Adam Clare

How to Make the Suburbs Livable

Peter Calthorpe is a man on a mission to make the suburbs of North America a place where people can live (seriously, you should see what books he’s written).
The car-dominated culture of the suburbs has produced a series of housing developments that pretends the environment and other people don’t exist, and in the 21st century this lifestyle is confronting reality. Recently, Calthrope has been asked to make a suburb of Toronto, Markham, into a modern city and Markham is moving ahead with the plan. The key component of the plan is to make a more urban setting that revolves around good transportation.

“We’ve had a 50-year experiment with sprawl,” Calthorpe argues. “Now it’s over. Everything’s changing. There’s a huge demographic shift happening. If you include externalities and eliminate subsidies, sprawl is not affordable. The key to unlocking the potential is transit.

But as Calthorpe also points out, successful transit is regional transit. That’s surely true at Langstaff. Cut off by hydro easements, highways, railway tracks and cemeteries, the missing connections to the external world can only be created through transit. Extending the Yonge subway to Hwy. 7 is critical to the project, as are the locations of the new stations.

“If you want to get people out of cars,” says Calthorpe, “you’ve got to get them close to transit. And transit must be there to support walkability, not the other way around. Destinations have to be nearby.”

Times Square Goes Car-Free

New York City is famous for grid lock and horrendous traffic – but that’s the past. New York is really trying to green itself and become friendlier to sustainable forms of transportation. They are even going so far as to make times square car-free.

Vehicles are being barred between 42nd and 47th streets at Times Square and 33rd and 35th Streets at Herald Square.
City officials say the move will reduce pollution and pedestrian accidents and ease traffic flow in the area known as “crossroads of the world”.
…
“It’s good for traffic, it’s good for businesses and we think it is going to be great deal of fun,” city transport commissioner Janet Sadik-Khan said last week.

The symbolism of the financial heart of the American empire discouraging the use of the automobile will hopefully be noticed.

Clean the Air While Biking – With Plants

Here’s a neat idea to clean the air while getting around town – build a bicycle with a plant box. You can follow the complete instructions at the link, but it looks like it takes a bit of work. I’m sure it’s a pleasure to ride with the smell of fresh herbs or flowers under your nose.

Steal Ideas

The 21st century has yet to come to terms with a good way to ensure that ideas spread, shared, and plentiful. In the developed world good ideas can get pushed aside because of copyright, DRM, and intellectual property laws. Let’s change this. One group of people (who I think are a marketing company) are just giving away all their ideas for free.

In the future

It’s one thing to come up with a good idea, but remember, it’s even better if you try out your idea in the real world.

Freight Containers as Student Housing

Tempohousing uses shipping containers to create housing and other buildings for places that can use it. Simple, modular, mobile, and funky.

In 2002, the city of Amsterdam had a very urgent need for student housing and was looking for new and original ideas to quickly solve the problem. Only temporary building sites were available (as in any city, land was scarce), so the solution had to be mobile, affordable and had to have a quick set up time. Traditional construction was not going to work: too expensive, not mobile, and too slow. Tempohousing (at the time also known as “Keetwonen”) was the only company who could offer solutions with the budgets and timeframes. But to live in what looks like a shipping container was completely new in Holland, so many hearts still had to be won.