<p>This post is a follow-up to last week's post about our dialogue about big cities and descent.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-11-13/cities-too-big-to-fail">read more</a></p>

<p><span class="inline inline-left"><img src="http://energybulletin.net/sites/default/files/images/Crit.TransactionalCapacity-440x246.thumbnail.png" alt="" title="" class="image image-thumbnail" width="100" height="56" /></span>Considering that forty percent of the time we spend traveling, across all cultures, is spent walking or waiting, the challenge was stark: that the car is complicit in a wi

<p>New Mexico residents are trying to a break free from Los Alamos’ nuclear legacy by creating more environmentally sound ways of living.

<p>A late-summer conference that brought city gardeners and construction developers from around the world to Toronto has just issued a declaration. The statement calls for a new generation of living infrastructure that’s built in partnership with what’s conventionally thought of as urban agriculture.</p>

<p><span class="inline inline-left"><img src="http://www.energybulletin.net/sites/default/files/images/cities-suburbs-fig4-cargraveyard1.thumbnail.jpg" alt="" title="" class="image image-thumbnail" width="100" height="79" /></span>The vulnerability of cities and suburbs in the post-petroleum era has been the object of much debate because their present organization makes their operation so energy-

<p><span class="inline inline-left"><img src="http://www.energybulletin.net/sites/default/files/images/shhh-300x252.thumbnail.jpg" alt="" title="" class="image image-thumbnail" width="100" height="84" /></span>To get back to this season’s water crisis, it’s the rich opportunities for reuse and recycling – not the scarcity – that should focus municipal debate about water.

<p><span class="inline inline-left"><img src="http://www.energybulletin.net/sites/default/files/images/bixi_3-480x360.thumbnail.jpg" alt="" title="" class="image image-thumbnail" width="100" height="75" /></span>Last year I visited Montreal to attend the Ecocity World Summit, a biannual gathering of visionaries from around the globe committed to creating cities where people live in mutually enric

<p><span class="inline inline-left"><img src="http://www.energybulletin.net/sites/default/files/images/687px-Osteospermum_Flower_Power_Spider_Purple_2134px.thumbnail.jpg" alt="" title="" class="image image-thumbnail" width="100" height="87" /></span>As said in the introduction to this lecture held in spring 2011, Christopher Alexander has started a fire that keeps on burning, spread by the "wind"

<p>In the word-cloud of current events, the phrase "parasitic financial system" billows up to a degree that suggests even so-called thinking persons begin to understand what's happening: that banking shenanigans are sucking the life out of advanced societies.

<p><span class="inline inline-left"><img src="http://www.energybulletin.net/sites/default/files/images/Girardet_Figure1.thumbnail.jpg" alt="" title="" class="image image-thumbnail" width="100" height="64" /></span>An urbanizing world requires major policy initiatives to make urban resource use compatible with the world's ecosystems.

<p><span class="inline inline-left"><img src="http://www.energybulletin.net/sites/default/files/images/P8130003.thumbnail.JPG" alt="" title="" class="image image-thumbnail" width="100" height="75" /></span>Building things by yourself, especially with leftover material, has this air of post-peak self-reliance. But, often, that supposes the existence of industrially made products.

<p><span class="inline inline-left"><img src="http://www.energybulletin.net/sites/default/files/images/Barkenbus_Figure2.thumbnail.jpg" alt="" title="" class="image image-thumbnail" width="100" height="67" /></span>The bad news is that it is very difficult to get the American public to embrace household energy reduction despite the promise of financial savings.

<p><span class="inline inline-left"><img src="http://www.energybulletin.net/sites/default/files/images/Raising-A-House.thumbnail.jpg" alt="" title="" class="image image-thumbnail" width="100" height="67" /></span>Have you ever crashed a realtor's open house -- not because you were a buyer, but just so you could see what the owners have done with the house?

<p>Sometimes well-meaning 'green' people like to imagine that the eco-cities of the future are going to look either like some techno-utopia - like the Jetson's, perhaps, except environmentally friendly - or some agrarian village, where everyone is living in cob houses that they built themselves.

<p><span class="inline inline-left"><img src="http://www.energybulletin.net/sites/default/files/images/comunidad_cambria_0.thumbnail.jpg" alt="" title="" class="image image-thumbnail" width="100" height="68" /></span>Rental or leasehold coops are democratically run organizations of tenants that equitably share costs of renting or leasing a building owned by someone else.