Urban Planning and Energy Considerations

The annual American Planning Association conference took place last weekend in Las Vegas, NV. I stumbled upon it when I came across an interesting blog post from Daniel Lerch, who works for the Post Carbon Institute and presented a workshop at the conference.

I'm always interested in hearing about these sorts of industry conferences because they often provide a pretty good sense of what the overall zeitgeist is within the particular field - and because it's strangely difficult to get a sense of an industry if you're not actually part of it. Lerch's blog post is illuminating in several ways. He does lay out some good news,

"Some bright spots -- most notably a project manager for WRT who's rewriting a Pennsylvania county's Comprehensive Plan with energy efficiency as its main theme, and a manager with FEMA's Mitigation division who was fully on board with peak oil and wanting to integrate energy uncertainty into her work."

However, it seems like the majority of the event missed the 'green wave' that other industries are beginning to pick up on. In fact, having a city planning meeting in Las Vegas seems like it would be a terrific learning opportunity, to steal a phrase from the elementary education playbook. And yet:

"Indeed, the whole conference was somewhat discouraging to me: a massive missed opportunity to address sustainable community planning in this most unsustainable of cities. Not only was there not a single session on what was wrong with Las Vegas (and there is plenty to be learned from, there), the closing speaker, New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger, largely focused on how Las Vegas was an extreme extension of American anti-urbanism (per Venturi et al's groundbreaking 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas) that nevertheless has become 'accidentally urban' thanks to the massive pedestrian traffic the Strip generates. Interesting, absolutely. But we're in a sorry state when thousands of planners come to Las Vegas and the focus is on architectural philosophy -- and not on the fundamental incompatibility of that sprawling city's economic, land use and transportation patterns with the increasingly uncertain flows of natural and human capital it depends on for survival.

In other words: We've got nearly 2 million people living out here in the middle of the desert; they're extremely dependent on distant and declining water sources; their economy absolutely depends on cheap aviation fuel, which will soon be a distant memory; their food, manufactured goods and construction material are all trucked and trained in thousands of miles with cheap diesel fuel, which also isn't getting any cheaper... Maybe this is something planners should be concerned about?"