Recent News

"Forget large-lot, single-family, cul-de-sac subdivisions accessed by traffic arteries lined with fast-food and big-box outlets. Future development would be densely clustered or channeled into towns and villages on sites less valuable for farming and conservation or where infrastructure already exists. Besides homes, these growth centers would include shops, workplaces, schools, pedestrian amenities and transit. This kind of development, known as new urbanism, is already increasingly familiar. What’s new is its integration with efforts to protect working and natural landscapes."

An interesting idea that takes Calthorpe's ideas about green urbanism, and asks if they can also be paired with innovative technological fixes:

Peter Calthorpe has long taken the position that redefining the models of growth in America is essential to addressing climate change. He is just as firm in asserting how the principles of New Urbanism, mixed with conservation technologies, can have a major impact in reducing carbon emissions and the demand from traditional, petroleum-based sources, thus easing the transition to a wide range of renewable energy sources.

"It’s a love story gone horribly wrong. Big cars, ever-bigger homes, distant suburbs – all of it kept afloat by cheap oil. If this American arrangement ever made sense, it certainly doesn’t now, Peter Calthorpe told a Climate One audience in San Francisco on May 25."

In a new webinar from Smart Growth America, introduced as "Peter Calthorpe Tells All," his new book "Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change" is discussed in detail. "Is your agency or organization looking to start or advance a regional plan? In this latest webinar from the Sustainable Communities Network, award-winning planner Peter Calthorpe shares advice on how to begin, implement and successfully navigate the regional planning process, and ideas about how to leverage regions’ unique qualities to meet fiscal goals, land use challenges and transportation needs."

Tyler Falk, from the blog www.smartplanet.com, interviews Peter Calthorpe about his new book, "Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change," to discover "why cities are on the 'cutting edge of environmentalism'". It turns out that, even for city dwellers who don't consciously consider themselves to be environmentalists, just by "living in cities and walkable towns they’re at the cutting edge of environmentalism."

Calthorpe Associates deployed its Rapid Fire model to produce a series of regional scenarios for the San Francisco Bay Area. Those scenarios and their results are available on an interactive website (www.youchoosebayarea.org), and are the subject of community forums which begin on April 21, 2011. See the Envision Bay Area project page for more information.

StreetsblogSF, in their 5-part series featuring Peter Calthorpe's new book, Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, focuses the fifth installment on Transit: The Greenest Technology. "The most important community-scale system dependent on urbanism is transit. It has long been known that density and transit ridership are linked, but it goes much deeper than that. The key to viable transit systems is not just density but walkability and mixed use—true urban places."

StreetsblogSF, in their 5-part series featuring Peter Calthorpe's new book, Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, focuses the fourth installment on Green Urbanism, which is enabled by using all of the tools in the toolbox required to get to the 12% Solution, including urbanism and green technology. "Once demands are reduced by passive urbanism, the next step is to add technology.