There are many beautyful old trees in the area where we live. Now in autumn they show their golden dresses and make me feel whole and calm.

***

Wenn man durch den Freiburger Stadtteil Vauban spaziert, findet man viele alte Bäume. Obwohl der Stadtteil dicht besiedelt ist, fühlt man sich trotzdem wohl udn nicht beengt. Eine gute Stadtteilplanung und -architektur mit viel Grün und Freiflächen hebt die Lebensqualität entsprechend an. Jetzt im Herbst leuchten die alten Bäume in den schönsten Farben. Im Hintergrund zeichnet sich der Schönberg als Silhouette, bei gutem Wetter auch in den tollsten Herbstfarben leuchtend. Ich bin gern hier.

Herbstgold mit Schönberg im Hintergrund

Alter Baum zwischen den Häusern

Grenoble remporte le Grand prix national EcoQuartier 2009

La ZAC de Bonne, à Grenoble, va servir d’exemple aux futurs EcoQuartiers destinés à voir le jour en France dans les années à venir. Elle vient en effet d’être auréolée du Grand prix national au palmarès EcoQuartier 2009, organisé par le ministère de l’Écologie. Une récompense pour ce projet “exemplaire, porteur d’excellence globale” qui doit devenir un quartier durable. Explications et palmarès.

Batiactu

Voir aussi

• Grenoble : un écoquartier dense remplace l’ancienne caserne de Bonne
• Ecoquartiers : la France peine à rattraper son retard
• La caserne De Bonne, quartier modèle et économe du centre de Grenoble
• Palmarès EcoQuartier : “Identifier des lauréats thématiques revient à nier le caractère transversal du développement durable” [ajouté le 11 nov. 2009]

