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Urban retrofitting: creating different sorts of spaces and uses out of places that are already there.

Alex Steffen

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Alex Steffen
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: January 1
Environmentalist
Writer
Oakland
California
Inspiration
Spaces
Space
Urban
Use
Sorts
Different
Uses
Motivation
Places
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More quotes by Alex Steffen

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Our cities need to change, fast. Tactical Urbanism is a guided tour of solutions created when local people decide they can't wait for politics to catch up before they improve their neighborhoods. This weathervane book deserves a place on any urbanist's bookshelf.
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There is no such thing as garbage, just useful stuff in the wrong place.
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Deep walkability describes a city that is built in such a way that you can move from one area to another on foot, on bicycle, on transit and have an experience that remains a pleasant one, that you feel you are welcome not just in the neighborhood but moving between neighborhoods.
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Powerful people doing bad things LIKE cynical, despairing citizens.
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Optimism is a political act. Those who benefit from the status quo are perfectly happy for us to think nothing is going to get any better. In fact, these days, cynicism is obedience.
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If mass media, social isolation in the suburbs, alienating workplaces and long car commutes create a bunker mentality, the Internet does the opposite.
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For carbon-neutral cities, there are things worth talking about in how our consumption patterns can change - sharing goods, etc. - but those are a fraction of the impacts of transportation and building energy use. If we need to choose priority actions, the most important things are to densify, provide transit, and green the buildings.
Alex Steffen
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For most people, using the Internet broadens their sense of who 'we' is and actually ends up leaving us in a place of greater compassion and understanding. It leaves us more connected to a larger group of people and more at one with a lot more people in our community.
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At its very heart, Worldchanging is about using the best of people's new ideas, bringing them together and applying them to the massive problems that we all face.
Alex Steffen
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Cities generate most of the global economy, and most of its energy use, resource demands and climate emissions. How we build cities over the next decades will largely determine whether we can deliver a bright green future.
Alex Steffen
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There’s more to being an environmentalist than occasionally signing an online petition and mailing your check to the Sierra Club. Really the most effective environmental actions you can take have to do with crafting your home and surroundings, your workplace decisions and your investment habits.
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There's no law of physics that says we have to be an unsustainable society - in fact, quite the opposite. The planet's ready to work with us if we're ready to think differently, but we do have to make that jump and start to do things in new ways.
Alex Steffen
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We get so little news about the developing world that we often forget that there are literally millions of people out there struggling to change things to be fairer, freer, more democratic, less corrupt.
Alex Steffen
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It's not just enough to survive. We've got to make something better than what we've got.
Alex Steffen
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In almost all city governments in America, the small group of people who don't want change are able to block change.
Alex Steffen
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Cities offer us powerful leverage on our most stubborn, wasteful practices. Long commutes in our cars, big power bills from our energy-hogging buildings, shopping trips to buy stuff that'll spend a few short months in our homes and long centuries in our landfills.
Alex Steffen
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Clean air and water, a diversity of animal and plant species, soil and mineral resources, and predictable weather are annuities that will pay dividends for as long as the human race survives – and may even extend our stay on Earth.
Alex Steffen
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The denser places get, the lower the amount of energy people use to get around it.
Alex Steffen
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Cabbies in particular seem to like discussing the fate the Earth.
Alex Steffen
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Saying the Tech Bloom is not commercially driven is like saying Mother Teresa had an interest in the poor.
Alex Steffen