Grist | Topics | 146 Results

RESULTS		Results 26 – 50 of 146
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Headline	Author	Published	Section
Better homes and gardens The NYT on urban farming	Tom Philpott	08 May 2008	Gristmill
Viewed through a wide lens, the world's troubles seem overwhelming: climate change, pointless war, spreading hunger, surging food and energy prices, etc. There's a tendency to seek big-brush answers to these vast problems, to ask: what's The Solution? Failing inevitably to find it -- much less implement it -- we plunge deeper into despair and political impotence. Of course, taking a broad view of the world is critically important. But that perspective may be better at ...
Topics: agriculture, food, local food, placemaking, sustainable ag, urban planning (all these topics)

Cities	David Roberts	07 May 2008	Gristmill
Why don't candidates who claim to be interested in climate change talk about cities more? That's where the rubber is hitting the road: Officials in King County and other places are rethinking the way their communities grow and operate, all with an eye toward reducing their overall carbon footprint. After decades of policies that encouraged people to move out to the suburbs in pursuit of larger homes and bigger backyards, some policy makers are now pushing aggressive ...
Topics: ecological footprint, local politics, placemaking, politics, urban planning (all these topics)

Melbourne A modern city can be remade	David Roberts	07 May 2008	Gristmill
Check out this great video of the street life in Melbourne, Australia, which is my new Place I Want to Move: From the accompanying post on StreetFilms: Melbourne is simply wonderful. You can get lost in the nooks and crannies that permeate the city. As you walk you feel like free-flowing air with no impediments to your enjoyment. For a city with nearly 4 million people, the streets feel much like the hustle and bustle of New York City but without omnipresent da ...
Topics: Australia, placemaking, urban planning (all these topics)

Change now or change never The longer we wait to move away from gasoline, the more high gas prices will hurt	Ryan Avent	05 May 2008	Gristmill
Like Americans, Europeans are generally not fond of rising fuel costs. Unlike Americans, they're much better at handling them. It isn't difficult to understand why; they simply planned ahead. Geoffrey Styles writes: A big part of our problem is that most Americans are still driving cars that were purchased when gasoline was under $1.50/gal., to commute between work and home locations that were chosen when fuel was even cheaper ...As of this week, nominal U.S. retail ga ...
Topics: energy, European Union, fuel efficiency, oil, placemaking, urban planning (all these topics)

The unbearable tightness of oil markets America is ill equipped to handle expensive oil	Ryan Avent	30 Apr 2008	Gristmill
The Times' Jad Mouawad has written a piece describing the state of the world's oil market. It is, in a word, tight. Production volumes have been flat at best, and consumption growth has continued. Kevin Drum comments: I imagine that a global economic slowdown will flatten oil consumption a bit over the next year or two, and eventually higher prices will rein in demand more permanently. On the other hand, we've seen oil prices double three times in the past eight years wi ...
Topics: economy, energy, oil, placemaking, politics, public transportation, urban planning (all these topics)

Drawing on Experience Architect R.K. Stewart on building the future of sustainable design	Sarah van Schagen	25 Apr 2008	Grist Feature
If you build it, they will come. But if you build it green, you just may be able to save the planet. R.K. Stewart. Or so says a recent report, which suggests that green building could help cut North America's greenhouse-gas emissions more quickly and less expensively than any other measure. And word is getting out about the promise of this fast-growing field -- some have ev ...
Topics: art, climate, green building, interview, placemaking, urban planning (all these topics)

Generate energy locally; recycle whenever possible A Pollan-esque energy objective in six words ... and then some	Sean Casten	23 Apr 2008	Gristmill
Perhaps the single most important thing we can do to drive up our energy efficiency, lower energy costs, and bolster the overall reliability of our energy infrastructure is to overhaul our electric sector's regulatory model to move generation away from big, remote plants and toward local generation. From solar to CHP, we have a panoply of technologies, fuels, and companies who would participate in such a shift. Less understood is that our regulatory model creates o ...
Topics: electricity grid, energy, energy efficiency, placemaking, urban planning (all these topics)

City of Angles If you're building in L.A., you gotta build green		23 Apr 2008	News
Posted at 9:36 AM on 23 Apr 2008 Los Angeles has become the biggest U.S. city to pass green-building laws. Under the regulations announced Tuesday, new commercial and residential structures of more than 50,000 square feet will have to be LEED certified by the U.S. Green Building Council. The law also applies to major renovations. "We look toward the future through a greener lens," says Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, "a ...
Topics: green building, Los Angeles, news, placemaking, urban planning (all these topics)

