Not So Much - blog

PART 4: Energy

Another major component of our future cities is energy. Transforming our transportation and changing the layout of our cities will already give us a huge relief in the way of energy consumption, but there are much more we can do to cut down on wasted energy resources. We can get started with the low hanging fruit, which in my opinion is solar and wind (depending on the location) power. These are free resources that we should go after first. In communities where there is a great deal of sun year round, we need to integrate solar collection panels on rooftops of building and houses. Our parking garages should all have solar panels on the roof, so that electric powered cars can plug in while they are parked. We can look at storing energy in the form of hot water underneath the miles of black topped roads. This stored (hot water) energy can be utilized when the sun is not out. In places where wind is abundant, wind turbines can be used to generate energy. Pumping water uphill while wind is plentiful can be stored and with the help of gravity, turned into power when the wind stops blowing.

Another important energy saver within our communities, is how we use (or waste) our water resources. We can divert a large amount of waste water that will need to be processed by city treatment plants by incorporating rainwater harvesting and greywater systems used for individual home irrigation. This will spread the water resources throughout the community, rather then having a single extremely wasteful and energy intensive water treatment plant burdened with the task of cleaning all our water. There is no reason why we should be watering our lawns and gardens with water that has gone through the expensive and energy intensive process we use to clean our drinking water. By catching and spreading water on individual properties, we will be putting water back into the ecosystem for future use. Currently we try to move all the water as quickly as possible off the all the land and into water treatment or back into the ocean. The earth needs that water to maintain it's top soil to keep our land healthy and fertile.

Improvements in our energy use can benefit the most from the latest in technology. As we begin to rebuild our infrastructure with new technologies like the Smart Grid we will be able to install home and building feedback systems. These feedback systems can tell us what our building's carbon footprint is. It can give us details about which rooms are draining too much electricity, even alert us if it thinks we are wasting precious energy in our homes. Overall, there are huge potentials to improve our energy use, as well as great economic opportunities for entrepreneurs to benefit greatly.

Continued...

PART 3: City Planning

Although I chose to discuss City Planning second, I think city planning is the most important aspect of improving our communities, because without a good city design, none of the changes I envision will work. It is excellent that we are finally beginning to "green" our homes and we are in the process of creating greener vehicles, but this is only a small first step in developing sustainable communities of the future. We need to think of a whole new way of living and designing our cities and dwellings. Designs that take in to account new technology, nature's patterns like Biomimicry, long term growth, harnessing natural energies and eliminating waste. It sounds like a science fiction city, but it isn't that far from reality. I argue that with the right group of skilled professionals and with the vision to weave all these new (some are actually quite old) concepts into a city plan, that we could create an entire city with zero emissions, lower stress on it's residence and a safe and healthy environment to life and raise families.

One idea would be to create small cluster residential communities around agriculture and natural landscape. These small residential pods (consisting of 100 to 500 residents) will be connected by public and private transportation systems that would give the option to of not owning a car, and still be able to reach the community resources. The small pod villages would not allow the large sized vehicles that currently dissect our neighborhoods without a special permit (ie. large delivery or moving vehicles). Instead the communities would be small enough to walk, bike or take an electric mini cars to the necessary transportation points that would be able to move them greater distances. The clusters would have an urban hub that would ideally connect to a high speed rail system. I imagine some of the high speed rail cars would allow the electric mini cars to drive on and plug in. The train cars could have solar panels on their roof to charge the mini cars while they are transported. The urban section would also have dense living spaces above shops and businesses and would be directly adjacent to natural landscape and agriculture that provides the shops and restaurants with fresh produce and raw materials. This would minimize the amount of imported food (hence better food security and less carbon emissions on food transportation, etc.), make the communities more self-sustaining, connect the residents with the farmers that grow their food and provide local food varieties that encourage health and turn the community into a point of interest, which could possibly lead to tourism. Of course the farming would need to follow some form or sustainable guidelines such as the principles of Permaculture which would promote plant diversity, producing healthy soils and using existing energy and resources that are currently on the farming site.

