Perhaps there’s no type of building that better signifies suburban sprawl than the strip mall. Well, maybe a McMansion would do, but the strip mall has been with us longer and its very form and purpose transmits the essence of sprawl. The buildings are low and long, surrounded by parking lots and, in most cases, reachable safely only by car. Whitemarsh Plaza is a smaller specimen, but it’s location along a multi-lane high speed roadway is common for this variety of commercial development.

Whitemarsh Plaza became the focus of SCAD graduate students. And things continued from there, as SCAD professor Scott Boylston describes on the Emergent Structures blog:

Almost 10 weeks ago, a graduate Sustainable Practices in Design class at SCAD visited a generic strip mall on Whitemarsh Island. We went to visit Wendy Armstrong of Thrive Take Out Cafe to talk about the possibility of creating an outdoor eating area made from building materials reclaimed from Savannah Gardens. You could say that conversation…and those that followed it…wandered a bit.

What began as an idea to create outdoor seating from reclaimed materials expanded to include other ideas, such as green roofs. Mary Landers describes some of the possibilities in her Savannah Morning News story, which features this excellent quote from Boylston:

“You go to this generic mall in suburbia and try to start showing people who are skeptical or unaware that this sustainability idea is not this hippie dippie thing,” he said. “It can be a strong, pragmatic set of solutions.”

Today from 3 until 7 p.m., a reception will feature live music, food and presentations framing the students’ ideas for the shopping center. A vacant storefront will house “videos, conceptual drawings, interactive displays” that provide a vision of what Whitemarsh Plaza could be. Click here to download a flier for the event.

The problem is our dependence on oil is bigger than the Gulf of Mexico and bigger than BP. Deepwater Horizon is arguably the largest and most publicized example of our tragic addiction to oil, but it is no way the first. Our national failure to consider more sustainable ways to live, work and get from place to place will continue to cause us increasingly severe and eventually debilitating environmental, military, political, financial and human rights headaches. And as we move on down the right hand side of the Peak Oil curve, these problems will become more numerous and difficult to solve.

Boycotting BP, then, is kind of like switching from Marlboros to Camels to spite Phillip Morris, while continuing to smoke two packs a day. We might feel vindicated in the short term and RJ Reynolds will be happy to take our money, but we’ll suffer the same terrible consequences in the end.

While our addiction to oil has shown up only at the margins of the national debate of how to best punish BP, some interesting things are happening in the background. As summarized by Richard Florida in The Great Car Reset: “Younger people today – in fact, people of all ages – no longer see the car as a necessary expense or a source of personal freedom.” If fewer young people falling in love with automobile culture, for whom are we continuing to build automobile infrastructure? In a cruel twist of fate, we may be creating it for people now (including our families and ourselves), who will become imprisoned by it later. The question is how much more money and effort we will devote to building an automobile-centric transportation system that future generations will not need and that will work against the interests of the people who are currently demanding it? How many more disasters will we tolerate to feed our demand for oil?

A local trend of note was reported yesterday by the Savannah Bicycle Campaign. A recently completed bicycle census finds that bicycle use in Savannah has increased dramatically, or at least was seriously underestimated in the past. Either way, there is more excellent news about who is riding in Savannah. As described here, “Women are considered an ‘indicator species’ for bike-friendly cities”:

“If you want to know if an urban environment supports cycling, you can forget about all the detailed ‘bikeability indexes’—just measure the proportion of cyclists who are female,” says Jan Garrard, a senior lecturer at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, and author of several studies on biking and gender differences.

Savannah saw a 33 percent increase in the proportion of women cyclists over the 2009 census number. That’s even more reason to provide additional bicycle infrastructure. It also offers cause to pause before spending mountains of money on road projects that will keep us hooked on driving in the short term.

Will the realization that it could come here lead to any action besides the emotionally satisfying, but ultimately useless, railing against BP and the government that has been our only response to the spill? Will the possibility of oil slicks from Miami to Maine cause us to comprehend our role in this cataclysm? Will it help us to finally understand that it’s our unrelenting demand for cheap oil that made deep water drilling a viable business proposition? Will it prompt us to take a hard look at how we have built our communities and the way we choose to travel in our daily lives?

