Birds on a Wire

"A planned community in Arizona has used time-honored Mediterranean strategies to keep temperatures down and attitudes high.

Western civilization has grown remarkably climate conscious over the last 20 years, but not when it comes to building, civic planning, and especially zoning. Perhaps the interiors of buildings are becoming more climate adapted, and in some cases the facades as well, but in a way that’s a little like inventing a freezer designed to keep ice cream frozen while sitting next to a fire.

Wooden or concrete boxes arranged side-by-side across leveled ground with sprawling, largely treeless gardens and concrete sidewalks alongside wide, blacktop roads is simply a culture of construction that has to be abandoned if living in a world of 2°C or higher annual temperatures [or, hopefully, less than that, but nonetheless likely over 1.5°C] is to be tolerable.

Fortunately for Arizonans, change may have finally arrived in the form of a carless, planned community that looks and feels like a Greek island village.

In the Phoenix suburb of Tempe, Culdesac has arisen as a 17-acre mixed-use neighborhood from the ground up to stay cool and local, taking the concept of the 15-minute city, where anything a resident might need is only 15 minutes away, and putting a Mediterranean spin on it.

Buildings are tall, thick, and totally white. The residential areas look like they were built atop of the ashes of the Phoenix zoning code burnt in effigy. Crammed together, they create narrow streets and alleys that are almost constantly shaded, through which wind is channeled and accelerated in passing.

Windows open towards each other, allowing wind that enters one building to exit into another, while the total lack of asphalt means that the ground temperatures are a staggering 50-60°F lower than pavements beyond the limits of Culdesac.

No privately-owned cars are allowed to enter the neighborhood, in which electric bikes, robotic mini taxis, and light rail shuttle people around town, to downtown Phoenix, or out to the airport.

The street life is lively—there are no cars to bisect movement between the 21 different businesses and eateries, among which is a James Beard Award-winning Mexican restaurant, DIY ceramic business, and some stores run out of apartments—a big no-no under Phoenix zoning laws.

“Once you pull the cars out,” Architect Daniel Parolek who designed Culdesac, told BBC, “there’s so much more opportunity to make a vibrant, thriving community.”

His inspiration was sun-soaked locales like Italy, Greece, and Croatia, where town centers were designed before the automobile and before air conditioning.

Technically speaking, the entire Culdesac neighborhood is one apartment complex, but the paseos, or little alleyways, open up into plazas of open space exactly liked one would expect in a little village in the Cyclades.

Because no one has to jump in a car to get from place to place, people run into each other, sparking conversations, relations, and breaking through the counterintuitive phenomenon of big city loneliness, which in Phoenix hits particularly hard.

“Culdesac Tempe has shown that people do want to live car-free in the US, even in a metro area like Phoenix that’s often seen as the poster child for car dependency,” says Erin Boyd, Culdesac’s government relations and external affairs lead. “This success has shifted the conversation around what’s possible in American development.”

watercolour clouds

'love, death & all her friends' sep 19 - oct 24 at corey helford gallery, LA

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