Friday, June 25, 2010

The Great Leap Sideways


Preventing urban crime means thinking about topics far and wide. For example, it's difficult to talk about reconstituting the urban landscape and not talk about geography, environment, and energy.

The distance of this theoretical turf to the community developer might be long, but the link is direct and important. All those things go hand in hand.

Chris Turner wrote The Geography of Hope precisely to make such linkages.

In a recent talk Turner wows us by tying together car-free cities, high speed rail, peak oil, renewable energy, solar thermals and ocean acidification. He does this in 15 minutes.

Appropriately, a reviewer quotes author Danusha Veronica Goska:

“When we study the biographies of our heroes, we learn that they spent years in preparation, doing tiny, decent things before one historic moment propelled them to center stage and used them to tilt empires.”

When I listen to Turner, I think: Yes! That's it exactly.

Click here to watch Chris Turner's talk (let it stream first).