Shared Air

What happens once politicians actually embrace the idea of Green Cities and moving forward? See Britain. In many ways, it seems 2 or 3 places ahead of American thinking on the chess board of environmental urbanism and place-making in general. Here’s their eco-towns prospectus – a nice read and a New-city prototype/overview for amateurs and pros alike. (If you’re not familiar with the UK, there was a post-WWII boom in scratch-built “New towns” and “Garden Cities” to ease urban crowding and spark dynamism in what was a bleak time economically and aesthetically. Lotsa lessons learned about pouring concrete willy-nilly and discounting latent social networks and human dynamics. On the upside, we got the Mersey Beat, Moody Blues and The Commitments out of it.) 

But “2 or 3 places ahead” is not suggesting intellectually or culturally superior. The challenges shift, politics still happens and the grass is always greener, literally. From Building Design…

“We really admire [the European model] for its lack of fear about doing something obviously sensible,” says Brian Mark, director of sustainability at Fulcrum Consulting. “In Britain, we have all these power stations and we chuck all the heat away and import our fuel from elsewhere, usually from Russia. They don’t do that in Germany or Holland, they keep it for the community.” The other key difference of the European models is that they have a history of local authorities taking the lead, while in Britain it tends to be the private sector. “It’s also a more collaborative relationship between the local authority and private developers,” says Barry Munday, deputy chair of the Housing Forum. “We’ve lost that system here, mainly because our local authorities are severely under-resourced or don’t have the facilities to do it.” Brian Mark adds: “The Swedish model is inherently sensible, they don’t let historic barriers of ownership get in the way.”

Ahh, Sweden. The furniture, cars and bands export well. Difficult to import a cultural imperative born of tightly networked hamlets and their solidarity, even if we Yanks do practice what some conservatives unfearingly acknowledge as “Small town socialism.”