It was very much the Berkeley-architecture-school thing to ask students to evaluate the "sustainable" elements of new housing developments, many of them built on semi-rural sites outside of city centers, in order to learn how to better design them. Sure, I learned a lot about adorning high-density buildings with solar panels, low-E glass, and permeable streetscaping, but I always felt like I was learning more about how to accessorize places to look "green" rather than how to make principled decisions about making them. What is so sustainable, I still wonder, about converting farmland to housing?
I spent an entire year designing a neighborhood plan for a greenfield site in Tianjin, China. My team came up with a plan for mixed-use development, high-density housing, ample park (but not parking)space, a lightrail system--all the standard good stuff of sustainable design. It was an exhausting, enthralling year.
Nonetheless my teammates and I could never rid ourselves of the image of what we had proposed to replace:
Is that image part of the compulsion of living there? My knowledge of this is from an embarrassingly slight canon, but all of those gorgeous countrysides in Hong Kong films must help enchant dispersing urbanization. (?)
Posted by: Valentine Cadieux | November 30, 2006 at 09:16 PM
Looks like the chocolate-box countryside to me, but I empathise with the conundrum of replacing it nonetheless.
Posted by: Nik Luka | December 06, 2006 at 11:36 AM