The Congress for New Urbanism and Environmental Awareness Essay

The Congress for New Urbanism and Environmental consciousnessIn the last two decades the New Urbanism movement has begun among planners, designers, and builders. Though it does non provide complete solutions to many of the environmental problems caused by human development, it shows a greater aw atomic number 18ness of the undesirable and potenti tout ensembley destructive tendencies exhibited by effected methods of design, planning and construction. Robert Davis, board chairman of the Congress for the New Urbanism, describes the problem of urban sprawl and development. For five millennia, we have built towns and cities with strong centers and clear edges, beyond which lay farms and forests and lakes and streams. For five decades these clear edges have become increasingly ragged, and the outward-developing forces of sprawl have flung a strange collection of objects across the landscape. The strangest of these objects are large boxes with very specialized functions. They are conne cted to each former(a) by swaths of asphalt and each is surrounded by a slender sea of the same material. Their placement relative to each early(a) and to the small boxes we live in is designed and planned for the supreme possible purpose of our time, and of energy in various forms, including human...(http//www.cnu.org/nunjuly98.html).Our monoculture development pattern started as a good idea to separate steel mills and slaughter houses from dwellings. like a shot we rigidly separate all uses our homes, our workplaces, our childrens schools, the places we assemble. This not only ensures the maximum possible consumption of time and energy, it also separates us from each other(http//www.cnu.org/nunjuly98.html). This is a design perspective based on aesthetics alternatively of enviro... ...d, watertables, or their conditions. Nor was their any specific mention of the use of natural reclaimable or sustainable materials in construction. These facts make me aware that there unavoi dably to be more collaboration and sharing of knowledge between planners, designers, builders, and ecologists. If ecologic concerns are not given consideration in development, ultimately all life forms will suffer. If biologists and ecologists do not understand the essential elements of political economy and aesthetics in design when communicating their concerns, nothing will be done to correct current development trends until human health is earnestly effected. Works CitedCNU Updatehttp//www.cnu.org/nunjuly98.htmlEnvironmental Building Newshttp//www.ebuild.com/Archives/Other_ Beth Dunlop, architectural Record Jan. 97, The New Urbanists The Second Generation, p.132-135