Linda Baker

But here’s the catch: During the 10 days I spent in Suzhou last fall, I didn’t see a single accident. Really, not a single one. Nor was there any of the road rage one might expect given the anarchy that passes for traffic policy. And despite the obvious advantages that accrue to cars because of their size, no single transportation mode dominates the streets. On the contrary, the urban arterials are a communal mix of automobiles, cyclists, pedestrians, and small businesses such as inner-tube repairmen that set up shop directly in the right-of-way.

As the mother of two young children and an alternative-transportation advocate, I’ve spent the past decade supporting the installation of ever more traffic controls: crosswalks, traffic signals, speed bumps, and speed limit signs in school zones. But I’d only been in Suzhou a few days before I started thinking that maybe there’s a method to the city’s traffic madness — a logic that has nothing to do with the system of prohibition and segregation that governs transportation policy in the United States.

As it turns out, I’m far from the first person to think along these lines. In fact, the chaos associated with traffic in developing countries is becoming all the rage among a new wave of traffic engineers in mainland Europe and, more recently, in the United Kingdom. It’s called “second generation” traffic calming, a combination of traffic engineering and urban design that also draws heavily on the fields of behavioral psychology and — of all subjects — evolutionary biology. Rejecting the idea of separating people from vehicular traffic, it’s a concept that privileges multiplicity over homogeneity, disorder over order, and intrigue over certainty. In practice, it’s about dismantling barriers: between the road and the sidewalk, between cars, pedestrians and cyclists and, most controversially, between moving vehicles and children at play.

For the past 50 years, the American approach to traffic safety has been dominated by the “triple E” paradigm: engineering, enforcement and education. And yet, the idea of the street as a flexible community space is a provocative one in the United States, precisely because other “traditional” modes of transportation — light rail, streetcars and bicycles — are making a comeback in cities across the country. The shared-street concept is also intriguing for the way it challenges one of the fundamental tenets of American urban planning: that to create safe communities, you have to control them.

“One of the characteristics of a shared environment is that it appears chaotic, it appears very complex, and it demands a strong level of having your wits about you,” says U.K. traffic and urban design consultant Ben Hamilton-Baillie, speaking from his home in Bristol. “The history of traffic engineering is the effort to rationalize what appeared to be chaos,” he says. “Today, we have a better understanding that chaos can be productive.”

A few years ago, Hamilton-Baillie spent several months researching traffic and street design in northwest Europe, followed by a stint as a Loeb fellow at Harvard. A former researcher at Sustrans, a sustainable-transportation nonprofit agency, he has become a leading proponent of the shared-spaces and second-generation approach, which he says meets the needs of automobiles while returning streets to their historic function as civic gathering places.

But the implications, especially in the United States, are nothing less than radical. Reversing decades of conventional wisdom on traffic engineering, Hamilton-Baillie argues that the key to improving both safety and vehicular capacity is to remove traffic lights and other controls, such as stop signs and the white and yellow lines dividing streets into lanes. Without any clear right-of-way, he says, motorists are forced to slow down to safer speeds, make eye contact with pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers, and decide among themselves when it is safe to proceed.

“The more you post the evidence of legislative control, such as traffic signs, the less the driver is trying to use his or her own senses,” says Hamilton-Baillie, noting he has a habit of walking randomly across roads — much to his wife’s consternation. “So the less you can advertise the presence of the state in terms of authority, the more effective this approach can be.” This, of course, is the exact opposite of the “Triple E” traffic-calming approach, which seeks to control the driver through the use of speed bumps, photo radar, crosswalks and other engineering and enforcement mechanisms.

The “self-reading street” has its roots in the Dutch “woonerf” design principles that emerged in the 1970s. Blurring the boundary between street and sidewalk, woonerfs combine innovative paving, landscaping and other urban designs to allow for the integration of multiple functions in a single street, so that pedestrians, cyclists and children playing share the road with slow-moving cars. The pilot projects were so successful in fostering better urban environments that the ideas spread rapidly to Belgium, France, Denmark and Germany. In 1998, the British government adopted a “Home Zones” initiative — the woonerf equivalent — as part of its national transportation policy.

“What the early woonerf principles realized,” says Hamilton-Baillie, “was that there was a two-way interaction between people and traffic. It was a vicious or, rather, a virtuous circle: The busier the streets are, the safer they become. So once you drive people off the street, they become less safe.”

Contrast this approach with that of the United Kingdom and the United States, where education campaigns from the 1960s onward were based on maintaining a clear separation between the highway and the rest of the public realm. Children were trained to modify their behavior and, under pain of death, to stay out of the street. “But as soon as you emphasize separation of functions, you have a more dangerous environment,” says Hamilton-Baillie. “Because then the driver sees that he or she has priority. And the child who forgets for a moment and chases a ball across the street is a child in the wrong place.”

