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Dynamic Design, Dynamic Cities
Bryn Davidson, Dynamic Cities Project
Dynamic Design = Green + Net Positive + Resilient

Through my parallel work as a practicing architect and peak oil / climate change researcher I've often struggled to fully incorporate 'transition savvy' ideas into the residential and urban design projects with which I actually make a living. This presentation, which was given as part of a forum hosted by Architecture for Humanity in Vancouver, samples some of my past projects and the lessons I've taken away from each.

The resulting bundle of strategies I call Dynamic Design, and focus not only on being greener but also on building local resiliency. In addition, the approach focuses on renovation (and/or) replacement as a means to create projects that are measurably 'net positive'.

Together, I believe these strategies can be applied as the next step beyond LEED and Smart Growth urban planning. Through dynamic design we can create Dynamic Cities which will serve us well through the coming energy transition, and will contribute to real - measurable - improvements in GHG emissions and other environmental impacts.

Presentation Slides:
http://dynamiccities.squarespace.com/storage/Bryn%20Davidson%20-%20AFH%2...

Architecture for Humanity, Vancouver:
http://afh-vancouver.org/main/
(3 June 2009)

White Rooftops May Help Slow Warming
David A. Fahrenthold, Washington Post
Energy Secretary Pitches Low-Tech Idea to Reflect Solar Energy Back Into Space
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Could climate change be staved off by making the United States look like a scene from "Mamma Mia!"?

That was suggested in a recent talk by Energy Secretary Steven Chu -- although, because he was speaking to Nobel laureates, he did not mention the ABBA musical set in the Greek islands. He said that global warming could be slowed by a low-tech idea that has nothing to do with coal plants or solar panels: white roofs.

Making roofs white "changes the reflectivity . . . of the Earth, so the sunlight comes in, it's reflected back into space," Chu said. "This is something very simple that we can do immediately," he said later.

Chu has brought increased attention to an idea that -- depending on your perspective -- is either fairly new, or as old as Mediterranean villages, desert robes and Colonel Sanders's summer suit. Climate scientists say that the reflective properties of the color white, if applied on enough of the world's rooftops, might actually be a brake on global warming.
(14 June 2009)

US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive
Tom Leonard, Telegraph (UK)
Dozens of US cities may have entire neighbourhoods bulldozed as part of drastic "shrink to survive" proposals being considered by the Obama administration to tackle economic decline.
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The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature.

Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area.

The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint.

Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.

Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.

Most are former industrial cities in the "rust belt" of America's Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside.

"The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we're all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way," said Mr Kildee. "Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity."
(12 June 2009)

Suburban dream lives on in Australia
Natasha Bita, The Australian
DIVING into debt, Katie and Brett Nash are living the great Australian dream. Having boarded with Katie's parents for a year to save a deposit, the Brisbane couple borrowed $350,000 to buy a four-bedroom brick house with a big back yard in the outer bayside suburb of Alexandra Hills in Brisbane six weeks ago.

But Brett then lost his job as a cement truck driver, so his wife is spending half her take-home pay as a nurse to meet the $1900-a-month mortgage. Despite the difficulties, the Nashes are delighted they will no longer have to pay "dead rent" to a landlord.

... The Nashes are among a record number of Australians who took on a mortgage in April, as first-home buyers rushed to cash in on the federal government's first-home buyers grant ($14,000 for established homes and $21,000 for new properties) before it is phased out from September.

... In the 1950s, the average house in Australia's capital cities cost three years of average earnings; today it costs seven years of average earnings. And two-thirds of low-income households are now spending 30 per cent of their disposable income on housing: the benchmark for "housing stress".
(13 June 2009)
Suggested by Stuart McCarthy who writes:
International readers may be astonished to discover that a major part of the Australian government's economic stimulus package in response to the global financial crisis was to further inflate the housing bubble via first-home owner grants of up to $21,000. This is the face of Australia's sub-prime mortgage crisis in the making.

KunstlerCast (podcast)
Duncan Crary, KunstlerCast
The KunstlerCast is a weekly audio program about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl.

Featuring: James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency and other books.

Duncan Crary, host/producer, speaks with Kunstler weekly about the failure of suburbia and the inevitable end of this living arrangement with no future.

I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work.

- James Howard Kunstler,
from The Geography of Nowhere

What the Critics Say about the KunstlerCast

"...a weekly podcast that offers some of the smartest, most honest urban commentary around -- online or off."

-- Columbia Journalism Review

"...the KunstlerCast delivers the goods, with inspired rants on a variety of subjects related to American places (and non-places) and the coming peak oil reality."
--TreeHugger

Recent podcasts:
#67 Jaime Correa - The 40 Percent Plan
#66 New Listener Orientation
#65 Virtual Tour of Detroit
#64 Contracting Cities and Urban Chickens
(June 2009)
Many podcasts available at the site.