Alba Iulia had a very important contribution to the history of human settlings and fortified citadels.
The city is situated at an old gold and salt commercial crossroads, into the perimeter formed by the rivers Ampoi and Sebes and the crests of the Apuseni Mountains that mount mildly and lithely towards the terrace of the river Mures and the Transylvanian Hills. The gentle climate and the richness of the soil rendered this area habitable even since ancient times. Archeologists register rich vestiges of the material culture – dating since Neolithic, Bronze Era, Hallstatt, Latene and Middle Ages – undeniable proof of our continuity on these territories.
The tribe of the Dacians from “the far-off Appulus” is mentioned in “Consolatio ad Liviam – Poetae latini minores”, and the geographer Ptolemaios revealed in his “Geographical Guide” (written in the first half of the second century) the coordinates of the city: 49°15′ longitude – 46° 41′ latitude.
The XIII Gemina Legion is to be billeted here in one of the major stoned Roman camps during the years Dacia was a Roman province. Along with the Dacians, the new comers (the Romans), “ex toto orbe romano”, are the ancestors of the Romanian people, appropriating the Dacian ancient toponym Apoulon (a fortress situated at Piatra Craivii, 20 km North of Alba Iulia, which became the Roman Apulum).
Two roman cities, first municipia and later collonia, have developed near the Roman camps, into the fortress, but also nearby the Mures river, in Partos.
The settlings became two of the most wealthy and important places of Dacia – (“Chrysopolis” 251-253 d. Chr.) – outstanding in diversity and the novelty of the local civilization.
Temples and polychrome mosaics, thermae and statues, amphitheaters, porticos, the governor’s palace “Daciarum Trium” – that would be in brief the synthesis of this important military-political, economic-commercial and cultural-artistic center, the miniature copy of the mother Rome.
Imperialism had irreversibly and unmistakably marked the existence and the consciousness of the Romanced popular Latin speaker inhabitants.
This was the beginning of a new world – orbs romana. The settling continuity, the pre-early and late feudal towns and graveyards, the hoards, the rotunda baptistery uncovered from the Roman-Catholic Cathedral’s floor, the presence of Hyeroteos who came here straight from Constantinopol, indicate the existence of a Christian world with Byzantine background and of an important political center – the Principality of Bãlgrad.
Middle Age was earlier here, Alba being certified as a county in 1171, then as “civitas”, along with Brasov, Sibiu and Rodna. The first documentary reference Alba Iulia had been made in 1276, and was then taken over and consequently translated as Bãlgrad or Gyulafehérvár.
An Episcopal citadel and an important political, military and ecclesiastic center of the province, Alba Iulia reached an important climax between 1542-1690, being the capital of the independent Principality of Transylvania and “the residence of the Transylvanian princes”, as the traveler Evlia Celebi eloquently wrote. Famous rulers and voivodes, musicians and painters, ambassadors and scholars, engineers and doctors met in “the city of fine arts”, endowing this “Transylvanian Heidelberg” with a new glowing.
An important commercial center, a real foundation stone of the province and of the entire South-Eastern European world, the city has gained a special cultural importance due to the notable accomplishments in the bishops Ladislau Gereb and Francis Varday’s time but mostly during the prince Gabriel Bethlen’s time.
The well-known Collegium Academicum, the first higher educational institution in Transylvania, which had been running since 1622, boasted for about four decades some of the most brilliant representatives of the European Humanism and Renaissance: Apaczai Csere Janos, Martin Opitz, Alstedius, Biserfeldius, Johannes Piscator, genuine titans with passion for knowledge and multilaterality. Nowadays the local universities continue the tradition of the old academic schools.
Between 1577-1702, more than 22 works, “real masterpieces of language, belief and Romanian feeling”, such as Tetraevangheliarul slavon (1579), Evanghelia de invatatura (1641), Noul Testament de la Balgrad (1648), Psaltirea (1651), Bucoavna (1699) or Chiriacodromionul (1699) came out of the printing presses of Balgrad. The ample series of incunabula and rare books (such as Codex Aureus) from the Batthyaneum Library (where it is the oldest astronomic observatory in Romania) enrich through their singleness the culture of Alba Iulia. The well-known Collegium Academicum, the first higher educational institution in Transylvania, which had been running since 1622, boasted for about four decades some of the most brilliant representatives of the European Humanism and Renaissance: Apaczai Csere Janos, Martin Opitz, Alstedius, Biserfeldius, Johannes Piscator, genuine titans with passion for knowledge and multilaterality. Nowadays the local universities continue the tradition of the old academic schools.
Between 1577-1702, more than 22 works, “real masterpieces of language, belief and Romanian feeling”, such as Tetraevangheliarul slavon (1579), Evanghelia de invatatura (1641), Noul Testament de la Balgrad (1648), Psaltirea (1651), Bucoavna (1699) or Chiriacodromionul (1699) came out of the printing presses of Balgrad.
The ample series of incunabula and rare books (such as Codex Aureus) from the Batthyaneum Library (where it is the oldest astronomic observatory in Romania) enrich through their singleness the culture of Alba Iulia.
On the first of November 1599, once with the voivode Michael the Brave’s victorious arrival, Alba Iulia has become the capital of the first political union of all Romanians. His military, administrative, cultural and national accomplishments represent a seal-symbol of the Transylvanian map and of Romanian people’s consciousness. The mitropoly that he had founded here, “our most resistant and useful establishment from this side of the Carpathians”, symbolizes the integration of Transylvania into the great Romania.
Having been overtaken by the Austrian suzerainty after 1700, the city of Alba Iulia had experienced fundamental changes between 1714-1738 and therefore became a real military bulwark, a monument of baroque architecture built in Vauban style.
Alba Iulia has the greatest and best-preserved fortress of this kind in Romania, which has become an effigy of the city. The serfs revolt led by Horea, Closca and Crisan, tragically put down in February 28th 1785 on the Pitchfork Hill, makes the city a seal symbol of the fight for justice and freedom.
Eloquently defined by Nicolae Iorga as “the cultural municipality”, Alba Iulia also honored its reputation through the synods organized by the Romanian priests, through public assemblies of Astra (1866, 1875, 1886) and those of the Romanian Theatre Fund Society (1878, 1909), through papers and publications, the well known names of St. Ludwig Roth, Mihai Eminescu, Nicolae Iorga, Octavian Goga, Lucian Blaga, Liviu Rebreanu, Iuliu Maniu, Constantin Daicoviciu ennobling the city.
On the 1st of December 1918 another glorious page of history was written in the citadel of martyrdom and glory, as a corollary of its millenary history. Here, in Alba Iulia, on the Field of Horea, 100,000 Romanians and 1,228 delegates have democratically, plebiscitarily and irrevocably decided the Unification of Transylvania with the mother country, accomplishing the dream of many generations.
A new historical stage came to an end, a stage also outlined on the 15th of October 1922 by “our defining in terms of history”, through the crowning of the Great Romania’s monarchs, the King Ferdinand the 1st, the Unificator and his queen Mary, in the People’s Reunification Cathedral.
As an acknowledgement of its contribution to the history of our nation, in 1944 the Romanian Parliament has stated Alba Iulia as the “Great Unification Citadel”.

