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Shrinking to Fit the Interstices
Sarah Rich, WorldChanging
Urban density makes sustainable cities possible. The more closely together we live, the more we share amenities, and the less space we take up for our personal needs, the smaller our collective footprints become. But getting more compact means changing the commonly accepted correlation between McMansions and good living.

The Japanese lead the way in proving the benefits of small spaces. By virtue of long-held tradition and the necessity of finding comfort in populous cities like Tokyo, designing homes for tiny in-between spaces has become a modern art.
(20 March 2007)

How green grows my roof
Randy Gragg, Portland Oregonian
Two visionaries see eco-salvation, though in different ways, by converting heat-soaking, rain-sloughing building tops into living things
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...two eco-activists are waging the same revolution, but on very different fronts. Liptan wants to plant the rooftops any kind of green; Hogan wants to cultivate colorful rooftop art.

As the chief advocate for ecoroofs at the Portland Bureau of Environmental Services, Liptan's goals are modest: to "keep as much storm water as possible out of the city's sewer system." As one of the country's leading horticulturists, Hogan wants to "green the city with a sense of optimism."

Also known as green or living roofs, ecoroofs are nothing new. Evidence of sod roofs dating to 3000 B.C. or earlier has been found in Scotland. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, featured a version. By the Middle Ages they were standard equipment on Scandinavian rural houses.

But in the early 1970s, German designers revived the tradition in higher-tech, lightweight, urban forms to perform the functions they always have: absorbing rainwater, insulating buildings, and cleaning and cooling the air.

In the past decade American cities have joined in, perhaps most flamboyantly in the Midwest, where Chicago Mayor Richard Daley topped City Hall with one and Kansas City initiated a metro-wide goal of "10,000 Rain Gardens."

With more than 80 ecoroofs sprinkled through the metropolitan area and many more on the way, Portland is getting the spirit, too. But, true to the city's tradition, it started at the grassroots, not by a directive from on high. In fact, Liptan's epiphany occurred in 1994, when he looked at the back of a dish-soap bottle, and Hogan's came last year as he fixed the city's highest-profile ecoroof failure.
(18 March 2007)

Low-carbon houses given tax breaks
Michael McCarthy, The Independent
Our homes, said the Chancellor, account for one-quarter of Britain's carbon dioxide emissions, and he provided a series of measures designed to encourage the development of low-carbon houses - "benefiting the climate through lower emissions, and benefiting consumers through lower bills".

He extended the grants for microgeneration - generating some of your own electricity instead of relying entirely on the National Grid, which wastes much of the energy it creates in transmitting it long distances - and he started the process by which people who do that could sell their surpluses back to the Grid and receive proper income.

He scrapped stamp duty until 2012 on all new zero-carbon homes up to half a million pounds in value. He also announced that Britain was proposing in the EU that the rate of VAT on energy-saving and environmentally friendly products in the home should be reduced from 17.5 per cent to 5 per cent.

But for some campaigners, he simply did not go far enough. ..
(22 Mar 2007)