MNN

The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) – probably the most significant urban design movement in North America since Levittown and the rise of suburbia – turned 20 in West Palm Beach last week.

I’ve been taking a lot of strange walks lately. I circumnavigated the long-gone walls of Old Montreal not long ago, hiked between twin cities in Kitchener-Waterloo, even walked as far as I could get in 45 minutes from the arrivals hall at Toronto’s Pearson Airport.

As somewhat bewildered Apple shoppers in San Francisco, New York and Toronto learned firsthand last week, Greenpeace has a new enemy: dirty data.

As half a million Twitter followers already know, the inside of retired baseball legend (and notorious steroid abuser) Jose Canseco’s head is a strange, restless and fascinating place. Alongside random snippets of sporting and celebrity life, Canseco uses his Twitter feed to wage a pitched battle between his ego and its many enemies. “I complete you,” he repeatedly reminds his fans, while snarling viciously at the many haters out there.

The following text is copied verbatim from a range of news articles, websites and press releases.

Whenever I’m asked to name my favorite cities, I rattle off a list that contains a few usual suspects – New York, Copenhagen, Berlin – and at least one that often surprises people: Hanoi, Vietnam. If I’m asked to elaborate, I find it tricky.

There were two blockbuster pieces of energy news last week that I’m going to discuss as the renewable and nonrenewable poles in our global debate about the future of energy — and in particular what we mean by cheap/affordable/economical energy sources — and I’m afraid this may take a little time. As the Twitterverse puts it, it’ll be a #longread.

First, let me draw your attention to a fantastic piece of listicle eye candy over at Treehugger - "The Future of Wind Power: 9 Cool Innovations." Now, futuristic eye candy and linkbait lists are of course a dime a megabyte on the Internet nowadays, and it's anyone's guess whether any of that stuff ever makes it to primetime.   Still, the items on that list are far more deserving of the "cool" modifier than most such things, and

Next month, a broad cross-section of America’s (and the world’s) best urban planners, designers, thinkers and doers will be gathering in West Palm Beach for the 20th annual Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU20).

As this wacky, wild, overheated March draws to a close, here are the numbers that mattered in sustainability this month:   7,504 This is the number of record high temperatures recorded in the United States this month as of March 29.

In a recent post, I posed a question I thought was somewhat rhetorical: “Is walking a form of activism?” Might a simple stroll down the street, I mused, constitute an act of dissent in a transportation network and broader urban landscape built mainly for cars?

Let’s start today’s sustainability lesson with a truism: Big global brands love sustainability. They love to talk about it, put it in their mission statements, make claims to living it. The reason why is in part because as a meme, it’s probably too successful. Sustainability’s been worn thin by overuse and mishandling.

Julius von Bismarck is a visual artist based in Berlin who appears to thrive on playful confrontation. His work tends to focus on themes of technology and mediation; he likes to play with old cameras and other image-capture devices. His best known invention is a machine called the Image Fulgurator, which looks like a professional-grade camera equipped with a telephoto lens but actually projects images onto nearby objects.

As I’m sure you’ve already noticed (unless you’re just back from a silent meditation retreat in the Thai jungle or something), there is a film version of Dr. Seuss’ beloved children’s classic "The Lorax" coming out later this week, and it’s being blanket-marketed and cross-promoted with an intensity rarely seen outside a Disney venture.   The book itself, of course, is particularly treasured in ecologically minded circles.

Here’s an eye-catching little story of urban design innovation from the fashion trade: This week in Toronto, a little boutique opened up on King Street West in the heart of the city’s theatre and club district (and not far from its old garment district).

In my last post, I promised to provide an overview of Awesome Transit the world over. It’s a phrase that I’m sure inspires eyerolls, a textbook oxymoron. Transit is a utilitarian thing. A tool of necessity, not a celebration of mobility, certainly not the cornerstone of a community. Right?   Well, certainly many North American cities have long treated transit this way.

The Internets are all abuzz with a new study published by Nature Climate Change (a sister publication of the prestigious science journal, Nature) about the potential climate impacts of Alberta’s oil reserves.   The study, undertaken by Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria – a former lead author with the IPCC and probably Canada’s most prominent climate scientist – and his student, Neil Swart, crunched the numbers on future greenhous

In my last post, I alluded somewhat less than seriously to the idea that the renewable energy industry was a vast, deep-pocketed cabal.

I give public presentations frequently on the subject of climate change and cleantech and sustainability, and probably the most common question I get at these talks is: Why do you hate our freedoms so much? The answer to that question is that I receive enormous amounts of money from the sinister forces of Big Solar and Big Wind to spread lies about a cleantech-powered world.

As urban bike fans already know, one of the world’s greatest cycling cities is Copenhagen, and one of the Web’s best reads is Copenhagenize, a wide-ranging, erudite forum for cycling and related urban transport issues produced by Copenhagen-based filmmaker and consultant Mikael Colville-Andersen.