Development"?

          In this blog, I'd like Greg, Robby, Alan, Sequoia and myself to have a chance to share and brainstorm about ideas concerning planning and human geography.  I take it for granted that this will in large part have to do with The Natural World.  

        The blog is named after a chapter in the book: A Pattern Language, written by a group of architects in the 1970's.     The chapter suggests that density should spread like fingers into the country side, rather than as concentric circles.   It suggests this would preserve the green space in between the fingers for farming, allowing dense human population to have easy access to green space from almost anywhere in the city.  

        This is one of the many concepts that Dancing Rabbit puts on the table in its design plans.   I think its a beautiful concept that, although admittedly difficult to retrofit, would provide large benefits to city planning world-wide.    (Not a bad platitude to start off with, no?)   
       
         This post acts as an invitation to speak/write their mind.   The posts need not be long, nor "publish-worthy".   This is just for us.  

please join,
thomas

http://www.dancingrabbit.org/


Robby's Blog:

http://www.evolutionarycity.blogspot.com/