When it comes to reconfiguring streets as community spaces, ground zero is once again Holland and Denmark, where planners are removing traffic lights in some towns and cities, as well as white divider lines, sidewalks and speed limits. Research has shown that fatality rates at busy intersections, where two or three people were being killed every year, dropped to zero when controls and boundaries were taken away. (This is food for thought among alternative-transportation advocates in the United States, who extol northern Europe as a model precisely because so much space in these countries is dedicated to segregated pedestrian spaces and bike lanes.)

A photo of a reconstructed intersection, “the Brink,” in the Dutch province of Friesland, provides more design details. Until 1998, the Brink was a standard asphalt intersection with traffic controls and segregated spaces. Today, the entire area has been repaved with red bricks bordered by sections of green railing. A raised piazza juts into the middle of the intersection, but there are no sidewalks, road markings, or right-of-way signs. Every day, 4,500 cars share the space with cyclists and pedestrians who wander about “the road” at will.

Hamilton-Baillie recalls visiting “the Brink” with Hans Mondermann of the Friesland Regional Organization for Traffic Safety, a planner who has redesigned several intersections with second-generation ideas in mind. “I was amazed to hear him say, ‘Have you ever seen so many traffic violations?’” said Hamilton-Baillie. “‘No rules, no rules,’ he told me. ‘You have to think.’”

Subvert, don’t attack, the dominant paradigm. Or, as David Engwicht, a shared-spaces proponent in Brisbane, Australia, has written: “Implicit in the whole notion of second-generation traffic calming is the idea that significant social change only happens when we amplify the paradoxical ‘submerged voice’ as opposed to tearing down the ‘dominant voice.’ Engwicht, a plenary speaker at the Walk 21 Cities for People Conference in Copenhagen this June, argues that controlling a driver’s natural propensity for speed is futile. A more effective approach is to engage the driver by emphasizing “uncertainty and intrigue” in the street environment — for example, planting a tree in the middle of the street instead of putting up a stop sign.

“Standardized signage and use of standardized road markings should be reduced to a minimum,” Engwicht writes. “As they create predictability and contain no intrigue. They also reinforce that a street belongs exclusively to the motorists.”

There’s another step in the second-generation logic process. Safety analysts have known for several decades that the maximum vehicle speed at which pedestrians can escape severe injury upon impact is just under 20 miles per hour. Research also suggests that an individual’s ability to interact and retain eye contact with other human beings diminishes rapidly at speeds greater than 20 miles per hour. One theory behind this magic bullet, says Hamilton-Baillie, is that 20 mph is the “maximum theoretical running speed” for human beings. (Evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson has drawn similar conclusions.) “This is of interest,” he says, “because it suggests that our physiology and psychology has evolved based around the potential maximum impact on the speed of human beings.”

The ramifications go beyond safety, says Hamilton-Baillie, to bear directly on the interplay between speed, traffic controls and vehicle capacity. Evidence from countries and cities that have introduced a design speed of 30 kilometers per hour (about 18.5 mph) — as many of the European Union nations are doing — shows that slower speeds improve traffic flow and reduce congestion.

“This surprises many people, although mathematically it’s not surprising,” Hamilton-Baillie says. “The reason for this is that your speed of journey, the ability of traffic to move smoothly through the built environment, depends on performance of your intersections, not on your speed of flow between intersections.” And intersections, he says, work much more efficiently at lower speeds. “At 30 miles per hour, you frequently need control systems like traffic signals, which themselves mean that the intersection is not in use for significant periods of time. Whereas at slower speeds vehicles can move much more closely together and drivers can use eye contact to engage and make decisions. So you get much higher capacity.”

Combining slower speeds with a reduction in traffic controls, in other words, may have more than public safety and shared-space benefits. It also appears to profit the driver. (This is the logic behind the modern roundabout, a redesigned version of the classic traffic circle that is replacing signalized intersections in the United Kingdom and is gaining acceptance among transportation officials in the United States).

“You can see this is the way to break out of the pro-car, anti-car debate,” Hamilton-Baillie says. “Because the shared approach very much accepts the car as a vital useful component in cities that will remain with us for some generations to come.”

Let’s return to China for a minute. If traffic in the world’s most populous country provides a useful comparison and contrast, it’s because second-generation traffic calming isn’t about anarchy; it’s about studied anarchy. In essence, Hamilton-Baillie is advocating for a new field: one that blends traffic engineering with urban design. Or, as he titled an upcoming paper: “Urban Design: Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” There’s a place for highways and roads dedicated solely to the movement of automobiles, he says. Just not in the city, where streets constitute 70 percent of all public space.

“You have to have a completely different approach to the design of streets in the broad urban realm,” he says. “You have to make an absolutely clear transition between those roads that are necessary, the state-controlled and legislative world of the traffic environment, to the human-controlled, culturally controlled world of the city, where you pick up your rules not from what you’re allowed to do, but from a much more subtle and complex series of codes that are implicit through design and environment.”

“If I walk into your living room, I do not need a sign that says, Do Not Spit on the Floor,” he explains. “Indeed, if there were such a sign, it would probably be counterproductive.”

