The first of the Metropolitan Free Drinking Fountain Association of England’s drinking fountains opens London in 1859 to “scenes of public rejoicing.”

Public Water: Individual Health, Urban Health

You could shlepp your metal water bottle all over town. You could buy a three dollar plastic water bottle to throw into a landfill for the next million years. Or: you could count on a network of convenient, eco-friendly drinking fountains.

Water from a drinking fountain is arguably the best possible thing for a human to drink. With zero calories, sugar or chemicals, water is the foundation of life as we know it. Water from drinking fountains is tested to city health standards, which are higher than the standards required for bottled water. Drinking fountains (also known, in regional variations, as water fountains or bubblers) reduce dependence on the environmentally degrading plastic bottles for water and sodas (millions of which are thrown away every year). They save people money, too: according to the Pacific Institute, “total consumer expenditures for bottled water are approximately $100 billion per year.”

The Lithia Fountain in Ashland, Oregon, runs continuously with the mineral-water the town is famous for.

The whimsical hippo head fountain in Sacramento’s Fairytale Town makes drinking water very exciting.

Sources of water are inherently magical. Especially in a city, sealed in concrete, water connects us with nature, engages our senses, and physically connects us with place. Free water sources in public spaces, historically provided by philanthropists or cities themselves, were one of the major progressive steps forward for civilization. These fountains helped in preventing cholera, bringing water closer to the homes of the poor, and reducing reliance on alcohol, which was traditionally much safer to drink than filthy river water. In 1859, the great Metropolitan Free Drinking Fountain Association of England opened London’s first free drinking fountain to “scenes of public rejoicing;” the tasteful granite and marble design was soon providing water to over 7,000 people per day. Other famous drinking fountains, such as Paris’s Wallace Fountains and Portland’s Benson Bubblers, have provided free, clean water to generations of urban dwellers while enhancing the sense of place, public beauty, and individual health.

In the US today, though, the drinking fountain has been having a tough time. Public perception and strong bottled water advertising have lead to a crisis of confidence. Recently built rest stops in Connecticut didn’t include drinking fountains at all. University of Central Florida’s new stadium didn’t contain drinking fountains, and in the first game, vendors ran out of bottled water and seventy-eight people had to be treated by medics or hospitalized for heat-related illness. (The university has since installed fifty fountains.) Bottle fillers are being installed all over San Francisco, but the drinking fountains, which do not require you to already possess a vessel for your water, are being left behind.

The Muir Woods drinking fountains drain into the landscape, saving considerably on connections to the sanitary sewer and irrigating nearby plants.

One of the 67 large models of Paris’s famous Wallace Fountains.

This sleek Toronto fountain minimizes drainage problems and back-ups by letting water slide silkily down to a ground drain.

A wolf fountain in Rome lets users create a drinking arc by stopping up the main spout with a finger.

Raising the profile of the drinking fountain, the most egalitarian of all city infrastructure, is imperative. The design group Pilot Projects in New York is leading the charge with an amazing proposal to install 100 different drinking fountains around the city, designed through a worldwide competition. (They also hosted red-carpet events at drinking fountains in Union Square and Washington Square, complete with a string quartet and a waiter to push the button.) Bringing high quality design to drinking fountains would improve their stature and respect. Aesthetics (beauty, uniqueness, color, maintenance), functionality (temperature, flow, drainage, relationship with context, placement), ergonomic comfort, and inclusiveness (public, ADA-accessible, reachable by kids, dog bowl), qualities that we demand in any public bench or train station, are critical to drinking fountain success.

As a key indicator of the relationship between people and place, good drinking fountains can be a real change agent in our modern world, providing healthy, free, eco-friendly life fluid to everyone. Drink to your health!

Josselyn Ivanov is a landscape and urban designer based out of San Francisco, California. She holds a degree in Architecture from Rice University. She collects images and ideas about water fountains and urban health on her blog, “Drinking Fountains.”

