My whole life is surrounded by technology that has been discovered or invented in the past 50 years. I am a product of Generation-X, the epitome of consumerism. I love and want more technology, I crave the latest gadget, I consume therefore I am. But really, I am a poor example of a consumer, I [...]
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Last Friday I spent the day with some of really smart people at the Institution of Civil Engineers North America Convention in Vancouver, BC. While I haven’t yet parsed all of the information, the day left me with mixed feelings about the future of the industry. On one hand, engineers can save the world – [...]
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UrbanWorkbench will be represented at the upcoming Training 4 Transition event in Abbotsford, BC by my wife Robyn Thomas. This course is a useful first step in getting started on the concept of a Transition Town and is being held over two days, March 20th and 21st, 2009, (in Abbotsford, BC).
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Over the past couple of days, I’ve attended the Building Sustainable Communities Conference held in Kelowna with a couple of hundred other people, predominantly from around British Columbia, but also from as far away as Sweden. I covered the contents of many of the sessions in posts that can be found here. These were my [...]
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Jesse Lemieux, now living on Denman Island is a Permaculture educator who has been engaged in Permaculture principles around the globe. His presentation at the Building Sustainable Communities Conference was a primer on Permacultur, the reasons and means to make a difference in sustainable design of human settlemtn and the relationship to the environment and [...]
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Why be a sustainable community? Involved connected creative community Necessity – statutory requirements of land planning Building within the environmental carrying capacity Population growth 1988 – 4,000 people 2015 30,000 people. (16% growth) Country residential fragments and expands infrastructure of all types Dwellers on the threshold A choice to be made – Planned destiny By [...]
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Traditional road-building focus until 1990 Fiscal, political and physical reality intervened Goal – Hold Traffic to 1994 levels, reduce SOV mode share to 25% Why not just build more roads? If Boulder pursued a road capacity building project: $200 million on road capacity projects improve system congestion from 60% in 20 years to 51% congested [...]
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A model for sustainable community, the Mayor of Linköping, Ann-Catherine presented on the last fifty years of efforts to improve the sustainability of the community – now over 90% of the residential dwellings are heated by the district heating system run by the municipality. A City of 140,000 people The community takes solid waste from [...]
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