Over the last few years, the shared-street concept has emigrated out of mainland Europe to the United Kingdom. In addition to home zones, which are cropping up in isolated residential developments, the city of Manchester is currently reconfiguring a major section of its central core according to shared-space principles. Hamilton-Baillie himself is working a project that he says is the first in the country to bring together all the elements of second-generation traffic calming: removing the road markings from a road that runs past a primary school in the city of Bath. It’s a project, he says, that capitalizes on the area’s “rich urban morphology” — St. James Square, the school and a historic church — to “create a series of places rather than a single highway.”

In the United States, as one might expect, policymakers haven’t exactly embraced the virtues of ambiguity and uncertainty embodied in second-generation principles. “Woonerfs are certainly being planned on private property,” says James Daisa, a project manager at Kimley-Horn Associates and a national expert on pedestrian-friendly development. “But the concept has yet to come to bear on public streets.” City codes are part of the problem, he says. The reluctance of traffic engineers is another.

Consider the case of Brookline, Mass., which installed a woonerf in front of a Marriott Hotel last January. A patchwork of brick pavings, the shared-space lacks big curbs, and the sidewalk and street are all at the same level. But as reporter Anthony Flint noted in the Boston Globe, the public works department botched the entire concept by painting white lines and big right-turn arrows on the street, and placing yellow-and-black-striped rectangles on the landscaped “bump-outs.”

“It’s clear that advocates and private developers aren’t sufficient to bring about a true woonerf,” wrote Flint. “The traffic engineers need to be in the room, and they need to understand the concept. A fact-finding trip to the Netherlands may be in order.”

For their part, many American traffic engineers say one critical ingredient is missing for a system built around shared spaces to work in the United States: a communal sensibility. “We live in a culture that gives so much value to the individual and the expression of that is how we act in a car,” says Robert Burchfield, a city traffic engineer in my home town of Portland, Ore., which is nationally recognized for its preservation of public space and its dedicated network of cycling lanes and pedestrian pathways. “I’m not comfortable with less order when I can’t get people to go below 50 or 60 miles per hour.”

But this, of course, is precisely the point; redesign the street environment as an active community space, and you equalize the power relationship between cars and human beings “The real gain in urban quality does not come from clawing back areas of the city from cars, as important as that is,” said Hamilton-Baillie, who gave a talk at the Portland Department of Transportation last fall. “But the next step is how you apply a broader approach to those areas where you need cars and trucks, bicycles and shops, and pedestrians and children’s play, all those different functions to take place in precious urban space.”

Even if we’re not ready to send our children merrily into the street, many of us, intuitively, have already embraced the concepts behind second-generation traffic calming. Like most other parents, I’ve drilled into my kids the fact that traffic lights and signs work for cars, but don’t necessarily serve pedestrians who want to make it across the street in one piece. “Look left, look right, look left again,” I preach ad nauseum — even when the walk signal is green. And who can resist the symbolism associated with recapturing the street for the (teeming) masses? It’s not quite the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the shared-space approach overturns the landmarks of sedentary isolation — everything from gated communities to skyrocketing childhood obesity rates — to celebrate the complexity and contradictions of city life.

The absence of traffic controls means that people are out for themselves; the trick is, they have to look out for everyone else as well. Second-generation traffic design is a curious mix of selfishness and altruism, of order amid chaos. And, after a fashion, it just might work.

Station managers weren’t impressed. “They were interested in the idea of probabilistic forecasts, but the news consultants hadn’t told them that’s how to make money,” Schneider says. As for including climate change and human influences on weather, Schneider was told: “‘Our chief meteorologist doesn’t believe in that.’ I said, ‘He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’ That was the end of the interview.”

Twenty-five years later, the debate over global warming is over. “Nature,” as Schneider puts it, “is cooperating with theory.” Now that the data are falling into place, and scientists have affirmed humans’ impact on climate, is the weather report poised for a 21st century makeover? Most Americans get their information about the weather and climate from TV meteorologists, who in turn provide forecasts to local newspapers. So the weather report would be a fitting, if not exclusive, place to inform the global warming discussion. The long-term implications are also intriguing. Historically, weather forecasters have been segregated from issues of policy and human behavior, which are considered the rightful province of the news reporting staff. Global warming, however, may be the trigger that finally brings the weatherman in from the cold.

“Every newscast has a built-in section devoted to weather,” says Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. “It is ripe for discussion of bigger issues.”

Interviews with broadcast meteorologists from around the country suggest that climate change is a hot topic in the newsroom. Weather reporters have come a long way from the 1970s, when they were hired for their looks and handed jokey scripts (David Letterman was a weatherman). Today, most forecasters have degrees in meteorology or a related science. In fact, because weather forecasters are often the only reporters in the newsroom with science backgrounds, they are well positioned to report on global warming, if not explain all the complexities of climate science. “It’s not like there’s a Grand Canyon separating meteorologists and climatologists,” says Anthony Socci, a senior policy fellow at the American Meteorological Society in Boston. “We share the same skill set.”

