Seattle Transportation Programming & Smart Growth

Just like many other cities, within the United States of America, Seattle adopted a Comprehensive Plan in 1994 in order to move towards a more sustainable future. Throughout the years the plan has been updated in major and minor ways, and the original plan followed major involvement by the citizens of the city. Through the citizen’s involvement the city was able to establish four core values: community, economic opportunity, social equity and environmental stewardship.

            

The state of Washington requires all cities within the state to have a comprehensive plan through Washington’s Growth Management Act (GMA). This act was especially important for the city of Seattle, because it has experienced a large population growth since the late 1970’s. In other words, if the city did not have a comprehensive plan then there would be no direct plans for the population growth, and land & other resources within the city could be quickly consumed or damaged.

            

Furthermore, comprehensive plans contain many elements such as a transportation element. Within the Seattle Plan there is the Urban Village Element aspect which shapes the city’s transportation. Unfortunately, with the city being fully built and already having a mature street plan, the city has now started to use a full range of non-single-occupant vehicle transportation facilities in order to support the redevelopment pattern. These facilities will help create the mixed-use, walkable, transit and bike-friendly centers that the overall plan has envisioned. Lastly, the city will also  look into an appropriate transportation design in order to align them with the transportation facilities and services along with adjacent land use.

Organizations throughout Seattle, Washington

To begin, I will be researching and discussing the eighteenth largest city within the United States of America. Seattle, Washington has an estimated 684,451 residents, and is known to be the fastest growing city with a growth rate of 2.1%. This seaport city can be found on the west coast of the United States of America, and is situated on a narrow piece of land also known as an isthmus between Puget Sound and Lake Washington.

Seattle was inhabited by Native Americans for about 4,000 years until the first European settlers made it across the country. In the years to come, the city was known for their logging industry until the late nineteenth century when they became a shipbuilding center as a gateway to the state of Alaska.

With the city having such a long history, they have had many organizations established in and around it. For instance, the Orca Conservancy is an all-volunteer registered Washington State non-profit organization that works to protect the wild areas that the endangered Southern Resident Orca inhabit. The organization was founded in 1996, and collaborates with the world’s top research institutions and environmental groups in order to better address the crucial problems facing the orcas. The organization collects their money through donations that helps them advocate for the the orcas.  

Environmental Justice

What is environmental justice? Well while looking more into this question it seems to me that there are many different answers to this question. However, I strongly agreed with the definition that was written by the EPA which states, “fair treatment means that no group of people, including racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic groups should bear a disproportionate share of the negative environmental consequences resulting from industrial, municipal, and commercial operations, or the execution of federal, state, local, and tribal programs and policies.” Ultimately, I thought that the EPA’s definition did a great job incorporating the many different means behind the phrase environmental justice.

In other words, with environmental justice having quite a few meanings behind it has different missions with many advocates following the different movements. For instance, along with the phrase environmental justice came the phrase environmental racism. An example of environmental racism has been happening within the United States of America with poor mainly African American communities being around many toxic waste sites.

Reaction to the documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth"

After watching Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, I came to the full realization that nothing much has changed in the 10 years since his movie came out to the public. Don't get me wrong his movie did a great job at discussing global warming and different factors that evolve around the problem, but why is it that nothing has changed since then? Is it because people, especially politicians, did not fully want to accept global warming? 

Furthermore, 10 years and 5 months later, famous actor Leonardo DiCaprio came out with a very similar documentary called Before the Flood. DiCaprio touches on just about all the same major issues that Al Gore did within his documentary. Both talking about how these issues got out of hand and how they need to change. Could this generation be the one to change things by better accepting this sad and tough truth? Or will another 10 years go by, and another famous person create another similar documentary?  

      

Urbanization and Sustainability in Sydney, New South Wales

When most people, at least here in the United States of America, think of a city within Australia they usually have one place in mind. This city being known as Sydney, New South Wales. Not only is Sydney the state capitol of New South Wales, but it is also the most populous city within all of Australia. You see Sydney is actually extremely old, and has housed the Indigenous People for around 30,000 years then later on it became home to the British settlers as well in 1788.

According to the 2014 World Urbanization Prospects, Sydney is a “medium-sized city” which means that it is home to 1 million to 5 million inhabitants. Although, with this being stated the United Nations goes onto say that, “while considered medium-sized by global standards, these cities are, in fact, the largest cities in 79 countries or areas.” Since these cities are actually quite large, and not really “medium-sized”, they tend to struggle with large population increases throughout there years of existence. For instance, the UN also talks about how “the global population living in medium-sized cities nearly doubled between 1990 to 2014, and is expected to increase by another 36 per cent between 2014 and 2030, growing from 287 million to 1.1 million.” With an overall growing population like this than this would only mean a growing number of energy usage within these cities.

The city of Sydney has done a great job with recognizing the problems that come with a growing population and a growing use of energy. The council of Sydney has come out with various reports that are targeted to let the public know their ambitious plans towards a more sustainable future for the city. These plans include creating a city that has little impact on the environment; which includes healthy ecosystems with clean air, waterways, and land. They propose that by addressing climate change as a serious problem, and creating renewable energy will create their sustainable city. Throughout the past 10 to 15 years Sydney has already begun to create this vision by drastically reducing their carbon emissions, and creating/using more green energy. For instance, the cities council’s latest Green Environmental Sustainability Progress Report showed the chart below that has their  past, present and future carbon emissions and how they have changed/going to change.