Here’s an excellent list of 10 ways cities and towns can kick the offshore-oil habit. How many of these are we doing locally? Aside from the wonderful expansion of on-street bicycle parking, spearheaded by Sean Brandon of the City of Savannah’s Parking and Mobility Services department, the sad answer is not much. In fact, some of the ideas mentioned in the list, including increased density and reduced automobile parking, are fighting words around here! Having been shown the consequences of our oil dependency via television coverage from the Gulf of Mexico, can we now talk seriously about our problems and begin to make responsible decisions about how to make our communities sustainable and livable? Or will it take oil drifting into Wassaw Sound to get our attention?

Healthy Savannah

A press release describes the goal of the forum “is to help people understand what factors have the greatest impact on our health in Savannah. Keynote speaker Dr. Evelyn Lewis will provide an opportunity for citizens to learn about how their health is affected by factors like public policy and the environment in which we live. Participants will also engage in active dialogue around actions we can take to improve our health individually and within the communities where we live.”

Healthy Savannah — coalition of businesses, nonprofits, healthcare agencies, governments, schools and neighborhoods — is an initiative of City of Savannah Mayor Otis Johnson formed in 2007.  It is a public/private collaboration of over 65 community organizations and growing. The community forum is sponsored by the Junior League of Savannah, The 100 Black Men of Savannah, The City of Savannah, St. Joseph’s/Candler Health System, Memorial Medical Center, GeoVista Credit Union, Savannah State University and the A Phillip Randolph Institute.

Thee vent is free and open to the public. For more information, visit the Healthy Savannah Web site or call Kimberly Pannell at (912) 658-8769.

Standing in Ellis Square yesterday evening, it was a little difficult to remember the ugly parking garage that occupied the square for decades. It was even harder to imagine more than 1,000 parking spaces below all the grass, trees and people having fun. And there were plenty of people having fun.

A ribbon cutting, staple of dedication ceremonies, followed remarks by Mayor Otis Johnson and other government officials. However, instead of sticking to the usual script in which the audience observes dignitaries cutting the ribbon, scissors were distributed to the crowd allowing the public to take part and producing hundreds of instant souvenirs of the event.

There’s a lot to like about the new Ellis Square, including the elements that make it “the most environmentally friendly of Savannah’s squares,” according to city officials. These include “water-efficient plants, energy-efficient lighting and HVAC system in the glass-walled visitors center, and a green roof on the public bathrooms.”

Truly, one of the best things going for Ellis Square is its location and the types of land uses nearby. In “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” Jane Jacobs describes the neighborhoods surrounding Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square and how they influence the way the park is used:

“Does anything about the physical arrangement of the neighborhood affect the park physically? Yes. This mixture of uses of buildings directly produces for the park a mixture of users who enter and leave the park at different times…In short, Rittenhouse Square is fairly busy continuously for the same reason that a lively sidewalk is used continuously: because of the functional physical diversity among adjacent uses, and hence diversity among users and their schedules.”

The functional diversity of adjacent uses around Ellis Square is represented by shops, restaurants, office buildings, galleries, nightclubs and hotels. These attractors will bring Jacobs’ “mixture of users” into the square at different times of day. Contrast this with Savannah’s beautiful Forsyth Park, which most folks avoid after sundown, unless a concert or other event is scheduled.

Longtime Sustainable Savannah may remember my grumbling about the fact that most of the money spent on the project went toward the parking garage, with only a fraction remaining for the square itself. I’m still not happy with how much public money we spend to provide storage for private automobiles, but I am pleased with the wonderful new public space that citizens can now enjoy.

The Greening the Southeast Regional Summit

• Farming and Forestry
• Non-traditional Funding Sources
• Climate Change, Renewable Energy Sources, Food Access and Watersheds
• Successful Grassroots Models
• Green Action Plans for College Campuses

For more information, visit the summit Web site.

As reported by the Savannah Bicycle Campaign last week,  The Savannah-Chatham County Metropolitan Planning Commission and the Savannah Development and Renewal Authority are holding a three-day public workshop and charrette “to examine feasibility of removal of the I-16 exit ramps at Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd and Montgomery Street, and to address redevelopment along the 52-block corridor.” The event is scheduled for Feb. 17, 18 and 19 at the Con-Ed Resource Center Ball Room, 714 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. A flier for this event can be downloaded here.

Eric Curl wrote about the potential for flyover removal in the Savannah Morning News last year. He quoted Lise Sundrla of the SDRA commenting about the economic impacts of the flyover:

“There are social and cultural reasons that support the removal,” Sundrla said. “From an economic perspective, (property values) drop drastically from south of the flyover to the north.”

And Christian Sottile described how removal of flyover would position the city relative to other communities grappling with the negative effects of highways on urban areas.