The fortress:

The Alba Carolina fortress was built between 1714 and 1738 and it is considered to be the most representative of Vauban type in Europe.

The fortress was designed by the Italian architect Giovanni Morando Visconti, who worked under the supervision of the general Stefan de Steinville and was later completed under General Weiss. Between the 18th and 19th centuries the fortress served as the military headquarters of Transylvania and also as a general armament repository. The perimeter of the outside walls is about 12 km. The fortification has seven bastions (Eugene of Savoia, St. Stefan, The Trinity, St. Michael, St. Carol, St. Capistrano and St. Elisabeth) that make it into a star-shaped, Vauban-style fortress. The largest bastion is the Trinity. On the whole, the fortress stands out as the most important baroque architectural ensemble in Romania and Europe.

The Route of the Three Fortifications

A unique tourist destination in Europe and the world, the Route of the Three Fortifications offers the visitors a life-time chance to travel 2,000 years back in time, walking about the vestiges of three fortifications belonging to three different historical epochs, successively built on the same location, each new citadel including the previous one: The Roman Castre (106 AD), The Medieval Citadel (sec. XVI-XVII) and the Alba Carolina Citadel, a Vauban-type fortification (sec. XVIII). The route includes visits to: The Minting Factory Gate, South Gate of the Roman Castre, The Military Camp, The Access Tunnel to the Artillery Platform, The Artillery Platform, The Guard Room – The Arms Room, The Bethlem Bastion and the Alba Carolina Citadel.

More info here on Alba Iulia City Hall website: http://www.apulum.ro/en/cetatea.htm

Air view:

Derek P. Jensen brings us this article on the only thing holding up transit-oriented and New Urbanist development in Salt Lake City: banks.  One of the biggest issues with banks is that their lending practices stress an abundance of parking, while one of the main purposes of these types of development is to reduce parking and encourage other modes of transportation.  Salt Lake City is having a hard time getting financing for the gateway district, which is expected to host a new TRAX light rail line and become a vibrant, walkable, 24-hour community, despite a number of local success stories in TOD.  Council Chairman Carlton Christensen explained that, even in the transit haven of Portland, early investors “had to have their hands held,” and the Council has the responsibility to educate investors.  Local builders agree; even after a tour of Portland and a conversion to the value of mixed-use development, they say they still have trouble finding financing.  Michael Morris of Zions Bank says that banks would be willing to be flexible if long-term investors were comfortable with less parking, but he doesn’t see that happening. “I don’t know if public transportation or fuel efficiency or the green movement is going to change that in the near term,” he says.  Apparently he’s never been to San Francisco, Portland or Washington, DC, or heard of Vauban, Germany or other communities making a lot of money off of green transportation and TOD.  Some people think that Salt Lake City is still a car culture city, but TRAX is already changing that, and as it expands, so will TOD.  Bruce Bingham, whose company is nearing completion of an office tower near the Gallivan Plaza TRAX station, deliberately scaled back the parking at his project because he knows that TRAX will  bring in workers without bringing in cars. “So far, it’s proven out that the TRAX stop is going to compensate for a lack of excess parking,” he says.  “The same conditions would exist for any transit-oriented development near a TRAX stop.”  He also says that developers shouldn’t worry about a lack of parking downtown. “The myth that there is a lack of parking in Salt Lake is just that: a myth.”  I hope that the continued success of TOD in Salt Lake City and elsewhere will soon convince lenders that these projects are worth their money.

