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“Trying to curb traffic congestion by adding more capacity is like trying to curb obesity by loosening your belt.”

Taken from Dolores Hayden’s “Field Guide to Sprawl.”

Jason

A Fat Gorilla and Externalities
In a comment on our last post, uneasy rhetoric referenced the 800-pound gorilla of economics. This particular gorilla drives us crazy not because we’re anti-commerce (see previous posts on why we’re for-profit) but because its 800 pounds and, as uneasy rhetoric observed, dominates the discussion at the expense of other important considerations. And also because we often find that the prevailing view of economics is short-sighted: its the economics of “externalities” which, as Levi points out in “The True Cost of Our Lifestyle,” too often makes future generations or the “have nots” pay for present-day economic growth, which ultimately means that its not a sustainable model of economics (incidentally, I just ordered a book called “The Real Wealth of Nations” which advances a “more equitable and sustainable economic system.”) In traditional development, future externalities are so rampant, they are often accepted as “the way it has to be”. Easy enough to say when the bad fruit of these externalities won’t be reaped until some undefined point in the future by faceless, unknown “others.” But there’s also hidden externalities passed on to “present day” consumers which have economic implications. Case in Point: the rise of health-issues related due to poor indoor air quality thanks to toxic off-gassing from building materials.

Bridge-Building
There’s a challenge on LJUrban’s horizon that we haven’t jumped very far into yet: working with people (whether industry-folk or the consumer) who default to “pure economics” in their decision-making and enabling them to see the interrelationship between eco-urban and economics. I admire the “bridge-building” and “redefining” ability of people like McDonough and Braungart, who, in Cradle to Cradle, “argue that the conflict between industry and the environment is not an indictment of commerce but an outgrowth of purely opportunistic design.” I want LJUrban to become a leading organization that can advance this kind of “both/and” perspective and shape the industry from inside out and from outside in.

In the context of the example given above, this bridge-building effort would mean taking the time to point out the financial implications of health issues. And knowing that people respond better to positive encouragement rather than pointing out the negative, we’d emphasize the increased productivity and creativity and sense of well-being that comes with good health and the subsequent decrease in medical expenses.

The Eco-Urban Message
When it comes to arguments for eco-urban, we opt for the “better quality of life” message more than the “if we don’t do this, all hell will break loose” message. Not that the latter doesn’t have a place (this blog, for example), but that the overall emphasis is placed more on “eco-urban = good living.” The environmentalist movement, in its earlier phases, made the mistake of focusing too much on the alarmist message and, in doing so, alienated a lot of people who otherwise would have rallied to a “we can do better” message. Thankfully, I see more and more expressions of this new argument, and, subsequently, more and more people are tuning into it, raising their hand and saying “I want that.” I also think its a pretty easy explanation; its truth is at a deep, common sense level.

Pop Culture and the Addiction to Immediacy
However, not everyone is receptive to the truth, even when its common sense. The onslaught of mass media and pop culture has inured us from being able to know “truth” when its staring us right in the face.

Furthermore, we live in a culture that celebrates the immediate kick-back, and some (but certainly not all) of the interrelationships between eco-urban and economics take more time. Full buy-in requires a “long-term investment” perspective.

Big Leaps
And this perspective is a pretty big leap for a lot of people (especially the ones fixated on the 800 pound gorilla), so right now we’re tuning into the early adopters (the people who already know and understand the value of eco-urban, the people who haven’t lost their capacity for critical thinking) and empowering them, knowing that they are ultimately the ones who will create the momentum needed for an eco-urban tipping point.

Jason

Very cool.

I found this site today and wanted to share it with you all.

It seems that finally people are catching on that to inspire change you need to start a revolution. I am reading a book by Alan Deutchman called Change or Die and he talks about how 90% of heart patients stop taking the prescribed Medication after one year. The primary contributor is that taking the pill every day reminds them of the gravity of their situation. The point he gets at is that the better way to change is to make it a habit and come at it from the positive angle. Because no one responds well in the long run to the negative.