“The flyover would be another model project,” Sottile said. “In this point in history (its removal) would place Savannah in vanguard of cities reclaiming their urban centers from world of high-speed travel.”

All sessions are open to the public. For more information, call Ellen Harris, I-16 Study Project Manager, 651-1482; or Lise Sundrla, (SDRA)  at 651-6973.

Landers describes the study’s methodology, which uses a variety of data sources “to come up with a block-by-block analysis of how convenient it is to choose fresh and healthy over fatty and fast. The group calculated a ‘food balance’ score for each city block by dividing the distance from it to any mainstream food provider (such as Kroger) by the distance to any fringe food venue (such as McDonald’s).”

The story  notes that lack of healthy food options is not exlusive to low income, inner city neighborhoods:

Kathryn Martin, chair of Healthy Savannah, knows that from first-hand experience. She’s lived in Southbridge since she moved to Savannah six years ago. “Southbridge is considered affluent, but when I moved there the closest place to access healthy food was 7 miles away in Pooler,” said Martin, a former administrator of the Chatham County Health Department who now is the Medical College of Georgia assistant dean for Southeast Georgia campus. “Officially, I was in a food desert.”

The difference, of course, between affluent communities such as Southbridge and some other neighborhoods is that nearly everyone in Southbridge has access to a car (sometimes more than one car) and thus easy access to healthy food. In other parts of Savannah, where residents depend on public transportation to travel outside their neighborhoods, the food that’s easy to find is often not the healthiest choice. And the study addresses this in one of its recommendations:

Identify traffic routes, especially pedestrian pathways, to mainstream food venues and identify ways to shorten and improve those routes. The dot maps showing the locations of mainstream and fringe food venues will aid in prioritizing where to start on this task.

The study, “A New Day in the Garden: A Food Desert and Food Balance Analysis in Savannah, Georgia,” can be downloaded here.

From coverage of last night’s Project DeRenne concept unveiling last night provided by WSAV, WTOC and the Savannah Morning News, you might get the idea that the mood  in room was particularly contentious. I didn’t get that impression. And I was sitting a couple chairs away from a local business owner, who rose during the question and answer session and demanded to know why she felt everything had already been decided. She asked why she was distrustful.

Tough questions. Explaining to a person why they feel a certain way is difficult. Naturally, reporters were lining up to talk with her afterward. Other questions centered on how the project would be funded and if “government money” would be necessary to realize some of the impressive developments depicted in drawings. Another good question.

This kind of skepticism is understandable. When you are looking at one of the most dysfunctional streets in the city, which is edged by some very shabby commercial properties, it’s difficult to imagine a safe, attractive street that’s framed by architecturally distinctive buildings and even parks and monuments. When you have an area that most people want to escape as soon as possible, it takes some imagination to think of it as a destination. Yet getting past what it is to what it could be  is the type of mental exercise that will be necessary to transform DeRenne Avenue from a community liability to a civic amenity. Savannah deserves more great places. DeRenne could be one.

Materials presented at last night’s meeting will become available on the Project DeRenne Web site in the coming days.

On Thursday, Dec. 3 at 7 p.m. the “preferred concept,” produced by the recent Project DeRenne charettes, will be unveiled in a former auto parts store at 131 W. DeRenne Ave. I’m interested to see what the folks from Kimley-Horne, working with city officials and citizens of all walks of life, have created. In a recent column in the Savannah Morning News, Project DeRenne coordinator Susan Broker explained how fortunate we are that previous ideas for the corridor never became realities:

“Imagine if we had built the first concept proposed to solve DeRenne’s traffic problems. The mid-city gateway into Savannah would now be an elevated expressway, greatly devaluing some of Savannah’s best neighborhoods and closing dozens of existing businesses. The second round of concepts was no better: Expanding lanes of pavement would have consumed the very neighborhoods they were intended to support. Neither of these concepts was deemed acceptable to the communities surrounding DeRenne Avenue.”

The common element between both the plans Broker mentions is that they focus on only one thing: Moving more cars at faster speeds. Cities around the country are currently spending mountains of money to undo the damage done to their communities by similar projects.

Project DeRenne presents an opportunity for our community to look toward the future, instead of repeating others’ past mistakes. It offers an opportunity to ensure that Savannah neighborhoods remain livable for years to come, instead of aiming solely to shave a couple minutes off the commutes of folks who don’t even live here. It provides an opportunity to understand that Project DeRenne has implications beyond traffic, including public health.

For more information, visit the Project DeRenne Web site.