Choosing What Our Cities Will Look Like in a World Without Oil

As we draw nearer to reaching the point of Peak Oil, it benefits us to imagine what our cities will look like in a world without oil. Does this conjure up images of cities turned into urban farms just to produce enough food for us all? Do we devote all our energy to growing, bartering and trading the food we grow? Or will the city become divided, with the wealthy moving to the center while higher costs of living force lower-income families to the outer-ring suburbs, where access to goods, services and transport will be limited?

If we start now, we can choose what we want our cities to look like in the future. We can make them the resilient, sustainable centers of culture, justice, art and creativity that we hope they will become.

Author and Professor Peter Newman is asking us to imagine and then get to work building these urban centers. His book and talk, both titled Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change, ask audiences to honestly look at what will happen to our cities when we reach Peak Oil. During his 90 minute presentation last night at Seattle's City Hall, Newman explained to the full house how peak oil will soon change reality as we know it; and how if we choose to make it so, we can take this challenge as our opportunity to create a functional, just and sustainable world


More at World Changing here.

Throw Away Consumables as Building Materials

www.garbagewarrior.com  

site has links and film trailers of an American architect who uses throw-away consumables to build "earthships";

http://www.earthship.net  (huge US website, incl. hard to get internships)

has UK followers (16 home project) here:

http://www.earthship.co.uk/earthship-homes.htm 
"..15,000 tyres would be recycled to construct the homes, at a time when the UK is planning to burn some 40 million tyres each year at great environmental cost..."

http://www.lowcarbon.co.uk/earthship-brighton  (standing earthship in UK)

Photogallery of Greenroofs

This one was my favorite.

Here is the link if you'd like to look at them.

Dongtan Eco-city for 500,000

Dongtan in Wikipedia, click here.

Quote:
Dongtan is planned to open, with accommodation for 50,000, by the time the Expo 2010 opens in Shanghai. By 2040, the city is slated to be one-third the size of Manhattan with a total eventual population of 500,000.

Dongtan was presented at the United Nations World Urban Forum by China as an example of an eco-city, and is the first of up to four such cities to be designed and built in China by Arup, a global design and engineering company. The cities are planned to be ecologically friendly, with zero-greenhouse-emission transit and complete self-sufficiency in water and energy, together with the use of zero energy building principles. However, the planned ecological footprint for each citizen in Dongtan is currently 2.2 hectares[1], higher than the 1.9 hectares that is theoretically sustainable on a global scale.

Dongtan proposes to have only green transport movements along its coastline. People will arrive at the coast and leave their cars behind, traveling along the shore as pedestrians, cyclists or on sustainable public transport vehicles.

Steven Finnegan, a British Environmental architect is working on the project.

An Invitation from Greg Peterson and the Urban Farm

Hi all,

Many of you know me from my work either as a graduate student in Environmental Planning at ASU or from my work at the Urban Farm in Phoenix. Well I have recently launched a new venture which includes an extensive webportal and television show called Smart Spaces: Inside & Out.

Each week we publish a new article on just how we can live a greener lifestyle. The article includes an Innovative Idea that is designed to spark your thinking in this area. I have included below this weeks Innovative Idea. I would like to invite you to subscribe (it's free) to our weekly tip here.

Again I want to thank you all for your awesome continued support of the work that I do. I feel blessed each day that I get to follow my heart and will continue to do it for a very long time.

Greg Peterson

June 11, 2007 Innovative Idea

This weeks article is the forward from a really great tool that helps you figure out the size of your ecological footprint. Our ecological footprint reflects as the impact of our everyday choices on the natural environment and believe it or not the cumulative effect of the choices that we make every day can make a difference.

"Anyone who knows me knows that for more than 25 years I've been preaching that at a small percentage of [us] changing the way [we] shop and the way we live can be a powerful force for good in the environment, says Joel Makower, Editor of The Green Consumer Letter.

EarthScore provides a cool scoring system designed to help us measure our personal impact with the idea that by understanding our individual habits and lifestyles, over time, we can identify where we can truly make a difference. Please read our article of the week for more information on the topic at Smart Spaces TV.


We look forward to your comments, interactions and feedback.

Greg Peterson
Editor
SmartSpacesTV.com
Greg@SmartSpacesTV.com

PS. Got a great tip you want to share? Visit Smart Spaces TV connect and share it.