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Built Environment, Vol. 29, Iss. 3 - Transport and Sustainability: The Role of the Built Environment

Transport and Sustainability: The Role of the Built Environment

Authors: Randall Crane and Lisa A. Scweitzer

Page start: 238

Built Environment
Volume: 29 | Issue: 3 New Urbanism
Cover date: September 2003

New Urbanism attempts to promote ‘greener’ travel through physical design: especially through the provision of compact, walkable neighbourhoods served by transit. Achieving the desired environmental benefits effectively hinges on reducing auto trips, by encouraging people who currently travel by car to switch to walking for short trips and transit for long trips. However, while these aims may be simply asserted, the extent to which they are achievable is complex. The sustainability debate now goes well beyond merely technical discussions of environmental impacts to tackle the stickier political economy of how cities can be made to work in terms of accessibility, how environmental costs and benefits are distributed, and the concept of ‘environmental justice’. Who goes where, based on where they live and work, and the land-use levers available to affect why, have become the core policy focus. In order to understand the extent to which New Urbanism can contribute to sustainable transport and development, it is necessary to consider how different social groups using different modes of transport are related to the design of the built environment.

tagged Crane Scweitzer built_environment city_planning environmental_justice new_urbanism sustainabilty transportation by jn ...on 21-JUN-07

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NYTimes - All Fall Down

November 19, 2006
Architecture
All Fall Down
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

NEW ORLEANS

The ravaged neighborhoods of New Orleans make a grim backdrop for imagining the future of American cities. But despite its criminally slow pace, the rebuilding of this city is emerging as one of the most aggressive works of social engineering in America since the postwar boom of the 1950s. And architecture and urban planning have become critical tools in shaping that new order.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development's plan to demolish four of the city's biggest low-income housing developments at a time when the city still cannot shelter the majority of its residents. The plan, which is being challenged in federal court by local housing advocates, would replace more than 5,000 units of public housing with a range of privately owned mixed-income developments.

Billed as a strategy for relieving the entrenched poverty of the city's urban slums, it is based on familiar arguments about the alienating effects of large-scale postwar inner-city housing.

But this argument seems strangely disingenuous in New Orleans. Built at the height of the New Deal, the city's public housing projects have little in common with the dehumanizing superblocks and grim plazas that have long been an emblem of urban poverty. Modestly scaled, they include some of the best public housing built in the United States.

tagged NYTimes city_planning garden_city new_urbanism public_housing by jn ...on 19-NOV-06