But rescripting the classic weather forecast is no easy task. As media critic Neil Postman has pointed out, the happy-go-lucky weather report has always contained the seeds of a conservative agenda. Consider air quality alerts, which show up in the weather (not news) report as natural adjuncts to rain or shine, purely meteorological events devoid of social consequence or responsibility. Driven by ratings, station heads are reluctant to deviate from the standard three-minute forecast, much less air content that might alienate the broadest possible audience, and cause them to change the channel.

“The last thing any station wants is an activist weatherman,” says Matthew Felling, media director for the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a Washington research group. Would CNN interview health correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, to talk only about heart disease? Felling asks. “No, he talks about the possible causes, the links,” he says. “Ever since Sept. 11, we’ve been inundated with the importance of connecting the dots. But weathermen are asked to live in a vacuum.”

Meteorologists, of course, are a heterogeneous crew, with diverse talents, career goals and political inclinations. But in a country where climate change is considered the province of politicians and talking heads — not scientists — all forecasters, regardless of interest, are inevitably the last people on the set consulted on global warming coverage.

“It is very difficult for us to report on climate change issues,” says John Toohey-Morales, chief meteorologist at WSCV, an NBC Telemundo station in Miami. “We ask, but the news directors are not inclined to do it, or they put it in on a weekend news report with the lowest ratings.” Political reporters present global warming as a debatable issue, says Toohey-Morales, who is also American Meteorological Society commissioner for professional affairs. “It’s tough for meteorologists to compete against the misinformation campaign.”

Last year, MJ McDermott, chief meteorologist for KCPQ 13, a Fox affiliate in Seattle, pitched her news director a story about global warming in the Northwest, an idea triggered by a “wonderful class” she had taken at the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group, a program that helps translate local climate information for the public. “I pitched it a couple of times, and the director said, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ and it never happened,” says McDermott. It wasn’t until the Seattle Times published a report on the subject months later that the station decided to have a news reporter cover the issue.

“We could have been ahead of everybody,” says McDermott, who once, on air, held up an article about global warming, only to receive angry e-mails in response. “But it’s not news until it’s news — until some report comes out, or until the White House is looking into it. And that hasn’t happened since Clinton.”

Responding to concerns about media coverage of science, the American Meteorological Society has launched an initiative aimed at promoting TV weather forecasters to the position of “station scientist,” and equipping them to cover a broad range of science topics in addition to tomorrow’s weather. Experts emphasize there is no way to connect a specific local weather event to global warming. But there are plenty of opportunities for broadcast meteorologists to raise public awareness, they say.

“Here’s how I would use that pulpit,” says Schneider, citing as an example the record drought in Phoenix, which ended March 11 after 143 days. “I would say: ‘Extremes of drought and flood are the kind of events we are expected to have because of climate change, but we just don’t know in any single case. Humans don’t make the weather, but we are changing the forces that contribute to the weather.’”

Philip Mote, director of the Climate Impacts Group, says one of the biggest factors in a seasonal forecast is El Niño, a large-scale weather pattern that results from warming ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean area. In the Northwest, El Niño events generally lead to warmer and drier winter weather. Over the past several years, there hasn’t been much El Niño activity, Mote said, and yet seven out of the past 10 winters in the Northwest have been substantially warmer than usual.

“So the main skill for a forecaster is to say, ‘Well, it’s getting warmer,’” Mote says. “The station has the option of ignoring the question of global warming or dealing with a scientifically sound answer.”

Many television meteorologists say they are interested in playing a more active reporting role on climate change issues. But in a newsroom dominated by ratings and tightly scripted formats, breaking the mold can be an overwhelming challenge.

“We have a burden to educate the public about climate change,” says Phil Ferro, chief meteorologist for WSVN, a Fox affiliate in Miami. “But the TV industry is so competitive,” he says. “Time constraints keep me from discussing it, even here in Miami, where folks are seeing the effects of global warming with the hurricanes.” Television consultants preach a “hyper-local” news mantra, Ferro adds. “Most local news stations sound alike and look alike. If you don’t focus on your backyard, people tune in somewhere else.”

Other forecasters say climate change is simply too complicated and too controversial to discuss in the context of a local forecast. “I stay away from global warming; I won’t touch it,” says Bill Bellis, chief meteorologist at KNXV, an ABC affiliate in Phoenix.

“People say the world is going to get one degree warmer; what the hell is that going to do?” asks Bellis, who had to postpone his original interview with Salon when drought-breaking rains continued to fall. “You can’t link the drought to global warming because then people say, ‘Well what about last year, we had record rainfall?’ Global temperatures are rising, but it’s not affecting the local aspect, and people get really touchy if you bring it up. Wait until we break 120 degrees consistently, then I’ll say ‘Oh my god’ on TV.”

Viewer feedback runs against global warming coverage, says Shannon Richards, KNXV’s weather producer. “We did a story on Mount Kilimanjaro, and people wrote in saying we’re not covering the fact that the ice melting will help some creatures or vegetation,” she says. “Because of the negative e-mail, we’re hesitant to do more on the air. We hate to run things that turn off viewers.”