Conversations with the Stewards and Designers of the Golden Gate National Parks

What does it take to create nationally-recognized landscapes like the Presidio and the Golden Gate National Parks in San Francisco, CA? The answer is more than just one designer, planner, steward, or advocate–and a lot longer than a decade. On April 4th, the Cultural Landscape Foundation honored the “exceptional number of Bay Area stewards and designers” that have played pivotal roles in creating and shaping this landscape over many decades, including three key leadership organizations: The Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, The Presidio Trust, and The National Park Service.

Here are some of the photographs of the Presidio and Golden Gate National Recreation Areas, documented by SWA Group’s Principal Photographer, Tom Fox:

“The Golden Gate National Recreation Area, created in 1972, is an 80,000-acre gem with some of the nation’s most beautiful natural and designed landscapes. Bikers, hikers, joggers, birders, nature lovers and others are drawn daily to its miles of trails and paths and its parks and other amenities. This National Park is not only a place for San Franciscans to recreate and enjoy, it also provides an ideal setting for learning, helps establish a lifelong connection with nature and the environment, promotes civic engagement and a holistic stewardship ethic – all while fostering engagement with a broader national and international community. Maintaining this expansive cultural landscape, though, is complex, challenging and costly, particularly at a time when resources are lacking and years of deferred maintenance have hobbled many such places around the country.”

– The Cultural Landscape Foundation, “What’s Out There.”

From The Cultural Landscape Foundation’s recent publication on the Golden Gate Recreation Area:

“The responsibility for making all of this nature look so natural – and publicly accessible – lies with the National Park Service (NPS) and The Presidio Trust (“the Trust”), working with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy (the Parks Conservancy). Together, as forward-thinking park stewards, they have consistently sought to balance natural, scenic and cultural values, providing public access while carefully managing a vast, ecologically-diverse park system. Their pioneering efforts serve as an innovative model for park stewardship nationally and internationally, successfully securing funds, developing forward-thinking management policies and building and sustaining infrastructure.

These projects are an important catalyst for Bay Area businesses, particularly landscape architects, architects, engineers and construction teams who are commissioned to design and rehabilitate the parks, trails, facilities and many other amenities. It is because of this thoughtful management that The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) honored the Parks Conservancy, the Trust and NPS each with a Stewardship Excellence Award. The Award, created in 2001, is annually bestowed on a person, group or agency that shares TCLF’s mission of “stewardship through education,” with the goal of highlighting stewardship stories that will educate and inspire future generations of cultural landscape stewards.”

Download a copy of the full book, with a great map and list of sites to explore if you have a chance to visit.

(Photography by Tom Fox, SWA Group). 

The list of speakers includes David McConville, Cheryl Dahle, Adam Werbach, Alex Gilliam, Terry Irwin, John Bielenberg and many more–and the conversation topics and short-form presentations will include discussions of resilience, design, innovation, composting, social change, and living in a connected world. What does it mean to design with systems thinking and social responsibility at the top of mind? How do recycling, composting, and social change fit together? What can we learn from modeling living systems as inspirations for complex design? Why do most products create so much waste? How can we learn from the patterns of the universe to design strategies that effectively address complex problems?

Join Landscape Urbanism at the event this Friday and Saturday, and watch for our blogging coverage of the event.

More information: Compostmodern 13: Resilience.

>> Also check out the Conversations on Resilience Design happening before the conference on Wednesday, March 20th at Hot Studio in San Francisco:  “Conversations with Ezio Manzini and John Thackara.” 

A quick version created with more generous tree sizes.

Designed in part by the desire to increase real-time engagement at community planning meetings, the fellows describe the project as “in the spirit of free software,” and encourage everyone to try it out and comment or suggest new features to help improve its usability.

“By creating an web-based version of this activity, planners can reach a wider audience than they could at meetings alone, and allow community members to share and edit each other’s creations.”

This app is a work in progress, and in a very early stage. Try it out for yourself at StreetMix.Net.

Beyond the metrics we already use to measure our cities, what are we missing? What ways can we quantify and measure actions, behaviors, politics, engagement, economics, and life in a city? What unseen dimensions and spatial parameters are critical for well-being (or quirkiness) within a city?

“Meanwhile, the cost of some of what we consume in cities – like real estate – is reflected in its price structure, yet a lot of it – like parking, parks, or pollution – is not. Even if the environmental benefits of urban density are starting to be understood, an accepted calculus of a city’s externalities remains far from precise, subsumed in a metaphorical language of carbon footprints or numerical valuations like LEED.”

“So let’s put it in personal terms. How do you measure your behavior: In rent? In square feet? The number of laps run around the park? MetroCard swipes? Brand of lightbulb? The distance food travels to end up on your plate? What are urban public goods – drinking water, open space, public access television, fireworks displays – worth to you?”

Deadline: Friday, March 22nd, 5:00PM EST.
See the call for submissions at Urban Omnibus.

These initial diagrams combine Thoreau’s recounting of 1846/47 ice harvests at Walden with commercial records and policy documents, mapping the regional industry and its rail-based network of extraction, storage and glocal consumption.

As in many northern areas, primitive refrigeration and rail reorganized urban access to dairy, meat, fish, and lager, preserving foods, making markets, and spurring population densification from Maine to Minnesota.

As the center of U.S. ice-export, Boston merchants also used ice shipments as backhaul, subsidizing northern importation of plantation crops as well as East Indies’ colonial products.

Thoreau’s editorial accounting and its underlying, forgotten networks thus provide an alternate perspective on refrigeration and invite us to explore, with fresh eyes, contemporary forms of climate control and sustainability.

The variations can be read here or downloaded in full here. Text and images courtesy of Meg Studer. 

Meg Studer is a designer, researcher and data-visualizer focused on logistics, material streams and process-arts. Ranging from antebellum industrialization to contemporary urbanism, her infographic work excavates the socio-material operations, forms, and footprints behind infrastructure and communication networks. Previously an Associate at Stoss Landscape Urbanism, she now leads Siteations (studio).

The stately Divine Lorraine rises ten stories above Broad Street.
Originally designed in the 1890s, it closed in 1999 and now sits vacant.

Once upon a time, elephants paraded into the Metropolitan Opera House and the Divine Lorraine stood regally ten stories above North Broad Street in Philadelphia. A fantastical quality remains in these two buildings that has outlasted entertainment trends, housing fashions and urban shifts that led to the general decline of the surrounding neighborhood and the near demise of these two landmarks. I had the opportunity to explore these iconic structures on a tour led by Hidden City Philadelphia and learn about their storied pasts and aspirations for the future.

The White Company, a Cleveland-based automobile manufacturer, held its Annual Dealers Banquet at the Hotel Lorraine in 1922. Photo Courtesy Philadelphia Free Library.

The Divine Lorraine is a Philadelphia legend, if not for its striking architecture than for its resilience. Designed by Willis G. Hale in 1894, the building originally housed Philadelphia’s affluent members of high society. It transitioned into an upscale hotel, known as Lorraine Hotel, before being purchased in 1948 by Father Divine. After adding his moniker to the building, the hotel was opened to people of all races and economic classes. Under his direction residents adhered to strict attire and behavior rules mandated by the church. Community social services such as inexpensive meals served to those in need or affordable rooms were provided. The building closed in 1999 and was eventually sold to developer Eric Blumenfeld of EB Realty Management in 2012.

The former Banquet Hall on the top floor of the Divine Lorraine is now stripped of details.

Beyond redeveloping the Divine Lorraine into 126 housing units, Blumenfeld proposesregenerating portions of North Broad Street between City Hall and Temple University. Though parts of his plan are still in the infantile stages of development, such as proposing several new public schools that re-imagine public and private educational partnerships, new housing projects, and restaurant ventures are already constructed.

