Wondering what else you can do to make difference and become part of the ResilientCity planning and design movement? Here are some suggestions:
1. Become familiar with the issues. We recommend the following three books as great backgrounders to understanding the key issues:
- The Upside of Down, by Thomas Homer Dixon
- Climate Wars, by Gwynne Dyer
- Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller, by Jeff Rubin
- The New Green History of the World, by Clive Ponting
And then watch Gregory Green's Video: The End of Suburbia, (directed by Gregory Greene, one of ResilientCity's Ideas Competition Jury Members) that very effectively treats all of the key issues of peak oil and its potential impact on urban planning and city design.
2. Participate in our next ResilientCity.org Ideas Design Competition to explore and then exhibit your ideas about how we could more effectively design our cities and buildings to achieve greater resilience.
3. Join the 350.org movement to help raise awareness of the need to set 350 parts per million (ppm) as the maximum sustainable concentration of CO2 equivalent gases in our atmosphere in the upcoming Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December of 2009.
4. If you are a member of a Green Building Council (like USGBC or CaGBC) then make your voice heard and tell your local chapter and your national representatives to make energy conservation a higher priority and requirement in their LEED building credit system. Although all of the LEED credits are important, reducing energy consumption in buildings is the most important single action to reduce green house gas emissions, and our reliance on fossil fuels.
5. If you are a member of a Building Envelope Council, then make your voice heard about the importance of developing strategies for re-skinning existing buildings with highly insulated building envelopes. The Canadian Building Envelope Councils have done a great deal to promote effective building envelope design, and they may be able to play an important role in the ResilientCity movement.
6. Become familiar with any initiatives to re-localize food production in your city, and lend your support to those initiatives. For example, in Toronto, find out more about the Stop Community Food Centre. Located in Toronto's Davenport West neighbourhood, The Stop Community Food Centre (The Stop) works to increase people's access to healthy food in a manner that maintains dignity, builds community and challenges inequality.
7. Send us your comments, suggestions and ideas on how you think we can plan and design more resilient cities, as well as how we can improve the ResilientCity.org website. We are a new website, so we wlll very much appreciate hearing from you on how we can make it more useful for you, at Contact Us.