Then there are the contrarian meteorologists — a minority, but not an uncommon breed in the newsroom. “The science is not definitive to make the connection between observed weather and human activity,” says Gene Norman, chief meteorologist for WGCL-TV, a CBS affiliate in Atlanta. “The earth is three-quarters water and one-quarter land. It’s hard for me to believe humans are making that much of a difference in global climate change.” Should forecasters help educate the public about global warming? “That’s a tricky question; it speaks to advocating a certain public policy,” Norman says. January 2006 was warm, he says. But February was cooler than usual. “Everybody’s heating bills went up,” he says. “I think all of us in meteorology have to educate ourselves on what is fact and what is fiction.”

As local and network news stations grapple with their approach to global warming coverage, selected media outlets are moving forward. Chad Myers, CNN’s weather anchor, said he had nothing to contribute about climate change, and declined to be interviewed. But the Weather Channel, the enormously popular 24-hour cable channel, is aggressively pursuing climate reporting as a niche market. Until a few years ago, Heidi Cullen was a research scientist at Boulder’s National Center for Atmospheric Research — “an awesome gig, with steady funding,” she says. Then the Weather Channel called with an offer Cullen couldn’t refuse: a newly created position as in-house climate expert. “It was a fluke,” she laughs. “Most of my friends don’t have a TV and I’d never even watched the Weather Channel.” But the former engineer was intrigued. “I felt the need to be practical, to communicate to a broader audience,” she says.

Through the Weather Channel’s “Forecast Earth” series, Cullen has reported on climate change and the Inuit Eskimos in Alaska, melting glaciers in Greenland and the drought in Arizona. “I consider it my job to link weather and climate,” she says. “The more long-term we can link the two, the better off we will be.”

“Our goal is to be the go-to source for factual, scientific information on the topic of climate change,” says Ray Ban, the Weather Channel’s executive vice president. “If we do our job, more attention will be drawn to the topic. It’s the best way to educate the American people.” Last December, the Weather Channel issued a position statement on global warming, affirming the scientific consensus that human activity affects the climate. This fall, the network will launch a new weekly program dedicated solely to climate issues.

Even at the networks, there are signs of institutional change. Echoing the accounts of other meteorologists, Pete Bouchard at WHDH-TV, an NBC affiliate in Boston, says he’d pitched several stories on climate change, only to be shot down by news directors. “If it doesn’t bleed, it doesn’t lead,” he says. Recently promoted to the position of chief meteorologist, Bouchard is now advocating for a weekly segment on technology and science, a show that would cover everything from global warming to solar technologies. The program supports the AMS station scientist concept, he says.

“I’d like to be the clearinghouse for information on climate change and other issues,” Bouchard says. “Global warming is the biggest single challenge for our children’s generation, and it is the role of the meteorologist to guide the public through it.” The challenge, he points out, will be taking the reins from news reporters, who currently lay claim to anything not covered by a standard weather forecast. “Everything’s about branding,” he says. “So it will have to be something like ‘Pete’s Weekly Science and Tech Exclusive.’”

Rain today, sun breaks tomorrow — for most people, the weather is still something that comes before or after the sports. Still, programs such as Bouchard’s may usher in a new era of weather reporting — as the nexus where nature and humankind meet. After all, there’s no turning back. “It isn’t certain we are going to have serious global warming,” Schneider says. “But we have started to load the climate dice.”

Goldberger’s critique of mobile communications technology capped over a decade of analysis revolving around the ability of global communications networks — for better and for worse — to release people from the constraints of time and place. “The post-information age will remove the limitations of geography,” wrote Nicholas Negroponte in “Being Digital.” “Digital living will depend less and less on being in a specific place at a specific time.” In “Pandemonium,” Lars Lerup, dean of the architecture school at Rice University, proclaimed: “The bandwidth has replaced the boulevard.”

Actually, it didn’t. Virtual reality as a substitute for reality? That kind of thinking is, well, so very yesterday. With a new generation of wireless devices, GPS (global positioning system) locators and ubiquitous networking, future gazers claim, digital space will simply add another dimension to physical space, especially as technology continues to penetrate what sociologist Ray Oldenberg has famously described as “third places”: the communal public spaces where people interact with friends or strangers.

So-called “urban computing” means much more than bringing your Centrino laptop to Starbucks and logging on to Amazon.com. Instead, cutting-edge mobile and wireless services emphasize proximity over connectivity, the local over the global and the here and now rather than anytime, anywhere. Computer geeks suddenly turned urban theorists, many of today’s technologists harbor even loftier goals for mobile research agendas: to enhance the image of the city itself — the patterns, the complexities and, above all, the sheer serendipity of the urban landscape.

“People talk about mobile computing as now you’ll be able to leave your home and go to a cafe or park and maybe go online and check e-mail,” says Eric Paulos, lead researcher at Intel’s Urban Atmospheres project in Berkeley, Calif., a program designed to explore technology’s potential to augment and enhance the urban experience. “But we’re interested in something much bigger than that. We’re interested in the social cues that people already perform in urban spaces, in the artifacts that already exist, like trash cans, park benches, and how they will be mapped or reappropriated into a playful network of digital life on the streets.”

