Housing & urban design

John Michael Greer has officially established himself as an institution within the peak oil community. Truly one of the finest minds working on the predicament of modern-day industrial civilization, he is so well-read in so many fields that he regularly gains access to insights that utterly elude his contemporaries. For this he is treasured by a growing number of loyal readers—and, I suspect, hated by equally many fellow bloggers who wish that they could be half as good.

-Building With Whole Trees
-From TED: Edward Burtynsky photographs the landscape of oil
-Straight Talk for the Planetary Era: A Trio of Book Reviews
-Eric Sanderson pictures New York -- before the City
-Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth sequel stresses spiritual argument on climate

-Odense: Masterplan for sustainable mobility
-Empty homes: Properties with potential
-Metropolitan Glory
-Greenest Place in the U.S.? It’s Not Where You Think

-Permaculture Principles: Nature's Design for our Living World
-Dan Douglas' European vision for our capital city
-Investigating The Potential For The Expansion Of Urban Agriculture In The City Of Edinburgh

-Boom Towns
-Bloomberg’s “PlaNYC” Continues Forward Moves
-Review: My Kind of Transit: Rethinking Public Transportation in America

-The First Review of ‘Local Food’
-Eat Locally Grown Food All Year
-Rethinking the Front Yard: Cities Make Room For Urban Farms
-Growing a Revolution
-Smaller cities seen leading the way in urban agriculture
-Planting The Seeds For Sustainability

-What Have We Done to Democracy
-Planetary Boundaries and The Failure of Environmentalism
-Will modern-day flaneurs help rebuild fragmented communities?

-Resilience Takes Form - A Handbook for Transition
-A Detailed Analysis of Somerset County Council’s Transition Resolution
-Curry Stone Prize Finalists announced, includes Treehugger fave Rob Hopkins

-Rethinking the Street Space: Toolkits and Street Design Manuals
-One day, all houses will be built this way
-Stockton Williams on urban retrofits, Obama, and the sexiness of caulking guns

In our history, the American nation committed obvious sins against select groups of people, and we've paid bitterly for some of that. But now it's our sins against the land itself that threaten to sink the USA as a viable enterprise.

-What we need to form Florida’s green economy
-Britain's first housing co-op leads the way in sustainable living
-No Impact Man and the Pursuit of Happiness
-Enabling Inward Community Investment: insights from the DTA conference
-Squatters’ rights
-One Man’s Trash ...
-Real people, real preparation, Part 5, Carolyn Baker Interviews Robin Rucker
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Within the span of a couple generations, we abandoned a durable, finely textured, life-affirming set of living arrangements characterized by self-sufficient family farms intermixed with small towns that provided commerce, services, and culture. Worse yet, we traded that model for a coarse-scaled arrangement wholly dependent on ready access to cheap fossil fuels.

-How on Earth Can We Feed 8 Billion People?
-Solar Power from Space: Moving Beyond Science Fiction
-Johnson announces awards for 'low carbon zones'
-The Cruel Cost of Clunkers
-How to Grow Democracy
-Bike-o-rama: A Roundup of the Best in New Bikes, Bike Infrastructure, Blogs, Books and More

It is a sign that the world may be upside down when French tourists in Las Vegas take pictures of themselves in front of the Paris Las Vegas hotel and casino complex which includes a half-scale replica of the Eiffel Tower. And, yet this is not the strangest behavior I observed recently during a trip to southern Nevada, an area that along with the much of the West is suffering through the worst drought on record.

-Apocalypse Later? I'm Going Local Now.
-Local Future: Peak Oil, Climate Change & the Economic Crisis
-LOOK: Lanefab Microhousing