Put Back Paradise !!

From:

http://www.architectmagazine.com/content.asp?articleID=652494&sectionID=1006

Question: How would you spend the $1.6 trillion on infrastucture in the US of A?

Depave the Parking Lot and Put Back Paradise

We would spend less time fixing and more time dismantling America's infrastructure. The 50-year suburban experiment in car culture is untenable in the face of climate change and projections of peak oil. Urbanism needs to embrace ecology, and urbanists need to recapture the exuberance of visionaries from Charles Fourier to Buckminster Fuller in the creation of new models for sustainable and localized communities.

We would spend the $1.6 trillion on five important eco-urbanist projects. First, a systematic study of the suburbs identifying those which can be densified as new cities and those which can be returned to farmland: There is no middle ground in Ecotopia.

Second, the reconstruction of a national rail network for people and goods and the elimination of trucking.

Third, a massive investment in ecological infrastructure, from solar fields to town-scaled water-filtering living machines.

Fourth, the expansion of farming universities; working land organically will become the future's (more satisfying) version of working at Wal-Mart.

Lastly, the re-establishment of the Jeffersonian grid as a national priority. Ban the cul-de-sac.

The final plea is something no money can buy: To abandon small ideas, banality in design, and the clinging to historicism in order to recapture a nonexistent past—and instead to channel courage, optimism, and humanism in the search for big and forward-looking solutions to contemporary issues.
—Dan Wood and Amale Andraos
Principals, WORK Architecture, New York