recipe for architectural charm

ingredients:

* grounding roof lines
* legible massing
* engaged relationship with landscape
* simple color palette and harmonious materials
* thoughtful details katie hutchison studio

Is that so hard? Click and learn.

I tend to call the tech “geo-thermal but it really does not matter. The point is that household heating and cooling could be done - either completely or in part - with nothing more complicated than some tubing, a trench or pond and a heat exchanger. Sure there are capital costs; but compared to building another nuclear reactor, high dam or coal fired plant these costs look pretty reasonable. And they would become more and more reasonable as the technology was adopted by more households.

the fact that they satisfy the religious belief of the enviros with respect to CO2 is a lucky co-incidence.

Figures released last week by Statistics Canada, show that in 2005, people in B.C. travelled 50.86 billion kilometres in vehicles weighing 4.5 tonnes or less. That is, everything from a Hummer to a Smart car.

That compares to 2004, when they travelled 55.94 billion km by car or light truck, and 2000, the year surveys of this kind began, when they travelled 54.18 billion km. the times colonist

The Rick Mercer Effect, a commitment to Kyoto?

Then there’s the price of gas. “If they do the same survey a year from now, there will be less driving because the price of gas has gone up so much,” Hardie (BC Transit spokesman) said. “We have seen a significant shift to transit ridership this year, and we have to attribute that to a rise in the price of gas.”

B.C. Automobile Association president Bill Bullis also put the decrease down to prices at the pump. “I know of no other phenomenon to explain it,” Bullis said. “That’s a big mileage decrease. That’s an awful lot of kilometres.”

It is not a major bit of economic news that as price increases demand falls. Assuming that there are actual alternatives. In both Vancouver and Victoria a long term fully integrated transport strategy - where the people who run the buses also build the bridges and the Skytrains - is beginning to pay off.  For all of the chat about carbon taxes and other harebrained schemes for meeting the Kyoto targets (and grant China even more room to pump CO2 into the atmosphere) price and a bit of planning will actually reduce miles driven and therefore CO2 emitted.

Taking the bus, working from home, riding a bike, carpooling; Rick Mercer can caper about for years and people’s habits will not change. But if the price of gas doubles you bet the SUV will stay in the garage.

Mark Holland understands what it actually takes to devise conservation, alternative energy, bright green strategies. It is worth going over to the Tyee and reading right through.

Of course, $75.00 a barrel oil makes a lot of green planning and densification much more attractive. And the prospect of $100.00 a barrel oil is no longer fantastic.

Conservation strategies ranging from higher mileage cars to increased density make a lot more economic sense when oil is expensive. So do bright green technologies. But, most of all, the shift towards a more efficient future has to make sense to the folks who actually have the money:

Holland’s group works its magic by taking the concepts underlying sustainability — think local agriculture and community energy-generation — and finding the business upside hidden within. “We take the stuff that is granola, but real, and we put it in a blue suit,” he says. “We march it into the room with a haircut.”
the tyee

Update:

Fifty-five percent of drivers said they had reduced their driving because of high gas prices, according to a poll released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center. About one in five said they had started carpooling or sharing rides more often, while 12 percent said they had begun using mass transit more often.
examiner.com This is hardly a surprise. As gas prices go up people are going to have huge incentives to reduce the miles they drive. Who knows, some may even walk or bike.

Unless China finds a way to clean up its coal plants and the thousands of factories that burn coal, pollution will soar both at home and abroad. The increase in global-warming gases from China’s coal use will probably exceed that for all industrialized countries combined over the next 25 years, surpassing by five times the reduction in such emissions that the Kyoto Protocol seeks.
nyt

I was reading an irritating little screed in one of Victoria’s soft-letie free mags which suggests that the haprer government’s gutting of the feds Kyoto compliance programs was oh so very wrong. After all, every country in the world - except for the bad old US (and Australia and India….) had signed on and that was such a good thing in itself.

Of course the reality is and remains that the miniscule gains which may have come about as a result of Kyoto (though more likely the rising price of oil) have been entirely wiped out by China’s rush to industrialize. (And that is to ignore entirely India’s similar rush which is eaqually “dirty”.)

If we grant the piety that global warming a) does exists, b) is to some degree a product of human action rather than increased solar output or the effect of a long cycle we have no clue about) Kyoto is precisely the wrong way to deal with it.

