This week I happened to find new articles about three of my favourite measures to transform cities, make them more resilient, reduce CO2 emissions, and make them more liveable. Each of these could be a separate post but they also make sense together as examples of how to achieve large impacts without having to invent anything, simply changing how things are done.
Sometimes, you find articles that have a certain twist of phrase or formula that you know you’ll use again and again. This short piece on the benefits of ‘slow cities’, by the authors of a book on the same topic, includes such a phrase. Instead of “mobility” (how far you can go in a given time), the goal of the “slow city” is accessibility (how much you can get to in that time).
Even though humans build cities, in a way creating our own habitats, we don’t completely understand the interactions of this built environment with nature and how much comfort or discomfort we might experience. Throw in the climate weirding, which brings more frequent extremes of heat, precipitation, as well as quick variations, and you quickly see how this understanding must be much more detailed and the lessons applied. The Science Museum of Virginia and the Portland State University SUPR Lab teamed up with a network of local collaborators, volunteers, and newscasters to measure Richmond’s heat island effect.
What would be your ideal city? There are likely as many answers as there are people but also likely to be a lot of common ground. The team at SPACE10, IKEA’s innovation lab have written a book on the topic, appropriately titled, The Ideal City.
In this short article by Kim Stanley Robinson for Bloomberg Green, the sci-fi author and climate thinker writes about the “30 by 30” plan to protect 30% of land by 2030, which a growing number of countries are joining, and how it echoes “the preeminent conservation biologist of our time”, E.O. Wilson who advocated for the protection of 50% of land on the planet “for the sake of the thousands of species now in danger of extinction.”
