Softening the urban fabric

Cities are hard places.
While Destiny, Fla., Masdar City in Abu Dhabi and to an extent tornado ravaged Greensburg, Kan., are about designing green communities from scratch, the larger challenge for the globe is making the existing metropolises environmentally friendly.
After all, if we make every new development from now on greenhouse gas-neutral, the pollution causing and energy intensive urban jungles will still continue to generate their Industrial Age problems.
It's not enough to just build communities correctly from here out — the environmental degradation created by all those hard surfaces in cities will continue unabated unless people start addressing them right away.
As cities built up and suburbs annexed farms and forests, planners and developers merely repeated a pattern that worked.
But now the diminishing returns are becoming more and more apparent.
Look at the building blocks of development: Concrete, steel, glass, asphalt.
To make a city block, architects, engineers, planners, developers, investors and laborers collaborate to — with various degrees of exigency — slather the place with tons of these impervious materials.
And the result is heat islands, unclean waters, unproductive earth, tense people and a general hostility to the natural order of things.
The key to solving the environmental pressures of the world is not abandoning our existing cities, giving them up as lost, shaking our heads, bowing out, humiliated by the short-sightedness, moving out and never looking back.
The key is softening the concrete and glass landscape, reversing their detrimental effects, taking better advantage of the untapped possibilities.
Fortunately, that also gives humanity plenty of opportunities to improve our cities, because practically every factor of development has been used and abused.
So I, a thoroughly unqualified but enthusiastic and curious civilian, will state a number of simple ideas whenever they occur to me to try and reverse the trend and reclaim the cities in terms of sensible and sustainable development.