Halfway between the Divine Lorraine and Temple University is the Metropolitan Opera House. A partnership between church, community, and developer, rather than the vision of a sole party, the Opera House occupies nearly an entire city block. This massive white structure does little to draw attention to itself from the street—the spectacle is concealed within.

The grand style of the Metropolitan Opera House is concealed within this innocuous structure on North Broad Street.

An ambitious showman who possessed a zealous passion for opera, Oscar Hammerstein built the 4,000 seat opera house in 1908, the largest in the world at the time. The stage is said to be the size of a basketball court and the orchestra pit so cavernous that the Broad Street Subway line rumbles audibly from within it. Opera was in the midst of a revival, but debt and a vision perhaps too grandiose for the time made for just a few opera seasons. Over the course of several decades the Opera House was home to a silent movie theater, ballroom, and sports venue. In 1995 it was proposed that the building be torn down and turned into a parking lot.

After learning of this project, and with only a few weeks to secure funds, Pastor Hatcher of Holy Ghost Headquarters purchased the building in 1996 and quickly made it habitable and safe for his church congregants. A blue tarp is draped over a portion of the theater and immensely deep stage. The church meets below the tarp in a comfortable room with blue carpeting and stackable chairs. Like a building surreally encased inside another building, the theater wraps the church and hides behind the blue tarp.

Top: The theater of the Metropolitan Opera House has been preserved, with a blue tarp covering the stage and most of the seating area.
Bottom: Holy Ghost Headquarters in the Metropolitan Opera House. The tarp that covers much of the former theater serves as the roof of this gathering space.

Part of the church’s mission is devoted to saving the opera house and they are open to Blumenfeld’s partnership given the immensity of the undertaking. The size and large seating capacity of the theater present programmatic challenges that will have to be creatively met.

In interviews Blumenfeld readily admits that “gentrification” is approaching North Broad Street, if it hasn’t already. Though this word might make some cringe and others wealthy it signifies an undeniable turning point for this area. Blumenfeld has certainly aroused enthusiasm and a mixture of support and skepticism but it should be remembered that his plans for these landmarks and the surrounding neighborhood are still in the early and imaginative “what if” stages. What if a derelict building could be new again; what if a blighted neighborhood could be trendy? What if we could educate a generation entirely different than we have before; what if we could live in places previously thought to be unlivable? Though he faces contention, compromise, and setbacks in the coming years, Blumenfeld‘s drive for urban transformation is compulsory and this neighborhood is prepared to take it on.

EB Realty Management’s plan to transform North Broad Street.

This post was published both for Landscape Urbanism and on Olin’s blog.

Amelia Magida is a landscape designer living, researching, working, and playing in Philadelphia. She holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and Bachelor of Architecture from the Pratt Institute. She is weeks away to becoming a licensed landscape architect and applies her many talents at OLIN.

Greater Las Vegas: Residential Patterns (and Aerial Photographs)

Flying in from San Francisco, here’s a couple of photos of the cityscape from the airplane window:

Looking towards the airport and the strip, offset in the background. One of the main visual characteristics of Las Vegas is the desert landscape and the mountains surrounding the flat, tan lands. Note the patchwork of development in the foreground and the scattered suburban developments. 

Residential suburban housing is an easy pattern to pick up from an aerial view: organized, repetitive, single-colored rooftops. 

Another typical form of neighborhood development, with an anchor shopping mall off of an arterial street system leading to rounded-street single-family residential housing. 

Gorgeous desert mountains in the distance. By and large, this is a horizontal city, not a vertical city.

The Downtown Project: Another Las Vegas?

Looking out the window and musing about a city I barely know, I started to ask questions about what we think of when we think of Las Vegas, the city.

