Still, the metrics all point in the same direction. So it’s always a struggle on the most profound level between long-term needs and short-term desires. From a short-term standpoint, a lot of the luxuries that we have today, which are unsustainable, are quite desirable. And it’s always short-term well being that seems to trump long-term concerns. The environmental community is endlessly caught-perhaps, necessarily caught-in this long-term versus short-term dilemma. MCP: Because they’re easily observable, there for all to see. What drives policy in China, however, is air quality, health, and congestion. For example, in urban design, there is now clarity that walkable transit-oriented places are better for the environment and better for producing low carbon results. They can get to consensus, but they’re balancing many forces. Our ambiguity is largely the fact that we just can’t reach consensus on anything. There’s ambiguity on how they’re going to emerge, and the ambiguities born of that represent a different set of forces. But given how complex that society and their economies and ecologies are, being rational doesn’t necessarily put you on a clear path. They do have a top-down, fairly rational decision making process. Peter Calthorpe: I fall somewhere between the can-kill-us and can-save-us camps. Now I think China might be the key to a sustainable future-since they can change policies quickly, while we waste time arguing about whether climate change even exists! Where do you fall? I once thought that the heedless urbanization and pollution there would spell doom for the world. Here Calthorpe talks about China’s unique planning process, the future of high-speed rail in California, and Architecture 2030’s new 2030 Palette, after the break. In recent years, in addition to his firm’s continuing work in the United States, Calthorpe Associates has increasingly turned his attention to a country urbanizing at a pace unprecedented in world history: China. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development, the Berkeley-based architect and planner has been at the forefront of urban design for more than three decades. Ī founding member of the Congress for the New Urbanism and a past winner of the Urban Land Institute’s prestigious J.C.

The titles of Peter Calthorpe’s books trace the recent history of urban design in its most vital and prescient manifestations, starting in 1986 with Sustainable Communities (with Sim Van der Ryn) and followed by The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl(with Bill Fulton), The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community and the American Dream, and Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change. This article originally appeared on Metropolis Magazine 's Point of View Blog as ' Q&A: Peter Calthorpe.'

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