How much of your city is concrete and parking lots?  It’s probably about 25% which is the ratio in many cities.  My city is no exception. There are so many parking lots that stand empty and vast expanses of pavement that it seems ridiculous.   The problem is that many cities were never actually planned — they were just cobbled together as populations grew, businesses sprouted up and zoning changed.  Business zoning means large parking lots.  Many of them are not landscaped with “greenery” in mind at all.

One major American city is taking on the parking lots and installing mini-parks or “parklets” for people to enjoy.  This adds trees and other carbon sinks to cities that badly need them,  and it puts some of the land back to use as nature intended.   It’s a true cliche that the earth was never intended to be paved over.  Nature abhors a vacuum, and there is no vacuum like a huge parking lot.  (Just look at any crack in a parking lot and you will see weeds or grass trying to poke through and grow.)  Let’s take our cities back from the pavement lovers and re-introduce some nature with micro-parks,  like they are doing in San Francisco (and have done in parts of New York).  A greener city is a healthier city too.

Unpaving Paradise . . .

In San Francisco, a handful of parking spaces and public right-of-ways are being remade into mini parks and plazas. Some are lined with trees sprouting from old dumpsters, others are buffered from traffic with large, discarded pipes; inside the improvised borders, tables, small patches of grass and concrete slabs are arranged for seating.

These ‘parklets’ and plazas are part of San Francisco’s new Pavement to Parks initiative, an attempt to transfer some of San Francisco’s public space back to pedestrians.

Mayor Gavin Newsom’s greening director Astrid Haryati recently told the San Francisco Chronicle, nearly 25 percent of San Francisco’s surface is pavement. The Pavement to Parks program aims to change how much of that area is devoted to cars.

This is a fascinating development in the evolution of thought around city streets and who gets to use them. In 2009, New York City took on a similar (yet larger) project — transforming Broadway to be far more pedestrian friendly. . . .

Read more here. I love this idea!

In a related futurism story, 350.org is excited about the future of renewable energy and future Breakthroughs.

You could also work from the other direction: making renewable energy so cheap that it supplants the dirty stuff almost automatically. The Breakthrough Institute and the Truman National Security Project earlier this month convened a collection of groups in Washington, USA to discuss how to build support for public funding for more aggressive research and development spending. The participants included, significantly, Google, perhaps the greatest innovation company on the planet (the 350 campaign anyway seems to run on Gmail, Googledocs, and GoogleEarth), which for [...]