A Retrospective on Urban Design

You know those tea sampler packs, the ones that have an assortment of different teas so you can try a little of everything and see what you like?  That's what PIELC reminded me of.  At any time, a panoply of panels offered a range of flavours to the discerning attendee; some were like soothing herbal concoctions, not accentuating any particular point but simply spreading good energy, while others were like stiff breakfast blends, dark and full of milk, designed to fire up your nerves and set you to work.  And of course, there were any number of green teas, less strident than their breakfastey bedfellows, but still possessed of a definite hue and purpose.

I chose to focus my time at the conference on panels involving innovations in green urban design.  I was initially interested in exploring more technical topics, such as the pros and cons of nuclear power, but it turns out you need a secret decoder ring for those presentations and I had forgotten mine.  Cars on roads, though, that's something my brain gets right now!  Hooray!

While some panels never got past vague comments to the effect that "we need to pollute less", there were also a number of concrete ideas being kicked around.  Here are some of the panels I scribbled about in my notes:

Restructuring Cities: This was one of the first panels I attended, and probably the high-point of the conference for me.  One reservation that I'd often had about innovations in green design was that they seemed like great ideas for some hypothetical future city we might build, but most of our cities have inconveniently decided to exist right now.  So, short of bulldozing the lot of them and starting fresh, how do we fix what we've got?  Well, panellists Mark Schlosberg, Nico Larco and Mark Gillem had some ideas.  Using a roadway redesign proposal they were currently promoting for their own city, they discussed the outdated design philosophies that have led to many current traffic systems being so inefficient, necessitating long drives to reach even nearby destinations.  They then described some ludicrously simple solutions based on clever road designs in other cities, and even discussed how they'd managed to g! et local businesses on board with the idea!

Energy Solutions for Sustainable Neighbourhoods: Many of us have probably tried out those energy-efficient light-bulbs, but how much good is that going to do?  Not much, suggest panellists Clark Brockman, John Sorenson, and Jeff Hammarlund.  Noting that household lighting and appliances constitute only a tiny fraction of power use, with most power going to warm or cool buildings and heat water, the panellists discussed areas where improvements in energy efficiency might yield a better bang for our buck.  I was particularly intrigued by a European design based on solar panels, but with a twist - instead of channelling the solar power into photovoltaic cells, the energy is used directly to heat water, which is then sent via insulated pipes to all the buildings in the area, providing hot water and building heat while cutting electricity out of the picture entirely.  Some cities have supposedly achieved total energy-ind! ependence using systems like these.  The panellists then looked at legislative and financial barriers to implementing similar solutions here, and how they might be overcome.

Permaculture: This was largely a feel-good panel that didn't get down to much concrete discussion, but there was an interesting bit on how the current zoning system (in Oregon, at least; I don't know if it's the same here) assumes that a piece of land can only be used for one purpose, and why this sometimes makes things difficult for innovators who are developing ideas on how we can use the same amount of land more efficiently.

Energy Efficiency: Our Cleanest Source of Power: If we can meet our power needs far better by making existing infrastructure more efficient rather than by putting up new power plants, then why aren't we doing that?  In a revealing analysis, panellists Steve Weiss, Linda Dethman, Jana M. Linderman and David Naccarato dissected the current billing system used by power companies, where profits are based on the amount of power used, and explained why that could actually cause power companies to lose money if they became more efficient.  To their credit, however, the panellists were not simply throwing stones at "the evil power companies"; rather than being judgmental, they proposed practical reforms to how power companies control their billing rates (roughly, by billing based on number of subscribers rather than the amount of power they use, although it was a bit more complicated than that), allowing them to make the same amount ! of money while eliminating their disincentive to adopt more efficient measures.  This was followed by what was essentially an "Advertising 101" crash-course which highlighted how the environmentalist movement has failed to make effective use of certain aspects of human psychology.

-Ethan