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Lunch Speaker:  Can an Ideal World be a Real World? | Nov 7th at 1:34pm

Posted by Randy Crane | 1

The distinguished UK Engineer Peter Head gave a fluid, elegant, wide-ranging talk on what the post-oil city might look like.  Following a review of how we got here, he promoted higher densities and “eco” city strategies, and argued that China is among the most active in this regard, with pronouncements from its president and its support of such demonstration city-scale projects as Dongtan, near Shanghai.  Brazil’s Curitiba and Colombia’s Bogota were also used as examples (mainly, I suppose, for their visionary mayors Lerner and Penalosa and their BRTs).

Detailed and attractively rendered guidelines for urban design were flashed on the screen (probably available from www.arup.com), with particular emphasis on literally greening cities and suburbs with more vegetation on roofs and sides and roads (professional gardening is a growth industry in these scenarios).  Transport alternatives fell into 3 categories: high speed rail, zero emission mass transit, and consolidated centers for freight delivery.  His presentation included animated films showing how this might look and feel in downtowns and suburbs. One central theme was that this can be somewhat if not entirely self-financed, in that cheap-oil behaviors are now clearly economically inefficient.  Accessing that surplus by reducing waste is at least possible, if it won’t happen as a matter of course.

The presentation was beautiful and the speaker articulate and extremely well informed.  As a result, I am inclined to gloss over the many, many loose ends.  Let’s just call it aspirational and leave it at that for the moment.  Time to go to the next talk.

Randy Crane (PhD, MIT) is professor and vice-chair of urban planning in the UCLA School of Public Affairs, an associate editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association, and coeditor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning.