Two new commissioners will be seated on Friday, March 13. Kelly Kirshner and Dick Clapp received more votes than the incumbents they are replacing.
News story about the latest election is here.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
A Humane Metropolis
Neil Peirce wrote an very interesting column about "Keys to the Humane Metropolis".
An excerpt:
Now, another idea has surfaced. It's called "The Humane Metropolis."
A book with that title, edited by Rutherford Platt, was recently published by the University of Massachusetts Press and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. A conference on the topic was held a week ago in Pittsburgh.
So what is a "humane metropolis"? The key words seem to be green, healthy, sociable, civic and inclusive.
A metropolis (i.e., metro region or citistate) is considered green if it fosters humans' connections to the natural world -- an idea Anne Whiston Spirn promoted in her seminal 1984 book "The Granite Garden." Spirn rejected the idea -- easily absorbed if one watches too many "concrete jungle" films, or even televised nature documentaries -- that the natural world begins beyond the urban fringe.
"Nature in the city," she wrote, "must be cultivated, like a garden, rather than ignored or subdued."
That means renewed attention to welcoming urban parks, from entire "green necklace" systems within metro areas to the emerald-green sanctuary of small vest-pocket parks. Community gardens, green roofs, street trees and planted medians all count -- and today more than ever as antidotes to the "urban heat island" phenomenon and the spread of global warming-inducing greenhouse gases.
Something for us to think about in Sarasota.
An excerpt:
Now, another idea has surfaced. It's called "The Humane Metropolis."
A book with that title, edited by Rutherford Platt, was recently published by the University of Massachusetts Press and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. A conference on the topic was held a week ago in Pittsburgh.
So what is a "humane metropolis"? The key words seem to be green, healthy, sociable, civic and inclusive.
A metropolis (i.e., metro region or citistate) is considered green if it fosters humans' connections to the natural world -- an idea Anne Whiston Spirn promoted in her seminal 1984 book "The Granite Garden." Spirn rejected the idea -- easily absorbed if one watches too many "concrete jungle" films, or even televised nature documentaries -- that the natural world begins beyond the urban fringe.
"Nature in the city," she wrote, "must be cultivated, like a garden, rather than ignored or subdued."
That means renewed attention to welcoming urban parks, from entire "green necklace" systems within metro areas to the emerald-green sanctuary of small vest-pocket parks. Community gardens, green roofs, street trees and planted medians all count -- and today more than ever as antidotes to the "urban heat island" phenomenon and the spread of global warming-inducing greenhouse gases.
Something for us to think about in Sarasota.
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