What is Las Vegas? What is its identity? What image comes to mind when you consider Las Vegas, and have you been beyond the Strip (not technically in Las Vegas, afterall) to see the residential or downtown areas of the city?

Did you even know that the city had a downtown? I’m not sure that I knew this.

If you don’t know of the Downtown Project yet, it’s a $350 million urban experiment led by Tony Hsieh of Zappos to “build the most community-focused large city in the world.” (The press list includes coverage in the NY Times, Arch Daily, Fortune, Business Insider, Pando Daily, and Tech Cocktail).

I toured the downtown project area(s), feeling a bit confused about what the identity and vision for the project will be–although excited about the possibility of change and creation. In it’s current status, the downtown’s identity felt a bit like I was standing on a street corner peering into several different versions or interpretations of Vegas: looking in one direction, flat vacancy; turn and face the next block, and you see an amalgamation of 1950′s and 1960′s neon signs and strip-mall signage; another turn brings you face to face with more traditional downtown developments (a residential high rise, a city hall building), and yet another turn finds a lone sign and visions of shipping containers that feels somewhat familiarly like Burning Man in its eclecticism and desert combinations.

Looking East towards the denser part of downtown; Fremont Street’s events are covered by the large half-dome in the center.

Looking East.

Looking North, with the old City Hall in the left part of the frame. 

Views North. 

Looking North-West. 

Looking down towards many vacant lots and surface parking lots. 

From The Ground

What’s more important than aerials, however–is not the view from above but the view from the ground. What do these corridors and interstitial spaces feel like? What does the street front look like? How do we move through the city? How do we use the city, down on the ground, as pedestrians–as we spend much of our lives? Here are several snapshots from wandering the downtown spaces:

Lots of signs and interesting sculptures. 

As an urban designer and landscape architect, I was pressed to make conclusive remarks and design decisions for the future of the city–but in only two days, I can’t profess to have such conclusive thoughts. I’m as curious as the next person: what is Las Vegas? And what will it become?

So, what is it?

Or as the sticker in the hallway of the Ogden asked me:

I want _______ in my neighborhood. 

Aerial view near Indiana, United States.

One of the marvels of contemporary publishing is the sense of urgency it enables a polemical tract like Alex Steffen’s Carbon Zero to take on. Steffan opens with a stark and still-fresh reminder of his book’s importance – the nearly 14-foot tidal wave that struck Lower Manhattan in late October, less than two months before Carbon Zero hit shelves (or Kindles, whatever). I was at first tempted to label Steffen rather morbidly lucky in that sense, before reflecting that it’s actually becoming rather difficult not to publish a book shortly after some catastrophic event linked to climate change (that link should lead you to a story about heavy downpours and potential flooding in already-soaked England and Wales, during the week of 17 Dec 2012; but if you’re reading this next week or the week after or five years from now, I’m sure a new catastrophe will spring just as readily to mind).

“Steffen’s correct when he claims that we gradualists need to step aside, that we’re not recommending anything that’ll fix these problems anywhere near fast enough. If ever there were an issue well-suited to convincing utopianism, global climate change is it. Nothing else is going to cut it.”

It’d be a stretch to claim that Steffen’s written the most important book of the 21^st century – sorry, Alex – but he has written a very readable and really pretty useful book about the most important issue of the 21^st century, and that’s a praiseworthy-enough feat, I should think (incidentally, it’s also cheap as these things go, and since you’ve probably got some spare time [and possibly a new e-reader? It’s that time of year] at the moment, you can buy it here). A few months ago, I castigated Fast Company’s “climate capitalist” in-residence, Boyd Cohen, for more or less groveling at the altar of neoliberalism and simply refusing to challenge the systems of production and consumption which undergird early-21^st century capitalism; certainly no such criticism can be leveled at Steffen, who devotes an entire chapter to the subject. Carbon Zero really is a comprehensive piece of work, addressing not just all the major systems that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and global climate change, but also potential urban solutions to mitigate or even reverse those contributions. It’s a boldly optimistic piece of writing, the sort of thing that self-proclaimed pragmatists like myself try to dismiss as hopelessly naïve or some such. But Steffen’s correct when he claims that we gradualists need to step aside, that we’re not recommending anything that’ll fix these problems anywhere near fast enough. If ever there were an issue well-suited to convincing utopianism, global climate change is it. Nothing else is going to cut it.