Yeah, we have to do something about it, but we are not going to get anywhere if we are just trying to scare everyone into doing it.

There’s a powerful application to eco-urban community and development here. We talked a lot in the early days about sprawl and how its systematically destroying a culture here in America. We decided the better angle was to make cities better. That way you wont want to contribute to sprawl. You will be missing out on all the cool stuff going on in the core.

Levi

Just something I read and liked recently…

The only meaningful counterbalance to corporate globalization is communities. The momentum of globalized trade cannot be stopped, bit it can be redirected. Communities are small enough to be able to understand their own self-interest, yet large enough to be able to access resources and generate efficiencies of scale. When communities are weak, they are inevitably exploited. To take advantage of corporate growth and not be its victims, communities around the world must rapidly increase their strength and ability to organize.

Even more undermining to society is environmental degradation… Lifestyle, international economics, and world politics may have to find new balances. To respond to these challenges, we need more-effective strategies. The most practical and accessible way to shape a collective response is to grow appropriate solutions at the community level that take into account the large and complex forces impinging on them.

From: Just and Lasting Change: When Communities Own Their Own Future, by Daniel Taylor-Ide & Carl E. Taylor. John Hopkins University Press, 2002.

Vanessa

Two days ago, the first day of 2007 found me up in the foothills with my family for a long drive. Not necessarily the most eco-friendly activity from a fuel consumption perspective, but I needed to get out of the city for a spell and clear my head and felt that a strong dose of clean air and wide open vistas would be as good a way of starting the New Year as any. We meandered up through Auburn and Grass Valley and Nevada City, zig-zagging through the older parts of these small towns and their surrounding neighborhoods.

Somewhere around Auburn, after about 90 minutes in the car, my 7 year old daughter, completely outfitted head to toe in her brand-new, Native American outfit, said, “Can we find a place where I can run around, where there’s no buildings and just lots of grass?”

I love the honesty of children about their needs. Kids need open spaces. I just started reading Mas Masumoto’s elegaic journal “Epitaph for a Peach” and found myself pausing on page 7 after reading the statement, “Enveloped by nature, a child’s imagination soars.” A jumble of images from my own childhood flashed across the screen of my mind: from age 3 to age 7, I lived in the middle of Sonoma County orchards and vineyards, and I have stronger memories from those years than the following four years when we moved to the suburbs of Santa Rosa—small garden snakes, strawberry plants along the sideyard, old wasp nests in the garage, the pollen pods on the pine tree, the smell of fermenting pears and grapes, the tang of wild mustard, the Russian River swelling and pregnant from winter rains. I can’t fully explain the depth and breath of the impact of these few years on my identity formation but I know these experiences comprise some of the most fertile ground in my consciousness—and I can see a clear vector that runs from them to my eco-urban sensibilities.

Adults need open spaces too; some need more space than others, and some need more time in open spaces than others—the Thoreau’s and Jack London’s among us–but we all, not just children, need open spaces where our imaginations can run around, take wing and soar. I equate it to the need for sanctuary, a “return to Eden” kind of longing that just comes with being human. But, regardless of any one person’s particular spiritual bent, our connection to the earth, to bodies of water, to undisrupted sky, to flora and fauna seems to runs parallel with our spiritual cognizance, if at no other level than the mysterious source of a soaring imagination.

At its deepest level, I see this need for open space as a need for something larger than ourselves, larger than what we, in and of ourselves, can control and dominate and own. It’s the “enveloped by” characteristic of Nature that Masumoto points us to. When I look into a glen of trees and can’t see the end of them, when I look up the incline of a mountain and wonder what’s on the other side, when I look up into the sky and see stars I can’t begin to count, I have to humbly acknowledge my own finitude, my limitations, my boundaries. And this is where imagination steps in. Creativity flourishes just beyond edges and boundaries and, as such, requires their very existence; when we have no boundaries, when we see no end to ourselves, inspiration withers and dries up. Without the reminder of our dependence on a “greater than” ourselves, without open spaces that supercede concepts of “ownership,” we run the risk of becoming megalomaniacs and narcissistic.