There are certainly many cases where it makes sense to keep commercial and industrial zones outside of our neighborhoods when it comes to public health and safety, there are many benefits in bring parts of it together. By responsibly integrating these different zones together we get to know the local business owners better and even more importantly (and in my opinion the most important) we build a closer relationship with our farmers. That is correct, I said "farmers". This is another one of those large hurdles to get over, but I think it is key to our future. We should bring small community farmers and their plots of land right behind the various markets. So now when you go to the different shops, you know exactly where the tomato sitting in the basket came from. In fact you can just walk behind the store and down the road and that is where the community garden farms are located. This doesn't mean their won't be imported exotic foods, but all the local foods will be part of the community. This is a very important concept in todays discussions of where our food comes from and a key component to our nations food security.

Continued: PART 4

PART 2: Transportation

I decided to jump right into the American obsession with the car, because it plays a major role in the design of our suburban sprawling issues. The obvious problems with our current car dominate transportation system are pollution, pedestrian safety, cost of ownership (on the individual, our environment as well as on our communities and governments) and traffic congestion. Many of these issues have to do with the amount of time we have to spend in our cars and the tremendous distance we must travel in our daily routines. To reduce this time and distance, I envision many small communities with sprinkles of commercial, residential and agriculture all connected by the roads and highways we currently have, as well as to high speed rail. Near or at the entrance to these communities would be a large parking structure to park our current large cars (which over time will become hybrid and electric). The roof of these parking structures will be entirely covered with solar panels to charge the vehicles while they are stored safely and out or any harsh weather conditions. From here you would be able to either take a small (about the size of a large golf cart) electric transport vehicle (I call it a transport vehicle, because I want to leave room for other future ideas such as hover crafts) with a max speed of 30 miles per hour within the community pedestrian zone. These mini vehicles would eliminate air and noise pollution within the neighborhoods where family live, play and work. This would also create safer neighborhoods for children to play, since large, fast moving vehicles would be removed from the residential paths. This is very important considering more than 6 million police-reported motor vehicle crashes occurred in the United States in 2007 and 37,248 resulted in fatalities. There were over 45,500 deaths from overall motorized vehicles in 2006. That is more then the 30,896 deaths from firearms or the 37,286 deaths from poisoning in the US in 2006. The car mortality rate is staggering and I often wonder why people aren't marching in the streets to stop this man made hazard as they do about other dangerous social issues. With these smaller, lighter vehicles the neighborhoods will have many benefits:

• Pedestrians will be safer with slower, lighter vehicles
• The cost of building and maintaining roads would greatly be reduced
• The communities would be encouraged to walk or bike more building a stronger community
• Air pollution would be greatly reduced
• The cost for the individual to own a vehicle would be greatly reduced
• New local jobs and businesses would be created to produce these new vehicles
• The barrier to entry for small business to enter the transportation industry would be lowered, creating more competition

There are of course a few very important infrastructure developments that would be dependent on this to work. First, the communities would need to be developed near public transportation, preferably a high speed train that would allow for the riders to drive their small vehicles onto special train cars that would transport the vehicles to their destination. The large garages to park the current standard sized cars would need to be built as well as have the option to rent a mini vehicle to enter the car free communities (more opportunities for businesses and job creation to solve the mini vehicle issue). Finally, the communities would need to be built so our daily destinations are all much shorter distances. This falls into the realm of city planning, which I will delve into next.

The cost of road maintenance would be greatly reduced and the amount of space needed for the large multi-lane roads would be reduced as well. It isn't that far fetched to be dreaming of doing away with the current car scenario in our communities. There is even an upscale community outside of Freiburg, Germany that has already banned cars from within their city.

You may be saying to yourself, "That all sounds great and all, but the American people love their cars too much to make this sort of change." I would argue several things about that way of thinking. First, I believe the main reason we are so attached to our current transportation option, is because our cities, highways, neighborhoods, working and shopping areas are all designed around the current car. So it gives the illusion that it is progress, but in reality it is actually quite impractical and completely unsustainable as our population increases. At some point our population will reach a tipping point and traffic will become a nation crisis. At some point petroleum will become more scarce, and prices will jump yet again. We have already seen the stresses that elevated gas prices have on our populations, so let's be preemptive in dealing with these issues and start to rethink our future transportation solutions. People may love their cars now, but our future cars will be much better and we will look back and wonder why we ever tried to hold on to the older inefficient, polluting, steal danger boxes that were careening down concrete through our neighborhoods. In fact, most of the gas we are burning when we drive down the road in our current inefficient cars is being used to move the car itself and not it's contents or passengers. According to Amory Lovins, physicist and cofounder of the Rocky Mountain Institute environmental think tank, the modern automobiles uses only 1 percent of its energy to move it's occupants to and fro. On the bright side, that gives us a hell of a lot of room to improve.