FIRST, THE PRAISE…

Somewhat unusually for this sort of review, I’m going to refrain from quoting Steffen extensively; Sarah’s already posted some pretty significant excerpts from Carbon Zero to the blog, and if we keep going we’ll have the whole book up here. Instead, I’m going to focus on what I think makes Carbon Zero a hell of a lot more effective than (to beat a dead horse) Cohen’s “climate capitalism” or any of the other, seemingly-endless tracts laying out the neoliberal prescription for dealing with climate change: namely, Steffen’s unaffected utopianism.

Overall, Carbon Zero is a pretty optimistic book – almost unbearably so at times, when you reflect on Steffen’s introduction. “We still, just barely,” he writes there, “have the option [to]… pause at ‘extremely dangerous’ and pull back from the brink of chaos.” Maybe that’s why Carbon Zero never quite crosses the line of naiveté – Steffen’s optimism and utopianism are deployed in the service of a very realistic, perhaps even pessimistic (well, we can hope…), goal. Steffen doesn’t claim that we as individuals can save the world today. Instead, he lays out the case for collective action to prevent the future’s becoming too horrible, a case even hardened cynics should take seriously. Because after all, there’s still a chance, right?

“Steffen’s thesis is that cities – well-designed and well-managed cities, that is – can and must be our answer to climate change.”

Steffen’s thesis is that cities – well-designed and well-managed cities, that is – can and must be our answer to climate change. Rather than considering factors that contribute to climate change individually (though that certainly can be done convincingly), he examines five fundamental and very broad systems: energy, urbanism, shelter, consumption and sustenance. These systems function in ways determined by choice that we made collectively, and that can only be un-made collectively; cities and urban regions, Steffen argues, are the venues through which we can un-make some of our past decisions, and reach new ones that move the human race towards a “carbon zero” future.

So far, then, so good. Steffen opens by identifying a problem, the venue(s) in which it can be solved and the levers we’ll need to lean on in order to get there. Each chapter covers one “system” and outlines solutions that will likely sound familiar to urbanists of all stripes, but which aren’t always collected quite so readably in one place. We need dense cities that use less energy (particularly for transport, but also through the built environment more generally), and we need to live and consume in them in ways that minimize carbon emissions and maximize synergies between human settlements and the so-called “natural” world (Steffen is rightly skeptical of any attempt to maintain some human/natural divide, and thank God for it). You don’t need and shouldn’t expect the details from me – I’ll repeat that you should buy the book here, but now (since you’ve come this far) add that you can find it all at here at grist if need be – but they’re there in full. Carbon zero is possible, and Steffen does as good a job as any outlining the possibilities. Whether or not it’s plausible or even likely is another question entirely, but one that Steffen doesn’t and shouldn’t be expected to answer.

“Carbon zero is possible. Whether or not it’s plausible or even likely is another question entirely.”

Is this the best version of imagining (and reimagining) cities?

…AND THEN, THE CRITICISM.

Apparently, rhetorically linking whatever book I’m reviewing to the last thing I read (whatever that happens to be) is becoming something of a trademark move. This time around, I had the pleasure of re-reading John Maynard Keynes’s fabulous essay, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” just a day or two before picking up Carbon Zero, and was struck by the similar styles Keynes and Steffen employ.

