City Critical Design Designing In Reading Urban

City Critical Design Designing In Reading Urban

City Critical Design Designing In Reading Urban

Considering land use and sustainability together is a non-starter. It is almost impossible to achieve sustainability in an urban environment when land use rather than urban form is used to shape that environment.

A 60 year grand experiment in urban planning using land use as the primary organizing principle has not resulted in sustainable urban environments; it has nearly always produced unsustainable suburbia.

Urbanism versus Suburbanism

Let’s use a concrete example, the city of Calgary where this writer lives. Calgary is similar to a lot of other North American cities that have largely developed since World War II. Calgary’s footprint or square area is almost identical to NYC’s; the latter, however, has a population of many millions, whereas Calgary’s has 1.1 million people.