[amazon_link id=”1597267244″ target=”_blank” ]
[/amazon_link]In 1940, Woody Guthrie wrote, “This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to the New York Island…” Though parts of his song made it into school songbooks and the public consciousness, it’s underlying message runs counter to the notions of independent Americans. The land, Woody contends, belongs to all of us and not just people who put up fences around their property. While he would probably find that an extreme expression of his views, Author James Russel maintains that we all have a stake in the land, no matter who holds its deed.
In The Agile City, Russel contends that the United States lags behind the rest of the world in land use management because of our peculiar notions of property and wide open spaces.
While it’s no surprise that Americans will rise up in protest at any suggestion that the government might tell them what they can do with their land, or where they can or can’t build, Russell makes a convincing case that banking, real estate and government have created a growth engine that pushes the population further and further from city centers into less and less sustainable regions that previously supported needed farmland and buffer zones.
Ironically, the author points out, building beltways around cities to avoid urban congestion has turned out to be a sure recipe for spreading congestion over a wider area, as anyone who commutes on one can attest.
What’s needed, he asserts, is a return to cities, but not just to cities as they have been, but to cities that adopt newer more agile models for transportation, green construction and mixed use communities.
The American dream of a house in the suburbs was a fools dream, he points out in a well researched series of chapters on land, building, and transportation. That doesn’t mean that a better dream can’t replace it, one where cities thrive and green spaces are valued for their contributions to the environment and the economy.
Though the author provides no shortage of global and domestic examples of good and bad land use and city planning, he fails to offer a compelling call to action or program for the revolution he so clearly feels is needed.
As Guthrie pointed out seventy years ago, we live on a land both beautiful and bountiful, but The Agile City makes a strong case that we are squandering both qualities by carving the land up without regard for its future.
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.
The sign was painted, said ‘Private Property.’
But on the backside, it didn’t say nothing.
This land was made for you and me.
– Woody Guthrie, This Land is Your Land
Links/Sources:
- Island Press: The Agile City
- NPR: This Land is Your Land (Retrospective)
- TechRevu (originally published): Back From the Burbs: Dealing With Climate Change By Designing Better Cities
- Hardcover: 304 pages
- Publisher: Island Press (June 21, 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1597267244
- ISBN-13: 978-1597267243
Product Description
Adapting buildings (39 percent of greenhouse-gas emission) and communities (slashing the 33 percent of transportation related emissions) offers numerous other benefits that tax gimmicks and massive alternative-energy investments can’t match.
Rapidly improving building techniques can readily cut carbon emissions by half, and some can get to zero. These cuts can be affordably achieved in the windshield-shattering heat of the desert and the bone-chilling cold of the north. Intelligently designing our towns could reduce marathon commutes and child chauffeuring to a few miles or eliminate it entirely. Agility, Russell argues, also means learning to adapt to the effects of climate change, which means redesigning the obsolete ways real estate is financed; housing subsidies are distributed; transportation is provided; and water is obtained, distributed and disposed of. These engines of growth have become increasingly more dysfunctional both economically and environmentally.
The Agile City highlights tactics that create multiplier effects, which means that ecologically driven change can shore-up economic opportunity, can make more productive workplaces, and can help revive neglected communities. Being able to look at multiple effects and multiple benefits of political choices and private investments is essential to assuring wealth and well-being in the future. Green, Russell writes, grows the future.