Worldchanging Linkdump
Feb. 12th, 2010 11:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
forsythClosing tabs on articles I was reading over at Worldchanging.
Why Our Bright Green Futures Will be Weirder Than We Think Some solutions that sound great fail to be able to deliver sufficient change quickly enough to be very important. Others deliver change -- perhaps even lots of change -- but are dead-end paths: beyond a certain point, they can deliver no more benefit, and they also don't make the next solution set any easier. Still others may offer some level of benefit but actually impede progress beyond that level, to the point of being harmful distractions. It's not at all clear that every little bit helps: some solutions can get in the way.
My Other Car is a Bright Green City
De-Industrializing the City "Engineering without engines. We should use contemporary technology and computation capacity to make our buildings independent of machinery. Building services today are essentially mechanical compensations for the fact that buildings are bad for what they are designed for—human life. Therefore we pump air around, illuminate dark spaces with electric lights, and heat and cool the spaces in order to make them livable. The result is boring boxes with big energy bills. If we moved the qualities out of the machine room and back into architecture’s inherent attributes, we’d make more interesting buildings and more sustainable cities."
Why Our Bright Green Futures Will be Weirder Than We Think Some solutions that sound great fail to be able to deliver sufficient change quickly enough to be very important. Others deliver change -- perhaps even lots of change -- but are dead-end paths: beyond a certain point, they can deliver no more benefit, and they also don't make the next solution set any easier. Still others may offer some level of benefit but actually impede progress beyond that level, to the point of being harmful distractions. It's not at all clear that every little bit helps: some solutions can get in the way.
My Other Car is a Bright Green City
De-Industrializing the City "Engineering without engines. We should use contemporary technology and computation capacity to make our buildings independent of machinery. Building services today are essentially mechanical compensations for the fact that buildings are bad for what they are designed for—human life. Therefore we pump air around, illuminate dark spaces with electric lights, and heat and cool the spaces in order to make them livable. The result is boring boxes with big energy bills. If we moved the qualities out of the machine room and back into architecture’s inherent attributes, we’d make more interesting buildings and more sustainable cities."