Kyoto famously excluded China and India from the first round. It is being ignored by dozens of nations who have discovered the cost of complaince is staggering. And it is rendered superfulous by a set of economic and scientific trends.

Ultimately, the solution to whatever the human component of global warming is will rest on the rise in the price of energy as energy sources become scarcer. You don’t have to believe in “peak oil” to realize that the price of oil will continue to rise as primarily Asian demand increases. This will be true for coal as well.

As that price goes up the attractions of the alternatives to fosil fuels and the efficiency gains in the use of those fuels will tend to dampen the amount of alledgedly greenhouse gases which are emitted.

Which bothers the soft left because it is a market/technical/scientific solution to a problem rather than a statist, interventionalist, jobs for the boys fix. However, $3.00 a litre gas will do more than all the government programs in the world to promote alternatives to fossil fuel use.

Of course you can’t hit Harper over the head with a market driven solution so where’s the fun in that.

Jacobs was largely self educated which meant she seldom knew the “received wisdom” when she set out to write her books. Instead she went and looked at what worked and what did not.

To give a simple example, in the Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) she looked at the difference between vibrant parts of a city and its dead zones. While many commentators would cite income levels or on street parking or building height, Jacobs noticed that the length of the blocks themselves determined much of the activity on those blocks. Short blocks, with lots of corners and intersections created enough interest that people would flock to the street and the neighbourhood. Long blocks had exactly the opposite effect.

Jacobs had literally hundreds off these sorts of examples and insights. If you want to explain economies Jacobs thought you had to start at the level of what people actually did and how they acquired the knowledge to do more. If you want to understand why downtowns died you had to look at the effects of freeways and skyscrapers which were only occupied eight hours a day.

For Jacobs, the issues in urban planning or economic management were first and foremost questions about what actual people actually did. She had little time for theory or concepts of economic rationality and none at all for the conceits of planners.

Politically she always struck me as an agnostic. Some of her ideas - for example that freeways were a garrot at the neck of cities - were adopted by the center left; others, a belief in radical decentralization and an inherent scepticism about the ability of government to “get it right” are the staples of the libertarian right. Over the years I’ve found that in conversations with smart people on the left and the right her name often comes up. Not as an authority to buttress a particular argument; rather as a touchstone of rational, observational, political thinking.

Over the last half century her ideas have shaped urban planning models and developments. Places which work - and here I am thinking of Vancouver’s Granville Island and downtown in general, have implicitly adopted her short blocks, mixed use, people before cars, view of the world.

In the last few years Jacobs has been writing increasingly bleak books foreseeing enviornmental disaster and the destruction of the norms which allow professionals and an educated middle class to thrive. She may very well be right; but as more and more cities adopt Jacobs’ strategies there is every possibility that a marriage of the enviornment and what might be called a profoundly human life will emerge.

It was Canada’s great good fortune that Jacobs left the United States as her sons neared draft age during the Viet Nam war. As well as her tremendous body of work, Jacobs provided Canadians with a model of how an intellectual can work in public. Her influence and her ideas have been adopted in many of Canada’s cities. More importantly, her committment to examining how people actually go about their daily lives provides a model for people who want to think clearly about the issues which we grapple with in the 21st century.

Update: James Bow has an appreciation of Jane Jacobs at his site.

Update 2: The New York Times gives us a four web page appreciation of Jacobs which includes this quote from Robert Fulford:

Her complete dismissal of zoning in cities caused Robert Fulford, a columnist for The Financial Times of Canada, to observe in The New York Times Book Review that single-use zoning was the principal activity of city planners.

“It was as if she had somehow tried to persuade dentists that filling teeth did more harm than good,” he wrote.
the new york times

Update 3: Rational Reasons has an appreciation of Jacobs from a leftish position which is well worth reading. And Michael Stickings writes,

she was truly one of our greatest and most humane advocates for a fuller, richer existence amid the din of modern life.
the reaction

Update 4: And Andrew Spicer links to his own delightful description of an evening with the then 88 year old Jane Jacobs reading from The Dark Age Ahead:

Jacobs slammed New Urbanism, saying that it only produces more urban sprawl, but with porches.

This is as a result of the 3 rules of planners, that she says have come down as unsubstantiated dogma, contrary to the evidence of experience:

1. High ground coverages are bad
2. High densities are bad
3. The mingling of commercial or other work uses with residences is bad
andrew spicer

Mark at Section 15 writes:

Jane’s most influential book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is likely what launched me on my voyage to being a Green.

