It's All Coming Together...

I've had these discussions with friends over the past few days that I need to get into ideas...

First, the concept of China recreating the industrial revolution of the late 1800's England. You know, the smoke stacks, the thousands of poor workers in tenaments, etc. So what came out of that...here are the dots....you connect them:
Coal "revolutionizes" England's place in the world. Workers move off the land into cities. Of course, the cities cannot handle this and boards them up in tenaments, journalists looking for stories write about them, which gives direct rise to the the "Garden Cities of Tomorrow", which in turn fuels the suburbs of the US, and gives us a automobile culture, and now we deal with global warming.
What will the industrialization of China bring?

Second, the concept of automobiles. Over the past several years, we've been talking about energy use in the western world. But it is really a talk about land use that no one seems to bring up. Even if we make perfect automobiles that give us no pollution, still 40,000 people a year (in the US alone) will die from car accidents and we will drive everywhere. This gives us diabetes and obesity. So the automobile industry and the cigarette industry are perfectly linked. Efficient cars are like healthy cigarettes. We're still all addicted and we're all gonna die.
So it's about land use. We must change the proformas that direct development. I need to develop this more.

Lastly, how about meshworks vs. stratifications? Old vs. New. I'm convienced that new things (such as stadiums and civic centers) do not help out cities any more than keeping old crappy districts. My reasoning is that one cannot exist (successfully) without the other. There is a two block section in Boston that has a fancy hotel and condo on one side and a nasty building with bums drinking Scope on the other. How do they reinforce each other? Oh, I gotta write more....right now, I gotta sleep.

So one last thing. Bill Richardson is amazing. He is the president we need, at least as far as policy is concerned. The other one we need is Obama -- just for the simple charasmatic hope factor. My wish: an Obama/Richardson ticket. Or put Richardson somewhere important. He's amazing.