Waiting for a techno miracle: not the fastest way to cut emissions Government-financed construction plus carbon pricing is the key	Jon Rynn	21 Apr 2008	Gristmill
With NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof's seeming endorsement of Roger Pielke Jr.'s ideas about mitigating global warming, it seems that we have two main arguments developing: the 'breakthrough' argument, which says we must have technology breakthroughs in order to solve the problem, and, as articulated (for instance) by Joseph Romm, the 'just do it' argument that we have the technologies now to minimize global warming. Most of my posts have been an attempt to show how current ...
Topics: urban planning, placemaking, carbon tax, climate change mitigation, greenhouse-gas emissions, climate, green jobs (all these topics)

Oil hysteria Let's rebuild our national rail network instead of repealing the gas tax	Jon Rynn	17 Apr 2008	Gristmill
At the rate things are going, any money that would be available for global warming mitigation is going to go into subsidizing the oil used by airplanes, trucks, cars, and heating oil so that most Americans do not become hysterical -- or am I being hysterical? From Michael T. Klare's latest article: Oil at $110 a barrel. Gasoline at $3.35 (or more) per gallon. Diesel fuel at $4 per gallon. Independent truckers forced off the road. Home heating oil rising to unconscionabl ...
Topics: energy, fossil fuels, oil, placemaking, politics, public transportation, urban planning (all these topics)

Room to Grow Big urban parks sprouting across the U.S.		14 Apr 2008	News
Posted at 4:47 PM on 14 Apr 2008 Four major cities are poised to create urban parks several times bigger than New York's iconic Central Park, itself a not-at-all-shabby 843 acres. In Orange County, Calif., a portion of a former air station will become a 1,347-acre park; in Memphis, a 4,500-acre former prison farm has been snatched from developers by a conservation easement; Atlanta is trying to add enough parkland to attach nearly every nei ...
Topics: green space, New York City, news, placemaking, urban planning (all these topics)

Sidewalks are sexy! and other things I learned at Hahvahd	Katharine Wroth	14 Apr 2008	Gristmill
I just spent a couple of days at a journalists' forum at Harvard whose topic was climate change and cities. The basic premise being that -- as our Mayor Nickels and his climate-fighting compatriots well know -- cities contribute a hell of a lot of carbon to the world, but are also in the best position to slow our handbasket voyage. Over the two days (which could easily have been two weeks), we heard from planners and architects working in places like New York, New O ...
Topics: green living, placemaking, urban planning (all these topics)

Machiavelli meets the Big Apple Ten reasons NYC's congestion pricing plan went belly up	Charles Komanoff	07 Apr 2008	Gristmill
Photo: Tom Twigg Albany strikes again: congestion pricing -- the smartest urban-transportation idea since the subway -- has been buried by the professional morticians of the New York State legislature, led by Chief Ghoul Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. As previously reported, the pricing plan, proposed a year ago by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and subsequently improved by a 17-member state-mandated commission, would have charged an $8 entry fee ...
Topics: legislation, New York, placemaking, politics, state politics, urban planning (all these topics)

New York City's congestion pricing plan ...	David Roberts	07 Apr 2008	Gristmill
... is dead.
Topics: legislation, New York, placemaking, politics, state politics, urban planning (all these topics)

Them's the Brakes Manhattan congestion-pricing plan kicks the bucket		07 Apr 2008	News
Posted at 1:06 PM on 07 Apr 2008 Hopes had run high that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's ambitious congestion-pricing plan for the Big Apple would move forward, but the measure has died a quiet death. Democratic members of the State Assembly, determining that the measure was overwhelmingly opposed, neglected to even bring it to the Assembly floor, instead shooting it down with a secret vote. The now-dead plan would have cha ...
Topics: air pollution, climate, climate change mitigation, legislation, New York, New York City, news, placemaking, politics, state politics, urban planning (all these topics)

Building green, one city at a time Eager municipalities hopping on board	Katharine Wroth	02 Apr 2008	Gristmill
In case you haven't noticed, it's officially the Year of Green Building. And while some areas have had eco-standards in place for a while now (helloooooo, D.C.!), the fevah is spreading in cities across the U.S. Take a gander at a few places considering formal green-building guidelines this spring: In a move described as a 'watershed time, a wonderful thing,' Chula Vista, Calif. voted yesterday to approve mandatory green-building standards for homes and business ...
Topics: green building, legislation, local politics, placemaking, politics, urban planning (all these topics)

The forgotten solution Transit investment should and will be a part of the peak oil solution	Ryan Avent	01 Apr 2008	Gristmill
Joseph Romm has made a number of very good points in his new Salon piece (and accompanying Gristmill post) on the problem of peak oil. He is, in my view, quite correct that oil prices will continue to increase based on supply and demand fundamentals. He is right that alternative oil source development would be a monumental mistake, and that biofuels are unlikely to be much help either. And I'd like to strongly associate myself with his statement that a solution to the cli ...
Topics: placemaking, oil, energy, urban planning, public transportation (all these topics)

