Sustainable Urban Landscape for Santa Cruz County

If you can’t make all the sessions, you can keep up by doing the reading.

The modern city has grown up during the era of the automobile, resulting in sprawling land use, paving over of up to 60% of urban space, loss of productive farm and range lands, forests, and wetlands, destruction of riparian habitats, and increased runoff and erosion; while within the urban spaces offering a lack of walkable neighborhoods and real centers of social and civic engagements, financially unsustainable infrastructure, traffic jams, and almost total dependence on private motorized transportation for shopping, school, work and basic services.

This workshop provides an overview of the current state of Santa Cruz County’s urbanized spaces and their unsustainable characteristics, introduces the principles of urban design for walkable neighborhoods and “new urbanism” that can bring our cities back into balance, gives participants an opportunity to visualize a transition to more sustainable and inviting spaces for various local neighborhoods where we live, work, and engage socially, and explores the concrete and specific changes that can help get us there.

Each session will include short readings to be completed before the following session and useful references.