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Monday, October 5, 2015

Street Smarts

This piece in the Minneapolis Star Tribune makes a case for greater density and higher quality buildings as a way for communities to generate the tax base that they need in order to pay for the maintenance and repair of the infrastructure that they have. Going forward, municipalities need to grow in more incremental and higher-density ways to ensure that they don't overbuild their infrastructure; to charge development fees in order to have the funds necessary to maintain their infrastructure; to stop devoting so much of their land to low-density, low-quality development; and to take out under-utilized infrastructure and use the public right-of-way for other economic, environmental or community purposes:

http://www.startribune.com/streetscapes-the-true-costs-of-sprawl/330417251/

Resilient Cities

I gave a TED talk in Minneapolis recently where I argued that the rapid urbanization of the human population, in which we will go from 50% to 75% or more in just this century, represents a survival response on the part of our species in the face of environmental and economic disruptions. Cities stand as the best hope of our species in learning how to live within our ecological footprint in order to sustain ourselves and not join so many of the other species on the planet now facing extinction. Here is the link to the TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xmL8gWi86o