Reclaiming in-use water is definitely higher value, but reclamation/desalination techniques and technologies should be a strict superset of in-use techniques.
Greening cities - there's been a lot of work done on this over the twentieth century. For references, look into the work of Jane Jacobs, the EcoCity Berkeley (http://www.ecocitybuilders.org/) folks, and the Rocky Mountain Institute (http://www.rmi.org). Also, the Permaculture folks have done some work on that subject; src or permiegirl might be able to elaborate. High green density (cf Portland, Berkeley) lets you get higher urban density and more greenspace than current planning strategies. You only have to give up 1) large lawns per lot and 2) rampant height restrictions, and 3) adopt more mixed residential/retail zoning. Forcing people to drive to the corner store is not desirable! (And current land-use policies, that make the corner store economically unviable in many parts of the country are even worse!)
One Econ question I'd like some grad student somewhere to spend some time thinking about: Where does low-price housing come from? Current thinking is 'compel developers to build and offer some minimum number of lower-priced units within each development plan;' I'd like to see some good data showing how successful that thinking is actually being, and evaluating enough alternatives that we have some idea at least of how badly the different options we have so far actually work, relative to each other. And if some of them actually work well, then lets adopt them more broadly and start spending more time talking about the fact that they work. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs) ()
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Date: 2007-04-08 08:23 pm (UTC)Greening cities - there's been a lot of work done on this over the twentieth century. For references, look into the work of Jane Jacobs, the EcoCity Berkeley (http://www.ecocitybuilders.org/) folks, and the Rocky Mountain Institute (http://www.rmi.org). Also, the Permaculture folks have done some work on that subject;
One Econ question I'd like some grad student somewhere to spend some time thinking about: Where does low-price housing come from? Current thinking is 'compel developers to build and offer some minimum number of lower-priced units within each development plan;' I'd like to see some good data showing how successful that thinking is actually being, and evaluating enough alternatives that we have some idea at least of how badly the different options we have so far actually work, relative to each other. And if some of them actually work well, then lets adopt them more broadly and start spending more time talking about the fact that they work. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs) ()