Continued: PART 3

Our communities are broken. Yes, I said it... no lead in, no introduction, I just went straight to the obvious conclusion that so many critics before me have written regarding the direction the "American Dream" has taken. At first glance some of the quiet, tree lined streets possess the illusion of peace, balance and community, but I would argue that beneath that tranquil facade resides isolation, unsustainable systems and economic sink holes that disconnect the residence living in these suburbia sprawls.

Perhaps when energy, land and raw materials were abundant and the U.S. population growth rate wasn't growing so fast, suburbs may have seemed like a good idea. They no longer make sense. In fact, they are becoming a drain on the environment, health, lifestyle, energy and the economy. These suburban communities are not designed with any sense of long term sustainability or efficiency.

After digging below the surface and seeing just how dysfunctional the design of our modern American communities have become, I got very excited about all the solutions that were within our reach to improve them. In many cases, those solutions would improve the daily lives of it's residence, make it a healthier and safer community and improve both it's economic and environment sustainability. If there is so much low hanging fruit that could be picked to dramatically change these communities in a positive way, why was so little being done? Then I started talking to people about some of the ideas for these improvements, and it became more obvious why things haven't changed yet. We are all quite attached to our current lifestyles, even though they are broken and leading to a very dangerous cliff. Time and time again, I would run into immediate resistance from many types of people: wealthy, poor, Democrat, Republican, progressive, conservative, young, old, etc. There were a few that did share my enthusiasm for some of these solutions, but it was certainly a minority.

So then I began to change how I presented the solutions, and it seemed like more people were receptive to what I was saying (this may have been to just get me to stop talking about it as well). Rather then approach it as giving up their old lifestyle, I began to show them they could trade it in for something better. It isn't a matter of going back to hard labor in fields and using a mule to transport your goods, rather it is changing how we organize our lives to allow some of the modern technologies that don't fit into the suburban sprawl model. This is still a challenge, but once I was able to show them that this wouldn't make their lives more complicated like going back to horse and buggy and morris code, but rather improve their daily lives and give them that valuable free time that technology has been promising for so long, the reception was much more positive.

So, making the assumption that there is something glaringly wrong, now what? I think it is time for us to completely rethink the design of our communities. This time we know what not to do and we can even raise the bar for something much better then what we were previously striving to achieve. So I will give you my vision of the future of the American community. I want to present to you that if we change the way we organize our communities, it will solve many of the existing problems we are facing today including pollution, traffic, safety & security, lifestyle stresses and cost of living. That is a tall order, but our broken communities weren't originally designed with a long term view, but rather they were developed in a time when resources were plentiful and cheap and the population was relatively low. I will delve into the details of 5 aspects of our communities that need the most change: Transportation, City Planning, Energy, Home Design, Our Perceptions. I will also be posting a rough sketch of what one of these communities might look like.

Continued: PART 2

I just finished reading "Botany of Desire" by Michael Pollan, and it is an amazing read. It has inspired me to take a close look, and in many cases change, my eating and living habits. Now when I walk into a food market I begin asking myself: where did this food come from? ... and how did it get here? This new awareness does make my trips to the grocery store like an investigation of a crime scene which probably adds an extra 45 minutes to my shopping excursion, but now I feel more in control of the important decisions of what I put into my body on a daily basis.

Before reading this book, I already bought a lot of organic vegetables and took the food I put into my body seriously, but now I am seeing food in a much more dynamic way, as it starts from the dirt until it ends up on my plate. Everything from our monoculture practices of our agriculture industry to genetic engineering to the mysterious concoctions coming out of Cargill.

Pollan discusses in great depth the Apple, Tulip, Marijuana and the Potato, and how they relate to the human desires Sweetness, Beauty, Intoxication and Control. Not only are his ideas full of insight and information, but they open doors for hundreds of other conversations, which I hope delve into when I ready his book next book, "Omnivore's Dilemma".