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The Planetizen News Brief - 6/18/09

18 June 2009 - 5:00am
Smart City Radio

The Planetizen News Brief is a weekly rundown of some of the most interesting and important news and issues of the past week.

The Planetizen News Brief airs every week on the nationally-syndicated radio program "Smart City", which is broadcast in cities across the U.S. Learn more about Smart City and listen to archived shows.

Full Transcript

Some are calling it unrealistic. Others says it’s the smartest move in the country. Whatever people want to think, the fact is that San Francisco’s new recycling law is by far the strictest in America. Officials there just approved new standards that require residents and businesses to sort their waste into three bins: garbage, recyclables and now compost. San Francisco is now the first city in the country to require that all food waste be separated into a compost bin, according to a recent article from the San Francisco Chronicle. It’s part of a plan led by Mayor Gavin Newsom to bring the amount of material the city sends to landfills down to zero by the year 2020. That’s an ambitious goal, one that many have criticized as being impossible to achieve. But the city and its board of supervisors are hopeful that the new recycling laws will at least nudge them closer to a zero waste future.

But in other parts of the country, waste is a big problem- especially since the implosion of the housing market. But it’s not food scraps and beer cans that are troubling cities, it’s wasted space. Cities across the country are blighted with entire neighborhoods that have been abandoned since the fall of the market and the ensuing recession, and many are scrambling to figure out what to do with them. One idea that’s gathering support at the federal level is all-out bulldozing, according to an article from the London Telegraph. Pioneered in the former industrial town of Flint, Michigan, the strategy for dealing with these empty and wasted spaces is to simply smash them, clear the land, and let it return to its natural, pre-development state. 50 U.S. cities will be examined as possible sites for this bulldozing project, including Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Memphis.

Meanwhile, on roads and freeways across the world, seemingly unprovoked traffic jams are bring drivers to a crawl. Even with clear roads and no impediments in sight, freeways just get jammed up. This phenomenon is known as a ‘phantom jam’, and a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed a model that tries to make sense of these senseless backups. They’ve written out some advanced mathematical equations to help explain the congestion. According to a recent article from ScienceDaily, the research helps to determine how and under what conditions traffic jams will form, which are mainly related to a high density of cars. Researchers say their study could help traffic engineers and road designers to counteract traffic jams by improving density on the roads.

And finally, prison is not exactly the place most people want to go. Here in America, more than 1% of the entire population is incarcerated, and many of them aren’t in jail for the first time and are likely to go back. A lot of that recidivism, it turns out, may have to do with design. A recent article from the New York Times Magazine looks at a prison in Austria that emphasizes livability, comfort and the dignity of the prisoners in its design. The result is what some are calling a luxury prison. But prison is prison, and nobody is particularly happy to be there. But unlike America’s brutal big box prisons, fewer of the inmates are likely to return. With more common areas where inmates can interact and nicer living facilities, the Austrian prison is being seen by some in the field as a more humane approach to dealing with prisoners. Because if you treat prisoners like people, once they get out they’re much more likely to act like people, not prisoners.

Stories discussed in this week's Planetizen News Brief

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