Mayor Dave wrote a pretty amusing response to a Rick Berg column the other day, in which he basks in the glory of showing the conservative columnist “the light.”

In the last issue of the Isthmus (you can still grab ten copies for your friends on newsstands today!), Berg grovels and begs my forgiveness for a blasphemous piece he wrote about a year ago after I returned from Freiburg, Germany. Having returned from the Mountain Top after a sister city visit there last June, I expressed my admiration for the city in general and the almost auto free Vauban neighborhood in particular. At the time, Rick wrote that I should have had another beer and left the crazy lefty-green ideas back in the Fatherland.

Hmm…was ist a guy named Cieslewicz doing calling Deutschland “das Vaterland”? In fact, this is the man who once extended his hand to Sara Mikolajczak, the former head of the College Republicans, and said “from one Pole to another.” Perhaps he is referring to Berg, who apparently is German.

Either way, Dave won on this one, not necessarily because the plan he cites is realistic in Madison, but because he made a right winger acknowledge that Europe is sometimes different for the better, rather than worse. It’s too bad Berg didn’t try to find out during his time in Germany why people all across that continent live so long despite their failure of a health care system. In wine-drinking France, in lager-chugging Britain, in vodka-guzzling Sweden – it must be something they put in the cigarettes.

Also, Dave’s post today focused on the Business Improvement District (BID), which is up for renewal today.

The BID does a lot of things for the downtown. It helps promote the area by supporting events like Maxwell Street Days, Cars on State and the Downtown Madison Holiday Open House. It produces the Downtown Madison Gift Certificate Program and the Downtown Madison Map and Guide. It does a tremendous job of fostering a welcoming environment downtown through its Information Ambassador Program – which helped nearly 28,000 downtown customers in 2008 alone – and enhancements to the area’s physical environment, dressing the downtown with flowers during the warmer months and holiday lights during our colder months.

Sounds OK, but I only want this association to go on if it’s agreed upon that the lights they put on State St are officially “Christmas lights.” That being said, even if they continue with the offensive “Holiday Lights,” Madison can still reap benefits from the blasphemy by getting prime time coverage on the O’Reilly Factor. Win-Win situation.

Also, Jason Joyce, where the hell did you weekly exegesis on Mayor Dave’s schedule go? Is this being outsourced to the Sconz or am I just incapable or searching your site?

Merci à Pierre, Jacky et Jacques pour leurs photos.

Vous pouvez nous en envoyer à fortdebertheaume@aol.com

No, It’s Vauban, Germany

From The New York Times

Residents of this upscale community are suburban pioneers, going where few soccer moms or commuting executives have ever gone before: they have given up their cars.

Street parking, driveways and home garages are generally forbidden in this experimental new district on the outskirts of Freiburg, near the French and Swiss borders. Vauban’s streets are completely “car-free” — except the main thoroughfare, where the tram to downtown Freiburg runs, and a few streets on one edge of the community. Car ownership is allowed, but there are only two places to park — large garages at the edge of the development, where a car-owner buys a space, for $40,000, along with a home.

As a result, 70 percent of Vauban’s families do not own cars, and 57 percent sold a car to move here. “When I had a car I was always tense. I’m much happier this way,” said Heidrun Walter, a media trainer and mother of two, as she walked verdant streets where the swish of bicycles and the chatter of wandering children drown out the occasional distant motor.

Be still my heart.

Last week my friend and her daughter have been here for 2 days. We enjoyed much time outside, inspiring talks and cherries non stop. Those trees grow not far from my home. The branches reach to the ground and are loaded with sun riped cherries. Very delicious.

Letztes Wochenende war meine Freundin mit ihrer Tochter bei uns zu Besuch in Freiburg. Wir genossen viel Zeit in der Natur, inspirierende Gespräche und Kirschen in Hülle und Fülle. Die Kirschbäume wachsen in der Nähe unseres Zuhauses. Die Zweige reichen bis zum Boden und sind bepackt mit sonnengereiften dunkelroten saftigen Kirschen. Sehr lecker!

