Blogs & Ecology

Image courtesy of Park Ayalon

Cascades Park, photo courtesy of webshots

While TreeHugger readers are generally optimistic types, there is no question that with climate chaos, peak oil, economic meltdown and whatever else might be the fourth horseman of the apocalypse, things could get pretty dire, and pretty quickly.

So when I was asked to liveblog the Re-Imagining Cities: Urban Design after the age of Oil conference I expected some urgency about the subject of urban design after the age of oil. Yet everyone was surprisingly relaxed....

photos by trevor reichman

Sustainability incorporates lessons leaned from history in order to improve on design to avoid fatal flaws and in this case to prolong the life span of a structure as it relates to its surroundings.

Scenes from Malmö, Sweden -- a hidden green city gem -- Björn Söderqvist @ flickr.

image by trevor reichman

What was a large downtown parking lot in Houston just a year ago, is now Discovery Green, downtown Houston’s new urban park. Underneath the park, an underground parking garage now accommodates the same number of cars as before…no more, no less. An above ground portal, designed by Austin artist, Margo Sawyer, takes drivers from their cars below the Earth up to almost a dozen acres of new centrally located parkspace. ...

That’s right – Yom Kippur. A somber day of introspection in most of Israel, in mellow Tel Aviv the Day of Atonement is the closest thing to a day without cars in the Middle East. With all cars banished from the pavements for 25 hours, helmet-clad children take to the streets in their masses.

It's not hard to imagine what life in one of Australia's big cities in 2020 would be like if we keep going with the roads obsession of successive governments. With peak oil and carbon pricing driving petrol costs through the roof, battling worse air pollution and worse congestion, there would still be no real alternative for those who want to get off the oil addiction and get out of their cars.

But, just for a minute, imagine if the State, Federal and local governments decided to change direction.

Picture living in a thriving community, a clean city, with regular, fast, safe trams, buses and trains running around a well-constructed network, planned around community needs and desires. A city of 5 million people or more running smoothly, cleanly and happily!

Bike racks are a very cool form of public art. So hopefully New York will be able to artistically combine form and function when it picks from 10 intriguing international bike rack designs to start gracing New York's city streets. Last week 9 prototypes were installed for use at the city's Astor Place.

Part of PlaNYC's focus on sustainable transport

San Francisco's Embarcadero Freeway. Torn down after the 1989 earthquake, the freeway was replaced with a vibrant, multi-use boulevard. (photo via Flickr)

Back in the 1950's and 60's, when gas was cheap and there was plenty of federal money to go around, highways were built on a massive scale in North America, often slicing through city centers or blocking off waterfronts. While they added little charm to American downtowns at the time, today many of these freeways are not only eyesores but downright dangerous.

A competition for the title of 'fastest mode of transportation' in Tel Aviv on Tuesday. (Photo by Omer Cohen.)

September 23 was "Public Transportation Day" in Israel, the Holy Land's answer to European Mobility Week and World Carfree Day. In honor of the event, local green groups organized a professional conference and a 6km drag race in Tel Aviv between different modes of transportation.

An Artist's Rendering of the Green Civic Center

San Francisco, just recently ranked the second greenest city in the US, forged a partnership yesterday with the Clinton Global Initiative to green the city's Civic Center....

Image source: Chicago Climate Action Plan

When Toyama City in western Japan was considering different alternatives for its development, it hit upon a good source of ideas: its citizens. Holding meetings and discussions with the people in the pop. 400,000 town helped City Hall decide that a Light Rail Transit (LRT) would be ideal for getting people around. The alternatives? To build massive parking centers and generally lose sight of the city center. What people felt was that as they get older, using cars would be less convenient, anyway.