“Possibilities…” is one of the more radical pieces Keynes published, in which he resolves to “disembarrass [him]self of short views and take wings into the future.” Keynes’s fundamental contention is that, given the trends witnessed from the Industrial Revolution up through the essay’s publication in 1930, it is not unreasonable to expect that within a hundred years the problem of scarcity – the Economic Problem, as it has often been called – will have been resolved. “Work” as we conceive of it will be largely unnecessary, limited to a manageable three-or-so hours each week to keep folks’ passions and sense of importance in check. In a hundred years, Keynes anticipates, “[w]e shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter – to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible.”

Was Keynes a naïve fool? Well, no – he was probably the greatest economist of the 20^th century, and after all we’re the ones still being suckered in by the “need” for work and the demands of an altogether-unnecessary 40-hour work week. I’d be careful who I called “naïve.” But Keynes will probably be proved incorrect, barring some dramatic change over the next less-than-two decades. There are many parties to blame for this, and our few remaining utopians hardly top the list – but they’re still culpable, dammit, at least to some small extent. In their refusal to challenge the centrality and permanence of the Economic Problem, they’ve not only undercut their own visions of utopia, but also helped limit our ability to achieve them.

“Unacknowledged in Carbon Zero is the tremendous amount of spare time that it’ll take to operationalize many of Steffen’s suggested urban “solutions” to the climate change crisis.”

Unacknowledged in Carbon Zero is the tremendous amount of spare time that it’ll take to operationalize many of Steffen’s suggested urban “solutions” to the climate change crisis. Words like innovation and competition and race-to-the-top are all too often bandied about without any admission that they all require time commitments that most normal people can’t afford to make. Crowdsourcing – publication of Carbon Zero was funded in part through a Kickstarter campaign – can help, but as Steffen recognizes in his afterward, innovation and creativity are expensive. A genius living paycheck-to-paycheck doesn’t have the time to drop by the café where she bump into someone with the other half of her idea for maximum-efficiency retrofitting of historical structures; after work, he or she’s too busy shopping, cleaning, cooking him or herself dinner and (hopefully) relaxing afterward for an hour or so before bed. I’ve done it, you’ve done it – working full-time simply isn’t especially conducive to genius. It’s mostly just exhausting.

If I’ve got one complaint about Carbon Zero, then, it’s that Steffen doesn’t take his utopianism quite far enough. His optimistic prescriptions call for significant investments of time, and that’s something we’ve got no shortage of – the ladies and gentlemen of Jacobin have long made a very excellent case for the “anti-work agenda,” while such mainstream-liberal outlets as the New York Times (well, Krugman at least) and the Financial Times have slowly begun to come around more recently. A future of experimentation, a future of hyperlocal production and consumption, a future in which people drive less and walk more, a future in which small and dense communities are the rule: all of that sounds a lot more compatible with a future in which people have a lot more time to devote to their own interests than one in which they’re stuck for forty-odd hours each week at some job they’re not particularly invested in.

I’m not sure what I’m asking for here – should Carbon Zero have been more ambitious, or should Steffen’s next project tackle the Economic Problem more aggressively? – but I am positive that it’s important. Pretending that we can actually mitigate climate change within the context of contemporary capitalism (Boyd Cohen, I’m looking at you) is a just a waste of time; Alex Steffen’s Carbon Zero clearly isn’t that, but it’s also not a complete answer to the questions it poses. What our current crisis demands is a fusion of Carbon Zero and its ilk, with the really rather inimitable “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” Steffen is right to argue that we must devote our hearts and our minds to addressing the problem of climate change. But if we’re to worry about where the planet’s headed, we’ll first need to start spending a lot less time worrying about putting in our forty hours. The climate change problem and the Economic Problem are inseparable; it’s time we finally got around to addressing both.

A native of Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, Peter Chomko got his start in planning rethinking the spatial organization of the atypical warehouse environments (those of an arts-and-education nonprofit and a corporate library services outsourcing firm) where he worked. He is presently a Master of City Planning (2013) candidate at the University Of Pennsylvania School Of Design, with a concentration in community and economic development.