Community Planning: Roadmap For Sustainability

Topics include space-specific urban guidelines, vitality of public spaces, inviting nature back in, mitigating negative vehicular traffic, rainwater management, energy reduction.

At the time of the original building biology writings in the 1970s, city planning theory had resulted in a new sort of ailment. The worst slums of the industrial revolution (at least in Western Europe and North America) had been successfully sanitized through slum clearing, and the implementation of draconian zoning laws.  But the post war cities then suffered from a new form of ailment characterized by sterility and alienation. Zoning laws and city plans based on the automobile created great separations between work, schools, shopping and homes. Dominated by the implementation of unproven and simplistic theories of urban renewal that were widely adopted, the very fabric that makes a great city great was completely ignored. This course makes the case that these experiments should be unanimously declared to be failures.