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Sustainability at the project level : the case of Willets Point, Queens
Abstract
Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 53-56). Citywide sustainability planning creates a vision of how environmental concerns will shape urban development, but the way these plans are incorporated into individual development projects plays a large role in determining how that vision will be achieved in practice. I propose a system for evaluating the extent to which individual urban development projects contribute to urban environmental sustainability and use it to evaluate the proposed redevelopment of Willets Point, Queens, in New York City. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has made sustainability a major part of his agenda during his administration, and calls the Willets Point project a model of sustainable development. The plans for the redevelopment, however, fail to address several aspects of sustainable development as I define it, and address others only weakly. I argue that in order to achieve strong sustainability, cities must use major projects like Willets Point to rethink how they will develop, and should maximize such projects' contributions to sustainable development. by Siobhan Watson. M.C.P.
... This is the language for a new urban vision; one that distances itself from and places itself in opposition to an obsolete and contaminated industrial landscape. However, advocates for an alternative planning solution for the Willets Point site question the defi nition of sustainability underlying the city's vision, which focuses largely on green building technologies and on meeting LEED-NP criteria that would characterize most locations in New York City, such as proximity to mass transit, walkability, and urban design that integrates commercial and residential uses (Watson 2008). ...
... Only after a major protest and pressure was brought to bear, did the EDC begin to have any meaningful discussions with WPIRA. (WPIRA 2008) The city insisted throughout the public review process that Willets Point "requires a redevelopment plan for future sustainable growth, [that] will only be able to occur as the site is cleared, cleaned and raised" (Potkewitz 2008; see also Watson 2008). However, as many advocacy groups had predicted, the fi nancial crisis has created serious challenges for the city's redevelopment plan. ...
This paper uses the concepts of human carrying capacity and natural capital to argue that prevailing economic assumptions regarding urbanization and the sustainability of cities must be revised in light of global ecological change. While we are used to thinking of cities as geographically discrete places, most of the land "occupied' by their residents lies far beyond their borders. In effect, through trade and natural flows of ecological goods and services, all urban regions appropriate the carrying capacity of distant "elsewhere', creating dependencies that may not be ecologically or geopolitically stable or secure. The global competition for remaining stocks of natural capital and their productive capacity therefore explains much of the environment-development related tension between North and South. Such macro-ecological realities are often invisible to conventional economic analyses yet have serious implications for world development and sustainability in an era of rapid urbanization and increasing ecological uncertainty. -from Author
This article explores the concept—sustainability—as a transcendental ideal of planning purpose and value. The article critically argues that sustainability largely has been captured and deployed under a narrative of sustainable development in a manner that stifles the potential for substantive social and environmental change, all of which constitutes new purpose, legitimacy, and authority for the discipline of planning and its practitioners while potentially sustaining or creating adverse social and environmental injustices. These are injustices that planning traditionally attempted to address but now often obscures under the primacy of the economic imperative within dominant institutional interpretations of the sustainable development narrative.
Abstract Nothing inherent in the discipline steers planners either toward environmental protection or toward economic development -- or toward a third goal of planning: social equity. Instead, planners work within the tension generated among these three fundamental aims, which, collectively, I call the "planner's triangle," with sustainable development located at its center. This center cannot be reached directly, but only approximately and indirectly, through a sustained period of confronting and resolving the triangle's conflicts. To do so, planners have to redefine sustainability, since its current formulation romanticizes our sustainable past and is too vaguely holistic. Planners would benefit both from integrating social theory with environmental thinking and from combining their substantive skills with techniques for community conflict resolution, to confront economic and environmental injustice.
As the need to confront unplanned growth increases, planners, policymakers, and citizens are scrambling for practical tools and examples of successful and workable approaches. Growth management initiatives are underway in the U.S. at all levels, but many American "success stories" provide only one piece of the puzzle. To find examples of a holistic approach to dealing with sprawl, one must turn to models outside of the United States. In Green Urbanism, Timothy Beatley explains what planners and local officials in the United States can learn from the sustainable city movement in Europe. The book draws from the extensive European experience, examining the progress and policies of twenty-five of the most innovative cities in eleven European countries, which Beatley researched and observed in depth during a year-long stay in the Netherlands. Chapters examine: the sustainable cities movement in Europe examples and ideas of different housing and living options transit systems and policies for promoting transit use, increasing bicycle use, and minimizing the role of the automobile creative ways of incorporating greenness into cities ways of readjusting "urban metabolism" so that waste flows become circular programs to promote more sustainable forms of economic development sustainable building and sustainable design measures and features renewable energy initiatives and local efforts to promote solar energy ways of greening the many decisions of local government including ecological budgeting, green accounting, and other city management tools.Throughout, Beatley focuses on the key lessons from these cities -- including Vienna, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Zurich, Amsterdam, London, and Berlin -- and what their experience can teach us about effectively and creatively promoting sustainable development in the United States. Green Urbanism is the first full-length book to describe urban sustainability in European cities, and provides concrete examples and detailed discussions of innovative and practical sustainable planning ideas. It will be a useful reference and source of ideas for urban and regional planners, state and local officials, policymakers, students of planning and geography, and anyone concerned with how cities can become more livable.
The UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves (WNBR), while not originally conceived to include urban areas, was intended to include sites representing all significant ecosystems with the goal of support for sustainable development locally and globally. Drawing on the example of the New York Metropolitan Region (NYMR), which has a population of 21.4 million, it is argued here that the eventual inclusion of the largest of the world's cities in WNBR not only is within the logic of the biosphere reserve concept, but would also benefit the network and its goals. The ecological significance of the NYMR, its role as a driver for global environmental change, as well as the efforts under way in the city to improve urban environmental management and governance are all examined. Potential added value to the WNBR of including megacities such as the NYMR is considered, in particular, regarding the sharing of best practices, lessons learned, and the strengthening of links between megacities and their global natural resource bases.
Who Is Buying Urban Condos? Masters Thesis in the Department of Architecture
- Robert M Delaney
- Linda K Pizzuti
DeLaney, Robert M., and Linda K. Pizzuti. 2005. Who Is Buying Urban Condos? Masters Thesis in the Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Urban Politics and Progressive Housing Policy: Ray Flynn and Boston's Neighborhood Agenda
- Dreier
- Peter
Dreier, Peter. 1996. Urban Politics and Progressive Housing Policy: Ray Flynn and Boston's Neighborhood Agenda. In Dennis Keating, Norman Krumholz, and Philip Star, eds. Revitalizing Urban Neighborhoods. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas)