Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, by Peter Calthorpe

Abstract

Berkeley Planning Journal, Volume 26, 2013 Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change By Peter Calthorpe Island Press, 2011 Reviewed by Hyungkyoo Kim Climate change has become one of the key challenges for contemporary planning. Peter Calthorpe, a Berkeley-based architect, planner, and a founding member of the Congress for the New Urbanism, suggests an alternative approach to addressing this challenge. In his 126-page book “Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change” (Island Press, 2011), Calthorpe seeks to answer why urbanism is needed in the age of climate change, which he does not hesitate to describe as an “imminent threat.” He forecasts the future impacts of various land use scenarios and offers solutions for planners and policy makers on how our cities and regions should be. This book begins by walking its readers through the history of urbanism in the U.S. in the last fifty years. It depicts the ways in which the changes of urban growth patterns left the country with unsustainable energy needs and suggests that the built environment is responsible for almost two-thirds of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Calthorpe argues that the sole solution to climate change is urbanism because it generates greater ecological, social, and economic benefits than the alternative. He defines urbanism as “compact and walkable development” and presents a set of solutions: a new set of urban design ethics centered on human scale, diversity, and conservation; regionalism in metropolitan planning practice; the Urban Footprint as a new planning tool; and transit-oriented development as an implementation strategy. Calthorpe proposes Green Urbanism, a combination of smart growth policies with the highest standards of technology and lifestyle, as he defines it, should be the most relevant future scenario in the age of climate change. The greatest accomplishment of Calthorpe’s book is a series of computer projections generated with Urban Footprint, a computer-based planning tool built by his team to forecast the impacts of future land use scenarios through 2050 presented with concise numbers and intuitive images. The projections come from his work for the Vision California study 1 , in which he forecasted how each scenario that varies in in housing, transportation, land use, and density futures would impact land consumption, energy use, infrastructure and utility cost, vehicle miles traveled (VMT), GHG emissions, and so forth. For example, the Green Urbanism scenario would 1. Scenario choices and their impacts of the San Francisco Bar Area can be interactively simulated at http://www.youchoosebayarea.org.