Discussion Questions 9/7

Sustainable Urban Reader

I would most closely associate McHarg with Howard based upon the scientific manner in which they attack the problems that each are dealing with. They differ because of the time and place both write from, Howard late 1800's England, and McHarg, with his Scottish backgroun, but primarily writing about 1920's North America.

McHarg characterized suburban growth as the hamburger stand, gas station, billboard, sagging wires, parking lots, car cemeteries, and subdivisions. He describes the fate of older suburbs as havens for race, hate, poverty, rancor, despair, urine, and spit. All living in the shadows. He exhibits an extreme distaste for suburban growth and suburbs.

The 8 natural processes that performed work for man according to McHarg were: surface water, floodplains, aquifers, marshes, aquifer recharge areas, steep lands, prime agricultural land, and forests and woodlands. These maps were used to derive the place of nature within the metropolis.

The main effect of development efforts after WWII for developing countries according to Frank wherein the metropolitan status generates development, while the satellite undergoes under development. He proposed the mechanism of the relaxation weakening, or absence of ties between metropolis and satellite leading to an involution. This increasing polarization is still occurring today.

Meadows unique new “first” associated with the model they use in Limits to Growth is that every assumption they collect from a person is transcribed in precise form for analyzation, and that the implications drawn from these assumptions can be traced by a computer.

Most people are likely to pay attention to problems regarding family or business, city, and neighborhood, that would take place within the next week, according to Meadows team. This hampers our ability to tackle such global issues as climate change and environmental degradation, because it is too large in scope and too far away in time to see results for the vast majority of the world’s population.

The three conclusions reached in Limits to Growth are that (1) if the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production , and resoursce depletion continued at the same rate as current, the growth limits for this planet will be reached in the next hundred years. (2) It is possible to alter these growth trends and establish a sustainable condition. (3) If people wish to attain the latter they must start working on it sooner rather than later.

Daly connects “growthmania” and “hyper-growthmania” to GNP by stating that people view economic output as a good thing and fell that there is not enough of it, however GNP has its costs and when determining if the costs of GNP growth outweigh the benefits , people do not take into acciont the growthmania, or costs of growth. Where as counting the real costs as benefits is hyper-growthmania.

Daly’s argument for a stead state economy is that the world is finite, and the ecosystem is in a steady state, and if the human economy is a subset of this steady state economy, there will exist a leveling out point, where the subsystem becomes a steady state.


Sustainable Communities

Roseland defines sustainable community as a community continually adjusting to meet the social and economic needs of its residents, while preserving the environment's ability to support the community.

The positive effects of half the global population living in cities include such things as large nearby labor forces, high areas of income, decreased necessity of private transportation, and high accessibility to resources. Negative impacts include high rents and cost of living/land, high concentrations of impoverished areas, decrease in rural features such as parks, streams, or lakes.
Roseland refers to the developed world as northern cities and the developing world as southern cities. He sees these northern cities as being unsustainable and southern cities as being under developed. Southern cities are impacted by problems with regard to meeting basic needs, since they are lacking infrastructure. Northern cities meet their needs to an excess and have issues with over use and pollution.

North American cities were built assuming abundant and cheap energy and land, which would be around forever. In current urban form this can be seen in many over populated cities, where growth now occurs upwards instead of outwards. In cities such as Bloomington and Indianapolis, this does not seem to be the case. Bloomington has ample amounts of land, but its population is quite low, as well as the population density. In Indianapolis they have been using numerous sustainable techniques for some time, and have kept growth outward for the most part, as the city continues to expand. The use of a canal for a water source shows some concept of knowing that not all land is for development, as they have made a concerted effort to keep the city from becoming a metropolis.

In comparison to other cities in the world North American cities have an ecological footprint far outweighing those of African and South American countries. If all of the world had a similar consumption rate to that of North America there would be a need for 3 planet Earths to account for the necessary resources.