Conceptually, “open spaces” doesn’t have to translate directly into acreage. Its more about sanctuary than about size. If this weren’t true, what hope for imagination could we offer those for whom a drive to the foothills isn’t possible. My daughter runs with as much gleeful abandon in the small pocket park down the street as she would over hill and dale. Community gardens, though squarely planted in the built landscape, add some of the same inspired respite and “envelopment” for blighted neighborhoods as open fields and shady woods.

And open spaces can also be viewed metaphorically, with the same conclusions. Open spaces of time foster a sense of grounding and reflection that often rewrite our priorities. Open spaces of perspective welcome diverse ideas that generates a kind of “greater than ourselves” necessary for creative, life-infused community.

So back to the foothills. We did end up finding a spot that fit our need, although not my daughter’s exact request. It was a lovely community park called Pioneer Park nestled in a meadow among a small enclave of neighborly homes in Nevada City. It had lots of room to roam and the air was cool and sweet. And I, for one, came home with a soaring imagination for 2007.

Jason

After staring it on our bookshelves for almost 2 years, I finally sat down with Dolores Hayden’s book “A Field Guide to Sprawl” this afternoon. I love some of the phrases various people have coined to describe everything we stand against. We’ve all seen this stuff… it’s horrid. Here’s a few that stood out:

Pork Chop Lot
An interior lot requiring a long driveway to reach the main part of the property… pork chop lots signify sprawl because they indicate pressure to sell farmland.

Power Center
Several unconnected big box outlets combine to use the drawing power of multiple discount stores. Cheaper to build than an enclosed mall, these category-killers tend to destroy business for retail malls and older Main Streets.

Putting Parsley Round the Pig
landscape (attributed to landscape architect Martha Schwartz). Landscaping a bad spot or a bad project… efforts to soften unfriendly landscapes, roads or buildings.
Snout House
Houses where its difficult to see residents’ activities since the protruding garages take up most of the street frontage.
Starter Castle
Custom-designed homes “of exaggerated size and aspirations, a play on “starter house,” a house for first-time home buyers. A hallmark of “conspicuous consumption.” Sometimes a starter castle is built on the site of a tear-down, an older house, usually in a desirable neighborhood, purchased for its lot value and demolished in order to build a larger structure.

Theming
Theme—first a noun and then an adjective—has recently been used as a verb. Theming describes designing and decorating restaurants, hotels, shopping malls, casinos and even small towns to exaggerate stereotypes and re-create lost places. Example: the Cheesecake Factory on Arden.

TOAD
An acronym for a temporary, obsolete, abandoned or derelict site. “Toads owe their onground existence to the use, abandonment, and reuse of real estate as exaggerated by a capitalistic system…. may be abandoned shopping malls, empty big boxes or closed industrial sites. ”

Tract Mansion
A large, expensive house (usually over 4,000 sq. ft.) constructed among homes that are very similar by a subdivider who builds on speculation.” Also called “McMansions” (coined by architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, where the “preferred style” is Grotesquely Grandiose”, developers offer a mind-boggling mix of Rapunzel towers, pretend Palladian, Jacuzzis and surround-sound.” A tract mansion may also be called a twenty-minute house because a realtor shows it quickly—all of the builder’s energy has been focused on the front. “A house on steroids”

Boomburg
Coined by Robert Lang and Patrick Simmons. A rapidly growing, urban-sized place in the suburbs. Fast-growing sub-urban cities. Natomas, CA.

Zoomburb.
A place growing faster than a boomburg. Sun City, Arizona.

Pod.
An area of single-use zoning (such as a shopping center or residential subdivision) located off a major road. The term may have derived from peas in the pod or from the pod people in the classic film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Long-winding roads that go nowhere characterize “dead-worm subdivisions,” places with multiple pods. A pod is often a cul-de-sac… or perhaps a group of them. The convoluted road layout caused by multiple single-use pods makes it difficult to go from one place to another.