I first read it while in university back in 1987. Already interested in urban planning and design, the contents of that book knocked my brain out of first gear — heck, it broke my gear box –
section 15

Update 5: The folks in Jane Jacobs Toronto neighbourhood - the deepest Annex - have set up a blog and condolence book which you can find here: http://www.JaneJacobs.TYO.ca

A great article on the transformation of the semi-skid row along West Hasting Street in Vancouver.

“The community” in this case are, for the most part poor, often drug addited or alcoholic, people living in SROs, shelters and or the street. These are people who have been entirely left behing in Vancouver’s (in my view ill advised) rush to become a “world class” city. But this community has absorbed Jane Jacobs through its pores. Couldn’t miss it when they had to walk miles to buy reasonably fresh food or a razor.

The anti-density mantra of the NIMBY yuppies is often a code for keeping the sort of people who live near West Hastings out of their neighbourhoods. But for the sort of people who actually live near West Hastings, density is one of the few things which can help tranform their neighbour hood and with it their lives.

German Loremo AG will introduce their ultra Efficient Car at the Motor Show 2006 (site) in Geneva next week.

The car start-up developed a light-weight passenger car with outstanding aerodynamics. The Loremo LS is powered by a 2 cylinder Turbo Diesel engine with 20 hp and 160km/h top speed. The amazing thing is that the Loremo only needs 1.5l per 100km. This is approx. 157MPG!
14U news

What is intriguing about this car is that it really does only one thing to achieve the claimed gas milage: it weighs 450kg. Call it 1000 pounds. Combine that with good aerodynamics and an efficient deisel and you triple the fuel efficiency achieved by a hybrid Prius.

This is the leading edge of a revolution in car transportation. The SmartCar, and assorted hybrids, technological innovation is going to radically change the options available for personal transport.

This is a market in action. If the price of gasoline goes up there are going to be increasing incentives for cars which use that gasoline more efficiently. No magic or carbon tax needed. Just the right price signal.

Unfortunately, the world auto industry and its American end has been fairly slow in adapting to higher oil prices and what they imply. One of the happier consequences of Hurricane Katrina was a temporary bump in gas prices and, for a few months, an unwillingness on the part of consumers to buy SUVs. That, of course, is a signal even GM could have understood. But it did not last long enough.

During the seventies oil shock American car manufacturers lost huge market share to foreign competition. One would think they would have learned something. As more people begin to demand radically increased gas mileage the demand will be created for lightweight, high efficiency, cars. And, as consumers demonstrated in the 70’s oil shock, they will not much care if the car is built in North America or in India.

From a larger perspective, a gradual replacement of 30MPG cars with 150MPG cars will reduce demand for oil rather radically. Which, in turn, will ensure that price rises are gradual - over the long run. But for this demand to be created there have to be real products available. It will take a while. But the uptake of the Prius - which is not all that fuel efficient - suggest there is a huge potential market.

I’d agree. It is a wonderful city. But I have to say that Victoria, being Vancouver 35 years ago, smokes Vancouver in terms of livability simply because Vancouver, 35 years ago would smoke Vancouver today. Imagine a city where you can get your car fixed in a gas station, where the lineup at the liquor store on Christmas Eve was, er, two people.

Yes, it is a bit sleepy. but if I wanted dynamic I’d live in New York or LA or London, not Vancouver. Dynamic and livable are two rather different qualities.

John Mathews of Universal Toyota in San Antonio has witnessed the day that auto industry executives in Detroit said would never come.

“We are seeing people who are driving $40,000 Suburbans trading them in on $15,000 Corollas,” said Mathews, who manages a dealership in a state where big trucks and sport-utility vehicles rule the roads. “The last 30 days have been unlike anything I’ve ever seen in the automotive industry.”
washington post

Well, duh.

People who pay attention to economics have known that the effect of higher gas prices would be to make gas guzzlers obsolete. The fact this is happening as gas prices are rising is not really news. The fact that SUV resale prices are cratering…not news.

Consumers are smart. They don’t want to stop driving and they don’t wat to pay a couple of hundred dollars to fill up a land boat. You don’t need a Nobel Prize to figure that small car sales are going to rocket and a lot of big SUVs are going to be sitting on the lots for a very long time.