I don’t believe that there is a dichotomy between a supposedly modern and traditional architecture. Instead there exist different geometric processes, and while traditionally builders have employed nesting processes in their work, for perhaps no other reason than it came naturally to them, modern builders have restricted themselves to linear geometric processes due to drawing their inspiration from cartesian science and engineering.

In attempting to transform architecture into a vessel for artistic expression, modern architects have been trapped by their limited tool set, and the product of their work has often been confusing, silly, or utterly corrupt. There are only so many tricks that one can perform with linear geometry, although computers have extended the reach of those tricks. But the confusion of modern architects becomes even more obvious when they ascribe artistic merits to traditional builders who never aspired to be artists at all. One such instance is the introdution of a recent biography of the 18th century french military engineer Vauban by official starchitect Jean Nouvel, who described Vauban’s fortresses as an early form of land-art and morphing. Jean Nouvel asks, could a man be an artist without being aware of it? Vauban was not an artist at all. Military necessity led him to employ geometric processes that significantly increased the complexity of fortifications, and it is merely incidental that today we find his projects to have artistic merits.

The process through which Vauban’s work became worthy of architectural praise provides the key to the distinction between linear and nesting geometry. Vauban was not himself the inventor of the star fort. Those had been around for more than a century when he began his career for the army of king Louis XIV. The basic star fort was a simple concept: the old masonry walls of the medieval age had shown themselves to be obsolete with the advent of cannons, and they had been replaced with thick banks of earth dug out of trenches whose major flaw was to provide space out of reach of defensive fire at its angles. The angles were thus extended into diamond-shaped turrets in the first pass at a feedback correction, introducing nesting geometry and initiating the first step of the genesis of a fractal.

A basic, early star fort

While the star fort was successful at resisting attacks, it was not impregnable. A method was devised to capture them by digging trenches in zig-zagging patterns through which troops could assault the walls without being exposed to cannon fire. In fact this is how Vauban built his career, and some of his “plans” for besieging star forts are significant civil engineering projects of their own.

The siege of Toreno. From an encircling trench, Vauban built successively denser trenches to capture the citadel and take the city, a process that was extremely expensive and time-consuming.

While star forts never truly became obsolete (as medieval fortifications had) until well into the 19th century, military engineers did improve on their effectiveness by correcting their vulnerabilities, which happened to be at the angles they were characterized by. And so, by another layer of feedback, the geometric depth of the star fort concept increased.

San Martin Citadel, a “second generation” star fort.

Vauban’s great invention was nothing much more than repeating this process of increasing depth one more time, creating what many now consider to be his masterpiece, the Citadel of Lille, a showcase of complex geometry made from the refinement produced by centuries of feedback of the star fort concept.

Citadel of Lille and the system of fortification of the City of Lille, as designed by Vauban

If you only understand cartesian processes, then the only idea that may come to you to improve on the basic star fort would be to add dozens of diamond-shaped turrets, a change that would most certainly make the concept worse instead of better. The military engineers of the time however were well aware that the diamond turrets were optimal in their shape. What was needed was a shape that extended the diamond, and this was achieved by increasing the depth of the whole object.

Another aspect of the complexity of a geometric process seen in the Lille example is its configuration adaptiveness. The shape of the city and the surrounding landscape is completely random, and the encircling fortifications bend to match this randomness, leading to Nouvel’s claim that it is an early example of morphing. But once again there is no deliberate attempt at morphing going on. Since each component of a star fort is defined as a recursive relational transformation of the basic wall, Vauban only had to design the wall and the other parts aligned themselves as a result of the wall’s configuration. If the outcome has artistic value, it is once again only incidental.

It is important to note that the Vauban extensions to star fortifications did not mean that the simple 3-part star fort became obsolete. In fact many simple star forts were built in the 18th and 19th century in America as the threat was low and the cities to be defended underdeveloped. The difference between a simple fort and Vauban’s complex fort is one of depth and effectiveness, and there is a real cost-benefit choice to make. The star fort only became obsolete when the bunker replaced it, and the early bunkers reset the process of complex geometry genesis by being simple concrete shells in their early incarnations.