Call it the “new new urbanism,” a fusion of telecommunications technology and urban design that is at once a 21st century zeitgeist and a familiar riff on the age-old interface between cities and technology. “From an urban design perspective, a lot of technologists are just discovering public space,” says Dennis Frenchman, chairman of the master of city planning program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s an old story that goes back hundreds of years.” A consultant on Seoul’s Digital Media City, Frenchman himself is part of a very new story. The DMC will incorporate all-digital signage, with programming capacity accessible to the public, personal positioning services, intelligent street lamps and transparent storefronts that will reveal a building’s inner uses as well as real-time Web feeds from sister cities.

The overall purpose of the DMC design, Frenchman says, is to infuse life on the street with multiple layers of meaning. “We’re in a transitional moment,” he hastens to add. “Huge kinds of things are happening.”

To use the Wi-Fi location-based vernacular, several factors triangulate the growing relationship between urban design and computer science. First, having taken over the home and the office, the technology industry has little virgin territory to conquer except the public realm. Second, until recently, there wasn’t the technological capacity to do much computing on city streets and sidewalks — the devices were too big and the network applications not big enough. Third, it turns out that virtual reality, when it comes right down to it, just can’t compete with the immediacy and sentience of real-time, real-place encounters.

In the 1980s, technologists and urban planners began to look at virtual communities as a new form of urbanism, says Anthony Townsend, a research scientist at NYU who teaches in both the urban planning and the telecommunications departments. “But they very quickly realized that it wasn’t that interesting,” he says. “There are some indirect linkages between the desktop web and what goes on every day in urban spaces, but not really very tight linkages.” Today, he says, the proliferation of wireless technologies has led to more direct interactions between cities and networked spaces. “What’s happening now is that technology and industry are adapting to us,” Townsend said. “Instead of us becoming global beings, technology is reorienting around the way we are: visual, local, tactile.”

In an article written last spring for the architecture journal Praxis, Townsend offers a primer on new digital technologies, categorizing them according to four different functional applications: mobile communications, positioning services, digital displays and urban documentation. Deployed in urban spaces, these technologies ultimately sort themselves out according to long-standing debates about the nature of people, place and community. Ask today’s tech researchers about the next big thing, and instead of obscure lectures on the radio frequency spectrum you’ll hear invocations to ’60s situationist concepts of “derive” — urban flows — or the neotraditional ideas of Jane Jacobs, whose seminal work, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” focused on the dense, diverse and random encounters that support thriving urban neighborhoods.

“I’ll tell you the truth of the matter — it ain’t rocket science to figure out how to do this,” drawls Scott Shamp, director of the New Media Institute at the University of Georgia, which set up a Wireless Athens Georgia (WAG) zone last summer covering all 24 blocks of Athens and the university campus. The project catalyzed NMI’s Mobile Multimedia Consortium, a cooperative effort involving students, faculty and consultants along with five private industry partners: Intel ExecuTrain, XcelleNet, Air2Web and Hewlett-Packard.

Since the WAG zone — also known as the Cloud at Athens — launched last June, says Shamp, he’s been getting calls from people all over the world who want to set up similar networks. “People said: ‘We want to know what access points you’re using, what protocols you’re using; tell me how you’re mounting them on the poles,’” says Shamp. “But what was most important was not that they understood the technology, but that we turned it into something that enhanced the community.”

Registered users take advantage of the Cloud’s interactive software to outline preferences regarding specific businesses; then in downtown Athens, they can receive information — via PDAs, laptops and cellular phones — about bands, menu specials or discounts at various stores. So far, the Cloud sounds like just another vehicle for advertising, but the goal, Shamp emphasizes, is to invigorate a local business economy by providing community content and applications. “Otherwise,” he says. “you can easily make an argument that somebody goes into downtown Athens, gets out that laptop, goes to Amazon to buy that book instead of walking two blocks and buying that book from a local bookstore.”

Like a street or a building, WAG zone access points actually inhabit part of the physical infrastructure, orienting the Cloud user to specific resources within the community. “A huge part of this is connecting up the information with the location and making it place-and-time relevant,” Shamp said. “To experience it, you actually have to be in downtown Athens.” Another site-specific application — customized for the social life of a student — is Friend Finder, a Cloud service designed by University of Georgia art, business and music students. “I can come into downtown Athens with a PDA, send a text message that I’m going to be in Blue Sky Coffee for two hours, then turn it off and put it in my pocket,” explains Shamp. “Then when one of my buddies comes into downtown, he can use the WAG zone to find out where his friends are.”

Global positioning systems embedded in mobile devices add yet another spatial dimension to virtual technologies. As Townsend points out, in cellphone-packing Tokyo, GPS chips are already embedded in most mobile devices, creating hordes of “smart mobs” who navigate the densely built — and inhabited — city through use of custom maps and buddy-finder applications. More recently, researchers at Intel’s Seattle lab have developed a Wi-Fi positioning system called Place Lab that doesn’t require extra hardware to install in mobile devices.

