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| | Environmental UrbanismHere’s our view. Efforts to improve the environment must focus on how we live our lives. If we want something better we have to take control and make it, and focusing on behavior and policies is where to start. Recycling, composting, home gardening and similar activities are worthy and relatively easy actions individuals can take, and have real impact if done on a large scale. But more impact results from choices like where we live, the type and size of our home, where we work and how we get there, what kind of car or how many cars our family has, what we buy, and where we shop. These can be harder choices but generally offer more impact. We want to support efforts that make these hard choices easier. Policy change is most important.Improving the environment requires a focus on our cities and towns, and the urban landscape. Cities and towns are efficient places to live. As our cities and towns were wholly transformed since the 1950s, we envision a new transformation, and many already know that “living closer” means living better. We also believe that social problems result from poor “city form” decisions, and that climate change, social justice, obesity, isolation and related problems can be diminished by applying lessons that have been learned about land use. Financing what we build has been one long-standing concern, e.g., changes needed for various programs and policies supporting residential, mulit-family, and mixed-use construction. This is also a good example of the type of leverage we seek from efforts we support. Surprisingly most of our advisory board members aren’t urban planners; we’re environmentalists of different sorts, from the US, Canada, England and Germany. Please note: We regret that we no longer accept inquiries or proposals.© 2019 The Oram Foundation, Inc. | |
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