When we undertake to create symmetry in an urban environment, we want buildings to be as alike as possible while allowing for adaptation to context. If we understand geometric depth we can build in such a way that poor and expensive buildings have the same basic design in their first levels of geometry, but expensive buildings have many more scales of geometry nested within that basic design. It is not necessary for an entire city to be made of the same materials as materials are one of the last visible scales of geometry, and so we can have a city of mud bricks and marble buildings that nevertheless share 95% of their geometry and beautifully complement each other, while both poor and rich citizens have a home adapted to their situation.

We can look at these examples from Korean traditional architecture for an illustration.

On the left is a simple house and on the right is the tomb of a great king. Both buildings have the same design, but the building on the right has much greater depth in this design.

Another interesting comparison is between the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco and the Verrazano Narrows bridge in New York.

The bridges are the same in design, but the Golden Gate bridge has more depth within this design, and is for this reason the more famous of the two bridges. That doesn’t mean the Verrazano Narrows bridge isn’t beautiful on its own.

And to make things as simple as they can get, we can compare a Sierpinski triangle with four levels of iteration with one that has six levels.

The fractal on the right has all the same elements as the one on the left, but also has more.

A lot of the residential buildings we create today would benefit from being more like the Verrazano Narrows bridge. They try to be more than a simple house for a simple family and end up covered in tacky, useless ornament that have obviously been forced into the design. Simplicity, if it is adapted to context, can create as beautiful a landscape as complexity. Postmodernistic nonsense geometry does not. We would be better served going back to the simplicity of 1950’s international style modernism than what is being built by architects today. The best architects would reinvent it with greater depth.

Previous topics

• Complex geometry and structured chaos part 1
• Complex geometry and structured chaos part 2
• Design, configuration and natural form

References

Vauban, l’intelligence du territoire

A modern artist’s hommage to Vauban. This artist did not understand complex geometry.

Nice NYT article to follow-up the last entry here about cycling and other sustainable transportation options.  This article specifically focuses on car sharing at work, which allows employees to take public transportation, shuttles, bike, or carpool to work, and still travel the area with the flexibility of an individual car.  This works great for doctors appointments, last-minute trips, and errands in the area.

Car sharing systems at work also include two of the most important elements of all car sharing:  environmentally friendly options, such as the Prius or Ford Escape Hybrid, and many vehicle options, including vans, trucks, and fun cars.  Car sharing at work is a big step towards changing the paradigm of a society where a personal car for every person is the only way to go.

If cars and trucks could reproduce, they would surely rank as the planet’s dominant species. From the tiniest Tata Nano to the most massive of monster mega-trucks, guesstimates for the the global fleet now approach, if not exceed, one billion. By mass and weight, humans were left in the CO2-laced dust a long time ago. Nothing in the history of history, short of an asteroid, has ever had such a speedy and profound global impact. It is a car & truck world. And we have to live with it.

Or at least try to make the best of it.

Jakarta, from "The world’s 20 cities with the worst traffic jams"

• In Jakarta, where “total traffic” (all rush hour, all the time) is expected by 2011, some have found a bit of gold in the gridlock. Passengers-for-higher called “jockeys” hustle for pick ups from drivers needing to fill seats to qualify for slightly speedier high occupancy lanes.

• In Sao Paulo, where traffic jams can stretch well over 100 miles and commute times average between two and three hours a day, the tale is told of a lovesick soul who threw a cell phone through the open window of a neighboring car to ask a girl for a date. Alas, the car-crossed lovers probably spent most of their courtship simply trying to rendevous.

• In Cairo, the Egyptian Horatia Alger is Nasser Sedky, a budding valet parking tycoon who had some business cards printed up for $10 and now runs a mini-empire of 50 professional parkers.

• In Chicago, parking pays the bills: The city recently leased its meters to meet a budget shortfall: $1.16 billion for 75 years.

• In San Francisco, cars have become data points for a team at UC-Berkeley testing a system to crowdsource traffic reports via GPS-enabled driver cell phones.

