Questions for Week 3

Students, here are questions to consider for section next Wednesday, based on our readings [Chs 4, 5, 6.1, and 6.2 of State of the World]

Chapters 4&5: Greening Urban Transportation & Energizing Cities
What public transit and energy policies does San Diego [or other California cities you know] have at this point? What options are being considered to improve and green these infrastructures?

Do you use public transportation? Have you or others you know undertaken energy conservation or alternative energy solutions?

In our city and region, what obstacles and opportunities do we have for public transportation and alternative energy?

Given that the book emphasizes the importance of political leadership, what do you think about Jim Bell's vision for San Diego?
-For example, the book emphasizes regional governance--what does this mean, and can you think of any examples of this in San Diego?

On a more theoretical note, I want to discuss the issue of scale--we often use the word level, but I appreciate how this book uses the word scale. How do these words differ when we refer to the urban or local level versus the urban or local scale?

Related to this is the book's key concern with scalability--how to take what might work in a city to be enacted in entire regions, nations, or hopefully across the globe?

Chapter 6: Natural Disaster and Risk

The larger issue I'd like you to consider is the relationship between urbanization and natural disaster--as the world's population crosses the 50% mark where more than half of us live in cities worldwide, how are cities making us safer and putting us at risk? Are risks distributed evenly or whom do they affect disproportionately [and remember we're discussing both local and global scales here]?

Closer to home, how can we evaluate recent urban natural disasters in this country, namely Katrina in New Orleans and the Southern California fires of October 2007? I'm sure many of you were affected by the fires, but an overlooked issue was the bias many felt toward the Witch Creek fire and the relatively little attention the Harris fire received, mirroring the balance of ethnicity and wealth in San Diego County.

Also, and this is not a small point, but I felt that the book severely misrepresented what happened in New Orleans during Katrina. I don't know if many of you have seen Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke, but it is a powerful and sobering look at our government's futility in the face of a gigantic federal disaster. The damage in New Orleans was due to the levees failing, not the hurricane itself.
http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/whentheleveesbroke/