Friday, June 20, 2008

Fixing all our development problems

As I see it, one of the most vexing impediments facing urban planners and sustainability advocates is our horrible built environment, structured as it has been for at least the last 50 years around the car. Hard to make walkable communities when the whole usable area is taken up by roads and suburban-density subdivisions. Residents of Greensburg, Kansas have found a solution:
Last May, an EF 5 tornado hit western Kansas. In Greensburg, the storm leveled every building, picked up cars and tossed them into rooftops, demolished the streets, left more than two-thirds of the town’s population homeless and killed 11 people.

... [T]he people of Greensburg decided not only to stay, rebuild and provide aid but also to take a revolutionary approach to doing so -- the environmentally sustainable way. City leaders saw their chance to change the city into a place where everyone would want to be, an environmentally sustainable place that would serve as an example for towns everywhere.

So, looks like all we have to do is encourage this global climate thing for a bit longer, wait for all of our creations to be ground to dust by tornadoes and floods, then start over. Hurrah!

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