“As computing moves off the desktop into the environment, you and I are going to own a large number of computationally enabled devices,” says Anthony LaMarca, a Place Lab researcher. That’s going to require a qualitative shift in how we interact with technology. “It’s not going to be that every computationally enabled device is going to be able to command your attention,” he says. “The devices you own and encounter in densely populated urban environments are going to have to make decisions on their own. For that to happen, the devices need context. And for a mobile device, location is one of the key pieces of context.”

Hewlett-Packard’s Urban Tapestries project in Bristol, U.K., takes finder and navigator functions to yet another level: leveraging Wi-Fi-enabled networks to allow users to digitally tag real locations with text and images. Thus you can wave your mobile phone at a tagged restaurant to pick up reviews left by previous clients, or download digital audio tours as you wend your way through a museum. Other labs are developing “smart place” services based on detection of embedded radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. Then there’s the inverse of location-based services, otherwise known as “computer enhanced location” technologies. At the 2003 UbiComp conference, former Intel researcher Joe McCarthy debuted three “place augmented” prototypes based on scanning and displaying digital profiles — with information about personal and professional interests — contained in wearable RFID tags.

“We are just beginning to scratch the surface of this,” says McCarthy, who left Intel last month to launch his own company, Interrelativity. “You can imagine scenarios where this is used at work, especially in large organizations with a lot of nameless faces. It gives people something to talk about and recognize that they have more in common than they thought. It also has a lot of potential for coffeehouses and other so-called third places.”

If the 21st century digital city raises serious questions about surveillance and information overload, the flip side is that mobile technologies put more eyes and feet on the street, a benchmark for success in any urban place. In fact, one of the paradoxes of digitized urban space is its apparent affinity for traditional urban and neighborhood aesthetics — not the soulless supermalls and virtual suburbs one might expect. The design of Seoul’s Digital Media City, for example, reflects an earlier era of narrow streets, dense alleyways and pedestrian plazas. Or consider the Intel People and Practices lab in Hillsboro, Ore., where researcher Michele Chang has designed a hybrid street game — with real and virtual components — steeped in nostalgia for old-fashioned street play such as hopscotch, kick the can and stickball.

“Street games, this really rich city practice, have all but disappeared,” she says. “It’s because cities have become more regimented, anonymous and commercialized.” If some might blame computer games for taking kids off the streets, Chang wants to leverage digital spaces to counter what she calls the prevalence of “heads-down computing.” Intended as a research tool to map urban practices, her digital street game assigns players random combinations of objects, practices and places to document stunts on the streets of New York. “The idea is very much technology is the medium and the city is the canvas,” she explains. “The street game is a platform for creativity that randomly sets out different ways of discovering your city.”

The neotraditional bent of the postmodern city perhaps explains the attraction of wireless technologies for more conventional urbanists working to mitigate the problem of place in American life. “Anything that’s networked tends to work better where there are lots and lots of people,” says John Norquist, former mayor of Milwaukee and president of the Congress for the New Urbanism, an organization that supports walkable neighborhoods and high-density, mixed-use development. “So Wi-Fi supports urbanism; it’s one of the technologies that enhances it, unlike the interstate highway system that undermines the density of cities.”

Wireless zones, says Ethan Kent, a program manager at New York’s Project for Public Spaces, give people a reason to use public space “in an era when there are more reasons to be in our houses, offices and cars.” Pointing to light-emitting-diode displays in Times Square — in particular a Reuters sign that offers live news and photo feeds — Kent said digital display technologies that reveal a building’s inner uses offer the greatest potential for enlivening public spaces.

Ultimately, the reaction of the urban design and planning community to telecommunications trends raises the question: Who is the driving force behind the 21st century digital city? The correct answer is not the Project for Public Spaces — or any planning organization, for that matter. Think of it this way, says Townsend. “Intel is the General Motors of the 21st century. It’s very influential.”

Backed by the big bucks, technology researchers are devouring tomes related to the theory of place. For their part, (underfunded) planners have yet to develop a comprehensive approach to emerging mobile and wireless technologies. An embryonic field, technology planning usually focuses on building an infrastructure network — such as expanding municipal Wi-Fi zones — or responding to citizen concerns about cellphone towers and radiation, says Scott Page, a Philadelphia urban planner who recently launched his own company, Interface Studio. “It’s unfortunate that the planning profession has turned more of a blind eye to the potential of emerging technologies than they could have,” he says. Urban telecommunications strategy needs to do more than plan for “lead users,” he says. “You want to be feasible, not utopian, not just throw out a bunch of ideas and hope that everyone is going to own a cellphone in five years,” he says, “because that’s not going to be the case.”

In conjunction with a local nonprofit, Page recently completed a comprehensive technology strategy for a distressed neighborhood in northern Philadelphia, including a community technology center where Temple University faculty will teach kids GIS (geographic information system) skills to build a database for the neighborhood, and public art that will double as a digital bulletin board accessible from a public place. “Technology becomes a visible part of a community’s revitalization, and you get exposure to people who have never had exposure,” he says.