LULU
A locally unwanted land use. Creates a problem for people because of the way it looks, smells, sounds or pollutes the environment. A LULU may be an everyday project such as a parking lot. LULU’s often end up in communities without the political clout to resist them.

Litter on a Stick.
A billboard. Over half a million billboards line major highways in America.

Jason

“Changing the world is a team sport, and there’s a spot on that team for every person on the planet, though finding our spot can be damn hard. Learning what we can do is not easy in itself, but discovering what each of us feels called to do, in a way that only we can do it, is one of the hardest tasks life has to offer.”

World Changing: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century edited by Alex Steffen, was produced by, our ‘teammates’, the crew at WorldChanging.org to be a “groundbreaking compendium of the most innovative solutions, ideas and inventions emerging today for building a sustainable, livable, prosperous future.”

I pre-ordered the hardcover version of this book and it arrived, to my delight, at lunchtime today! So, now that my crisp new copy has been baptized in tomato sauce, I’d like to shoot you guys in the direction of the website that has categories that correspond with those of the book to give you a taste of what I am gleaning from its pages.

This thick volume is full of thought provoking ideas about everything from a Guide to Making Your Own Biodiesel to Land Mine-detecting Flowers to Socially Responsible Investment to Sustainable Forestry to the Hidden Vitality of Slums and onto some of our favorite categories like Place-Making, Developing Green Housing, Living Well In Compact Space, Living Walls and Cool Roofs… I’ve got some reading to do…

*Worldchanging was printed on New Leaf recycled paper and wind power credits were purchased to offset the amount of electricity used to produce the book.

Vanessa

Denver seems like a year ago already… we’d hoped to post more but the last session we went to (Jim Collins, author of Good to Great) sent Levi and I on an 8-hour marathon discussion that wiped out everything else. So, in the absence of more in-depth content, here’s a quick rundown of dialogue from our office today.

Micah’s in the thick of eco-issues surrounding vinyl windows. It’s a choice between energy-efficiency vs. toxicity.

Vanessa’s on the end of her road trip enjoying cleaner air in California’s open spaces. Here’s to hoping she brings some back with her.

Levi’s just found out about Urban Design Association in Sacramento. Looks like a cool group of people.

William Burg, chair of the Newton Booth Neighborhood Association, has written a book about Sacramento’s Streetcar system that looks really interesting. The blurb at Powell’s.com is enough to make me cry for what we lost…

I read today that “the annual amount of money the average American family spent five years ago on gasoline, home heating, and electricity” was $3,300. This year, that figure will be $5100. Just one more statistic demonstrating the good sense behind eco-urban.

Jason

I just started taking a UC Davis class titled, “Sustainability and the Built Environment” which is a broad overview of the sustainable or green architecture, planning, and building movement. I have long held a passion for this work and am finally being given the chance to pursue it under the guise of “my career”. I love it. Anyway the professor opened the class last night by reading us the Lorax, by Dr. Suess. It was strange enough to be going back to college after so long but I really felt like we were reverting back to kindergarten. The professor stood up front and held the book open while he read to us. They even had snacks, not milk and cookies, but close.

The story is great. It walks through the product development process for a Thneed. It is something everyone needs. You should read it. It is an enlightening look at what can happen when capitalism runs rampant. So we walked through the things we could have consulted the Once-ler on in providing a much more sustainable Thneed. For one the Truffula trees should have been sustainably farmed or possibly only had the leaves harvested rather than cutting the entire tree down. Secondly the Bar-ba-loots could have been employed in the production of the Thneeds rather than run off. The factory should have been located outside of the canopy of the Truffula trees to preserve the habitat.

Anyway Dr. Suess must have been a little ahead of his time. Our children may wonder why we didn’t listen to the stories we read them.

Micah