WHEN COPING ISN’T ENOUGH: TRAFFIC AS A MALARIA-LEVEL KILLER

Making the most of a bad situation still leaves a bad situation. According to the United Nations Road Safety Collaboration, more people die each year from traffic accidents (~1.2 million) than from malaria (~1 million). Millions more are injured and maimed, which is several orders of magnitude more than are killed and wounded by land mines. Not surprisingly, most the carnage is in the developing world where vehicles tend to be older, roads worse and health care systems beyond overburdened. 85% of the deaths are in low and middle-income countries, leaving a trail of wrecked lives and nicked GNPs (estimate: 1% to 1.5% of gross national product). Young people are particularly at risk, with traffic injuries listed as one of the leading causes of death for between the ages 5 to 25 years-old.

In short, traffic isn’t just inconvenient, but a full-out, top-tier global public health disaster. If nothing is done, the numbers are expected to double by 2030. Does the World Health Organization have a scale for that?

George Robertson, chair of the U.K.-based Commission for Global Road Safety (CGRS), points out the irony of spending millions in development aid while ignoring things as basic, if mundane, as building better roads and investing in traffic signs:

Our overseas aid is devoted to improving life chances for education, for health. Dangerous roads damage this effort, killing the young and productive, disrupting commerce and trade. They impose a high burden on under-funded health services. They make the daily journey to school a high-speed life or death lottery for millions of children. Worse, many of these dangerous roads are being built with our taxes. Roads are being funded by our governments’ international development agencies, the World Bank and EU with one objective; to speed traffic and increase trade flows, but without sufficient attention to road safety safeguards or the needs and views of local communities.

“The killer we know too well: roads” / The Guardian

A new report by CGRS, “Making Roads Safe,” proposes a UN-sponsored “Decade of Action for Road Safety” to start in 2010, with the goal cutting the death rate by half. The cost – $300 million to save 5 million lives – is positioned as a bargain. By comparison, the annual cost of traffic deaths and injuries is tallied at $100 billion, “equivalent to all overseas aid from OECD countries.”

THE ROAD TO CLIMATE CHANGE…IS PAVED

But roads are only part of the problem. To the extent they contribute to the urban heat island effect, they are a problem all by themselves. Dark hard surfaces soak up heat, making cities several degrees warmer than surrounding areas. This local warming, seasoned with CO2 from the city’s million-plus tail pipes, has given scientists a way to see into the future.

In 2002, Lewis Ziska, a scientist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service, planted three plots of weeds: one on a farm, one in the suburbs and one near Baltimore’s inner harbor. Not only was the temperature at the Baltimore plot 3 to 4 degrees warmer, but CO2 levels averaged 450 parts-per-million – roughly the middle-case scenario projected for the planet as a whole in 30 to 50 years. The city weeds dwarfed their suburban and country cousins, producing more allergy-inducing pollen in the process.

As much as the weeds may have reveled in the smoggy muck, it hasn’t been all that good for us. Air pollution from cars and trucks has been linked to childhood asthma and other respiratory illnesses.

OPTIONS?

Two words: Drive less. Even an electric car requires urban-warming roads, so it is not just a question of trading up to a cleaner power source, but of rethinking the entire transportation equation. A billion cars and trucks, and the massive infrastructure that supports them, are not (short of an asteroid) going to disappear overnight. We have built our world and designed our cities based on their existence.

But what if we didn’t have to drive so much? Could we begin to chip away at some of the 12,000 pounds of CO2 each car adds to the atmosphere each year? (U.S. figures) Are there ways to better mix and match transportation options?

• In Vauban, Germany, an upscale suburb of Freiberg, most residents don’t even own a car. This modern throwback to simpler village life was laid out for walking and bicycles. Rental cars and car-sharing clubs are used for longer trips.

• More and bigger garages near commuter train stations can make it easier for drivers to split commutes, dramatically reducing the number miles spent in stalled traffic. For extra green points, build garages using  CO2-negative cement and landscape with green roofs that help keep cities cooler.

• Duel mode transportation schemes envision cars that can be hooked up to tramways where strings of cars form trains.

