Seth Bauer // January 18, 2010
A really good rant takes a rare combination of passion, knowledge, wit, and intelligence. Recently, in a long phone conversation with Andres Duany, the architect and urban planner, I was privy to one of the best I've ever heard.
The origin of global warming. The cause of American cultural malaise. The inanity of our planning, zoning, transportation, political, and community processes. Duany has a lot to rant about. Ostensibly our conversation was about the carefully distilled, practical advice contained handbook-style in his new release, The Smart Growth Manual, published by McGraw Hill. But our conversation about the book showed why Duany and his coauthors, Jeff Speck and Mike Lydon, had to pare down to core concepts: Otherwise, Duany was just going to explode with it all.
Duany began by identifying three concurrent crises that he traced directly to the American lifestyle: Peak oil (the likelihood that we've already consumed more than half the planet's petroleum in barely 100 years), the housing bubble, and global climate change. "It's where we live, the size of our houses, the distances we drive for work, commerce, play--everything."
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