How Affordable Green Housing Enhances Cities
Housing that is affordable to low-income residents is often substandard and suffering from deferred maintenance, exposing residents to poor air quality and high energy bills. This situation can exacerbate asthma and other respiratory health issues, and siphon scarce dollars from higher value items like more nutritious food, health care, or education. Providing safe, decent, affordable, and healthy housing is one way to address historic inequities in community investment. Engaging with affordable housing and other types of community benefit projects is an important first step toward fully integrating equity into the green building process. In creating a framework for going deeper on equity, our new book, the Blueprint for Affordable Housing (Island Press 2020), starts with the Convention on Human Rights and the fundamental right to housing.
Green Urbansim – An Emergent Human Habitat
How do we bridge the city – nature gap and shape a new paradigm for cities and nature? By combining the natural sciences and the social sciences or integrating a quantitative, empirical foundation built around urban ecology with a mindset that values the qualitative sensitivities of sociology and phenomenology. Another way to think of this is a conversation between Rachel Carson and Jane Jacobs.