Urban Decay Boston looks to generate electricity from indoor composting		26 Mar 2008	News
Posted at 3:07 PM on 26 Mar 2008 The city of Boston is looking to build an urban, indoor composting facility. Most cities, if they compost at all, transport food and yard waste in gas-guzzling trucks to dumps outside the city limits, where energy and methane from decomposing biomass get lost to the atmosphere. The first-of-its-kind proposed Boston facility would generate electricity from rotting leaves and fruit, enough to ...
Topics: Boston, energy, innovation, news, placemaking, urban planning, waste (all these topics)

The Pricing Is Right New York's new governor supports congestion pricing		24 Mar 2008	News
Posted at 2:40 PM on 24 Mar 2008 Brand-spankin'-new New York Gov. David Paterson has announced his support for a controversial congestion pricing plan. The proposal, put forward by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and supported by former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, would charge $8 to drivers entering Manhattan during peak hours. Said Paterson in a written statement, "Congestion pricing addresses two urgent concerns of th ...
Topics: air pollution, climate, climate change mitigation, New York, New York City, news, placemaking, politics, state politics, urban planning (all these topics)

Biloxi Clues A post-Katrina homebuilding project gives hope for weathering severe storms	Emily Gertz	20 Mar 2008	Grist Feature
When Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Mississippi on August 29, 2005, the storm's 125-mile-an-hour winds and 25-foot wall of seawater ground homes, boats, and businesses into matchsticks across the state's three coastal counties: Jackson, Hancock, and Harrison. The cities of Waveland and Bay St. Louis, roughly 20 miles east of the Mississippi-Louisiana state line, were practical ...
Topics: Army Corps of Engineers, green building, Mississippi, Mississippi River, placemaking, severe weather, urban planning (all these topics)

Tempting Fate Fifteen years after the Great Flood of 1993, floodplain development is booming	Emily Gertz	19 Mar 2008	Grist Feature
Once it was a cornfield; now it's a Wal-Mart, a Taco Bell, a Target. Here along a stretch of Missouri's Highway 40, in the Chesterfield Valley area just west of downtown St. Louis, what's said to be the largest strip mall in the country sits on about 46 acres of Mississippi River bottomlands. Less than 20 years ago, the land was open space. Press Play to watch with narration, o ...
Topics: Army Corps of Engineers, Mississippi River, placemaking, severe weather, urban planning (all these topics)

All close together now A post-petroleum American dream	Jon Rynn	13 Mar 2008	Gristmill
'This craziness is not sustainable,' concludes The New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert, and he's talking about the economy, not the environment. He continues: Without an educated and empowered work force, without sustained investment in the infrastructure and technologies that foster long-term employment, and without a system of taxation that can actually pay for the services provided by government, the American dream as we know it will expire. And without pet ...
Topics: agriculture, cars, energy, placemaking, public transportation, urban planning (all these topics)

The Way You Move Climate change has it out for transportation infrastructure, says report		11 Mar 2008	News
Posted at 5:08 PM on 11 Mar 2008 Climate change is likely to wreak havoc on U.S. transportation infrastructure, according to a report released Tuesday by the National Research Council. Think bridge joints weakened by too-high temperatures, flooded tunnels, shipping disrupted by heavy storms, roads threatened by erosion, and much, much more! Coastal regions are likely to be especially hard hit, as more and ...
Topics: climate, climate change impacts, news, placemaking, public transportation, urban planning (all these topics)

Driving in circles A fun traffic simulator and lessons learned	Clark Williams-Derry	11 Mar 2008	Gristmill
Via Brad Plumer: a traffic jam in in a bottle. To me, it's pretty remarkable how closely the real-world experiment above matches up with this java-based computer traffic simulator. Warning: if you click the last link, and you're at all geeky, prepare to lose your afternoon! A few years back I wasted hour after hour playing with the java settings, and watching "traffic" jams materialize and melt -- just like in real life. My favorite quirk: fo ...
Topics: cars, urban planning (all these topics)

Green building certified! Again! New certification planned by safety group	Katharine Wroth	07 Mar 2008	Gristmill
Maybe this all makes more sense to green builders than it does to me, but I see news today of plans to develop another new green-building certification, this one sponsored by the International Code Council. It seems like only yesterday three weeks ago that the National Association of Home Builders launched its own 'education, verification, and certification' program, and of course our pal LEED keeps chugging along. Oh wait, look what happens when you read the who ...
Topics: green building, placemaking, urban planning (all these topics)

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