SOS 323 Final Exam

(6) What are the salient features of “eco-cities” like Curitiba? Describe the specific sustainability efforts made by these cities (see Rabinovitch and Leitman 2009; Newman and Jennings 2008), which have reduced the eco-footprints and helped them stand out from other cities. Is there any limitation or criticism of this “eco-cities” or “eco-villages” approach?

Salient features of the “eco-cities” or “eco-villages” approach include putting people first, recognizing the economic value, empowering champions for health, energizing shared spaces, making healthy choices easy for people, ensuring equitable access for everyone, mixing it up (mixed-use), embracing unique character, promoting access to healthy food and making a place active. Salient features of the “eco-cities” or “eco-villages specifically to Curitiba include, designing with nature, priority to public transport, and participation through incentives.

“Progressive city administrations turned Curitiba into a living laboratory for a style of urban development based on a preference for public transportation over the private automobile, working with the environment instead of against it, appropriate rather than high-technology solutions, and innovation with citizen participation in place of master planning” (Rabinovitch and Leitman 2009, p. 320). Another success was the control of persistent flooding by setting aside strips of land for drainage. Then, to optimize these spaces, Curitiba turned many of these riverbanks into parks by building artificial lakes that contain floodwaters and extensively plating them with trees. Their priority to public transport, “emphasized growth along prescribed structural axes, allowing the city to spread out while developing mass transit that ...

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...react to fear within the context of the physical environment (i.e. local neighborhood). The implications of land use controls are explored through conservation policies, environmental injustices, and greenhouse gas emissions. For example, suburbs push for aggressive land-use control in order to increase minimum lot areas, preserve open space and/or reserve extensive tracts of land for residence. Sprawl and the problems that comes along with it are also attached to land use controls. The mechanisms that perpetuate and/or reinforce such “exclusionary residential policies” include codes, covenants, and restrictions (e.g., intensive building codes, anti-tenant zoning, higher tax), enacting the most restrictive land-use controls, home prices and “drive until you qualify,” developers incentive in building spacious subdivisions, and the middle class to upper class sprawl.