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Most people who know my work expect the writing I do in this space, as well as my speaking, to focus on what we should be doing to create and sustain greener, healthier communities. Don’t worry, that’s eventually where this particular piece of writing is going. I can’t help myself when it comes to that subject. But I’m not going to start there: allow me to self-indulge my way around a few personal detours first. I’ll try to make them entertaining.
Continue ReadingIf you are involved in the world of city and neighborhood design, you probably know (or at least have heard of) the work of urban thinker, writer, lecturer, and city planner Jeff Speck. He has authored or coauthored a number of books in the field, my personal favorite being The Smart Growth Manual (2010, coauthored with Andres Duany and Mike Lydon), a basic introduction to the principles of strengthening, building, and designing nonsprawling communities.
Most of us, most of the time, don’t make much connection between place – the neighborhoods where we live, work, and play – and our health. Not unless we’re thinking of such obvious local health concerns as an outbreak of infectious disease in the community, serious levels of pollution or toxicity nearby, or perhaps about local health care services and facilities. Absent those kinds of circumstances, we tend to take our neighborhoods for granted when it comes to health. But we shouldn’t, because there is a rapidly growing body of evidence demonstrating that the shape and character of our communities matters a great deal to our health.
In 2001, a new book came out with my name (and those of two colleagues) on the cover. It was a book of case studies of smart-growth alternatives to suburban sprawl, divided into three categories: urban development, suburban development, and conservation initiatives. I mention the book here not (well, not just) because I’m an incorrigible self-promoter but because it had three photos on its cover, one of which was of a then-new, multi-building and mixed-use development called Bethesda Row, located in suburban Maryland just outside of Washington, DC.
Originally published almost four years ago and every bit as relevant today.
I have spent most of the last twenty years working on an agenda grounded in, for lack of a better phrase, “smart growth.” That agenda basically holds that our regions must replace suburban sprawl with more compact forms of growth and development; that neighborhoods must be walkable and convenient; that automobile dependence must be replaced with a system of mobility choices in which the automobile is only a part. It is an environmental agenda first and foremost, but those of us who advocate it also believe it to be good for people.
If someone asks what a green community, or a healthy one, means to you, what comes to mind? I’m willing to bet that for most people it is the visible and tangible aspects: a lovely city park, perhaps, or mature street trees, or bicycle lanes on a city street. If you’re a bit more wonky, you might also think of access to healthy food, or to public transportation. If you work on these matters for a living, you might think of more technical matters such as where we get our energy, what happens to our waste, and whether neighborhood streets are designed in a pattern that facilitates walking to accomplish everyday errands. Continue Reading
Cities need nature, as I’ve written in an earlier essay. But what is not so well understood is that nature also needs cities. There is simply no way we can protect and maintain a beautiful, thriving, natural and rural landscape outside of cities if we continue to spread highways and suburban sprawl across the countryside. Healthy, robust, beautiful cities where people want to live are critical to the protection of nature.
Can placemaking – in short, the building or strengthening of physical community fabric to create great human habitat – be a “new environmentalism”? The question is posed by a provocative short essay, which I first discovered in 2011. Written by Ethan Kent of the Project for Public Spaces, the article continues to make the rounds. The essay influenced my own writing (“The importance of place to sustainability”), and I’m returning to it here because the issues Ethan has raised continue to be important.
In Chuck Wolfe’s absorbing new book, Seeing the Better City, he encourages readers to think with our eyes and communicate with visual imagery in order to improve our cities. With the proliferation of smartphone cameras and an endless array of easily accessible, web-based platforms on which to display them, virtually everyone is now a photographer. And, with cities on the ascendance, many of them confronting both excitement and worries about growth and development, more people than ever want to make them as hospitable as possible. It’s time to put those trends together, argues Wolfe, and use our eyes and our cameras “to explore, observe, and improve urban space,” to quote the book’s subtitle.
The other day while walking my dog, I was trying to count the ways nature makes us healthier, as a means of distracting myself from the fact that the temperature was -40, with wind chill. That’s the point where Celsius and Fahrenheit converge. However, since this is my 9th winter in my beloved Winnipeg – one of the three coldest big cities on earth – I was dressed for the occasion and was keeping to the sidewalks in the active core. Here tight setbacks and street trees provide shelter from the wind, neighbourhood shops and cafés offer places to stop in and warm up, and short blocks provide plenty of places to turn around when the time is right.
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