The Manhattanville Project is an excellent article by Daphne Eviatar on the challenges faced by Columbia University in developing their new campus extension, designed by Renzo Piano, in Upper Manhattan.

Photo by Brenda Ann Kenneally

Quoted: In contrast to the gated, stone Beaux-Arts-Renaissance campus built more than a century ago in Morningside Heights, the new West Harlem campus would tell a more contemporary story: filling almost 18 acres parallel to the waterfront, it would open Columbia to the surrounding community. Some buildings could reach 25 stories, and the streets would remain publicly accessible…Yet the university has met remarkable resistance. One man’s urban improvement, it seems, is another man’s urban debacle.

The World Resources Institute (WRI) Vulnerability and Adaptation Project works to prepare nations around the world to mitigate and manage the effects of climate change through informed policy.

Quoted: National development policies that take the changing climate into account will provide an essential foundation for enabling effective action on adaptation.  WRI’s Vulnerability and Adaptation (V&A) project tackles questions of how policy design can respond to the range of challenges raised by climate vulnerability.

The Mayors for Climate Protection website (www.coolmayors.org) offers a variety of resources for reducing CO2 emissions in cities throughout the world. It also includes profiles of the growing list of U.S. mayors who have signed on to this initiative.

Quoted: Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels launched The US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement on February 16, 2005, the day the Kyoto Protocol went into effect in 141 countries, without US participation. The agreement calls for Seattle and other U.S. cities that have signed the agreement to meet or beat the goals of the Kyoto protocol, which call for a 7 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Close to 300 cities have signed the agreement.

Jane Jacobs’s observations on city neighborhoods are so insightful, including her early advocacy of mixed-use communities where people can live, work, walk, and shop at viable local businesses. She is critical of modernist planning that placed low-income people in “projects” and uprooted urban neighborhoods in favor of highways and sterile civic spaces. Her ideas on the benefits of local economies, population density, and decreased reliance on automobiles are very well aligned with sustainable development and environmental conservation.

Synopsis from Powells Books: A direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century. The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its first publication in 1961, become the standard against which all endeavors in that field are measured. In prose of outstanding immediacy. Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves. She writes about the salutary role of funeral parlors and tenement windows, the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity. Compassionate, bracingly indignant, and always keenly detailed, Jane Jacobs’s monumental work provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of all cities.

Photo credit: things magazine