Urban Design

An interview with “Pattern Language” author Christopher Alexander

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Christopher Alexander, architect, thinker, designer, author of the seminal ‘A Pattern Language’ and of the more recent extraordinary ‘The Nature of Order’ series of books, has long been someone whose work I have admired greatly.

“… I finally realised that every one of these cultures had essentially a system of rules – though ‘rules’ is too strong a word because they were not binding. They weren’t being forced down somebody’s throat, but they were rules that everyone understood and which had to be used to get a good result.”

Real green living

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Consuming less doesn’t mean we have to sacrifice freedom or walk around in grey smocks and eat gruel, as many free marketeers would have us believe. Capitalism can foster innovation, but as the dearth of truly ecologically sane consumer choices reveals, capitalism also hinders innovation when it’s not profitable enough.

The polyculture lawn: A primer

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A polyculture lawn, which some call a clover lawn, provides ecological services, increases biodiversity, helps manage and conserve water, and stores carbon. Not only that, it looks good, it’s safe for children and animals, and it’s cheap. All you have to do is move beyond the idea that a lawn should comprise grass and grass alone.

It is elegant, but is it feasible?

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As Urbanization Week continues, Liz Borkowski put up a great post about feeding cities that includes a nice, rational discussion of the idea of Vertical Farming. I’m glad to see the issue come up, because it has so much power. We have a strong taste for complex and expensive, especially when it looks cool – generally speaking, and in an era of cheap energy and economic stability, there’s at least an argument for doing the complicated fancy thing – first, you can, second, the results are more elegant than what you can generally get without complexity. But in a society with major economic constraints and facing the reality of less, rather than more available energy for consumption, complex and expensive becomes not only a bad idea, but infeasible.

Feeding the hungry cities: Backyard chickens, rooftop gardens, and vertical farming

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As the global supply of fossil fuels shrink and oil gets more expensive, foods that have to be shipped long distances – and particularly those that have to be refrigerated in transit – will become much harder to afford. Urban agriculture, which already seems to be undergoing something of a renaissance, will become more necessary.

Can energy retrofit loans bring wonderful life to economy?

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America is beginning to look a lot like the dark “Pottersville” vision in Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”. Jimmy Stewart’s character George Bailey is shown a town where the middle class has been destroyed and lives in poverty under the thumb of evil Big Banker Henry Potter. Bailey’s heroic efforts to help the middle class saved Bedford Falls. America can help the middle class prepare for energy shortages with energy retrofit loans — or funnel billions to Potter-like promoters of Too Big to Fail energy projects. Where’s that angel Clarence when we need him most?

Cities, towns, and suburbs: Toward zero-carbon buildings

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Despite its persuasive momentum, the green building movement signifies a mere initial advance toward a low-carbon future. Even as we acknowledge that green facilities must be the building blocks of the resilient cities of tomorrow, we face significant barriers to a wholesale shift in the industry. Several challenges dominate…