No matter how we wriggle out of global gridlock, benefits will be dramatic and immediate. Fewer traffic deaths. Healthier air. Improved prospects on the climate change front. Insti-savings from reduced fuel bills. Quieter, cleaner, cooler cities. Not being stuck in “total traffic.” Blue skies (an unexpected bonus for Mexico City during the recent swine flu shut-down). Now wouldn’t that be something?

MORE READING

“Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us” by Tom Vanderbilt (book website)

NPR Science Friday and Fresh Air interviews with Tom Vanderbilt (audio)

“Transportation Futuristics” (web exhibition)

“The Lincoln Park Pirates” by Steve Goodman (for all the Chicagoans / ex-pat Chicagoans out there….)

"Invisible Car" by Artist Sara Watson

(AP Photo/Winfried Rothermel)

Here in Georgia, there’s a planned city outside of Atlanta that’s known for its preferred method of local travel: golf carts. Many residents own their own carts, special paths crisscross between destinations and kids start manning the wheel at 12. Vauban, Germany does them one better, though with its carless (and cartless) streets.

Vauban, an affluent suburb outside of Freiburg, has no parking garages, no driveways and no street parking, according to the New York Times. Residents may own cars but they have to park them in garages at the edge of the city for a whopping $40,000. Because of the hefty fee, 70 percent of the area’s families don’t own cars and instead use biking, walking and the Main Street tram as their primary means of transportation. A car-sharing club lends out vehicles when residents need to haul something heavy.

The community is fairly new — it was only completed in 2006 — but the foot-friendly grid was established in World War II. The site initially held a Nazi army base; after the war, it was occupied by the French army until German reunification. The community is compact and its streets are narrow because they used to be paths that wound between barracks.

In the United States, places like Vauban are called “car-reduced” communities. And while no communities of the same scale exist (obstacles include zoning laws that require room for two cars and reluctant mortgage lenders), at least one is planned. Quarry Village outside of Oakland, Calif., will be carless yet still accessible to the Bay Area Rapid Transit system; that is, if it can first raise a needed $2 million to break ground.

More at HowStuffWorks.com:
5 Walkable Cities
What’s a walk score?
10 Green Driving Tips

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/science/earth/12suburb.html?_r=3&pagewanted=2

Fiquei pensando, essa iniciativa partiu do governo? Dos moradores? Dos aliens marcianos que ali aterrisaram? Aí achei:

http://empauta.org/2009/01/15/036-ecobairros-uma-nova-abordagem-para-o-espao-urbano/

Através da contribuição dos vários participantes interessados desenhou-se um projeto ambicioso para Vauban, um bairro de curtas distâncias, energeticamente sustentável.  A execução do projeto começou em 1997, inspirado no conceito da “cidade-jardim” (século XIX), integrando um conjunto de princípios-chave: preservação das características naturais do local (árvores centenárias e um riacho); integração de espaços verdes públicos; definição de cotas de terreno com pequenas dimensões; e edifícios com no máximo 4 andares.

Beleza, começaram do zero! Agora quero ver pegar o bonde andando e fazer isso com São Paulo!

New York Times, published May 11, 2009

VAUBAN, Germany — Residents of this upscale community are suburban pioneers, going where few soccer moms or commuting executives have ever gone before: they have given up their cars….Read the rest here

Can you imagine a suburb with know cars? In Vauban, Germany that is the reality. The town of 5,500 has banned almost all automobile traffic within its limits. Homes are not allowed to have driveways or garages. Residents can own cars, but they must park them in a large garage at the edge of the community.

I was thrilled as I read this article. This kind of community makes so much sense. Not only do you reduce car-related emissions, but you encourage people to be healthier. The article mentioned the efforts of a group to build a similar community in California. Let’s hope they are successful and that Americans can learn to live without an incredible dependence on their cars. Communities, like Vauban, that are designed to make shopping possible on foot are a good part of the solution to solving climate change. Starting today, we must no longer design communities with the notion that the primary mode of transportation will be the car. Instead, we should be designing communities that make car travel impractical if not forbidden.