In January 2005, MIT’s Sensible Cities Lab and Center for Real Estate are hosting a digital city symposium bringing together real estate companies, tech companies, urban planners and designers, and cities that partner with tech companies. At the September 2004 UbiComp conference held in Nottingham, England, Intel’s Eric Paulos co-organized an Urban Frontiers Workshop that brought together technologists, urban designers, geographers and architects to examine the ways mobile and wireless computing will be integrated into the urban landscape.

Perhaps more than any other project, the Urban Frontiers Workshop suggests that trends within the digital city movement mirror long-standing distinctions in the urban planning community: between those who view cities as compartmentalized centers of production and efficiency, and those who view urban spaces as a kind of barely organized chaos, favoring unpredictable encounters between diverse social groups. Thus on one side you have the Place Labs and the Friend Finder applications; on the other you have the street games and what Paulos calls “urban probes.” These include a digitally augmented garbage can he designed to capture the pattern, flow and personal stories connected to trash usage and a “familiar strangers” project, a mobile phone application that logs and records the presence of people we see every day — at the bus stop, in the grocery store — but with whom we do not interact.

“Probably the big thing was try to bring the discussion away from the immediacy of things that promote efficiency or productivity,” says Paulos, who cites influences such as the situationists, who staged unpredictable street performances, and Kevin Lynch, whose seminal planning book, “The Image of the City,” exposed the difference between people’s mental maps of a city and the physical plan. “Even though these are important goals, it’s important to acknowledge that things we actually cherish in life in home or the city are not always about efficiency. They are intangible; they get at emotional experiences. It’s what constitutes the richness of people’s lives.”

Toggled together, the pragmatic and playful digital city applications will change both the shape and the experience of public space. As for value judgments, it is too early to say. If the cellphone, as Goldberger and many others complain, is a technology that isolates people on the street, it is also a tool to engineer face-to-face encounters. If a pervasive silicon-embedded environment suggests an Orwellian politics of place, it also points toward a democratization of technology, an era in which individuals and communities control their digital future.

Townsend tells a story of being in Seoul during the Summer Olympics, where 500,000 people would gather to watch soccer on a four-story Jumbotron on top of a building. “It’s a shared event, a shared sense of space,” says Townsend, “where people choose to make a statement by being in large group.”

“Emerging technologies are an enabler,” says Page. “They can reinforce anything we want to accomplish.” Besides, he adds, “it’s traditional that cities change and adapt to technology. It’s what cities are partially there for.”

Over the past two decades, transportation activists have focused efforts on redirecting state and federal transportation funds away from cars and road building toward bicycle, pedestrian and mass transit alternatives. By all accounts, their efforts are succeeding. Between 1973 and 1991, the 50 states spent a total of $40 million on bike and walk infrastructure improvements. By contrast, expenditures on bike lanes, sidewalks and pedestrian trails now total $422 million per year, an order of magnitude greater — albeit still a paltry 1 percent of the country’s total transportation budget.

The increase in bike and pedestrian spending started with the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991, an overhaul of the highway transportation bill. It established categories of funds for local projects that contributed to air-quality standards, as well as a wide range of bicycle and pedestrian projects.

Fifteen years later, a new program is rising to the top in the bike-walk hierarchy. It’s called Safe Routes to School, a rapidly expanding 4-year-old effort that coordinates transportation, health and education agencies to get children walking and biking to school. Statewide Safe Routes programs are already underway in California, Washington and Wisconsin, and the pending reauthorization of the highway and transit bill, TEA-3, contains a $1 billion appropriation for a federal Safe Routes to School program.

“It has the potential to become one of the best ways to improve conditions for walking and biking,” said Clark, describing the broad cross-section of Safe Routes supporters, including parents and teachers, health agencies and urban planners. “There’s an unassailable coalition.”

Sharon Roerty, director of community programs at the National Center for Bicycling and Walking in Bethesda, Md., concurs. “Safe Routes to School means a better walking and biking environment for everyone,” she said. “We picked schools because that’s motherhood and apple pie. But it could be a senior center; it could be a train station.”

But if Safe Routes to School is a case study in successful grass-roots organizing, the story behind it also unfolds as a classic — and damning — parable of contemporary American culture. Once a national pastime taken for granted by millions of children, walking to school is, under Safe Routes, a multimillion-dollar effort orchestrated by adults and branded with its own catchy acronym: SR2S. The collapse of walking as a natural activity and its rebirth as a public-private partnership suggests the intermodal equivalent of a society gone mad — an Alice in Wonderland state of affairs spotlighted by the corporate sponsorship and liability-insurance measures described in SR2S toolkits.

Through engineering, enforcement, education and encouragement mechanisms, Safe Routes to School seeks to challenge the supremacy of the automobile in people’s lives — along with its inevitable adjuncts, fear and isolation. But the real measure of the program’s success, suggests David Engwicht, an Australian traffic consultant who pioneered SR2S concepts such as the Walking School Bus, will be the withering away of its own apparatus.

“One of the major problems with SR2S,” said Engwicht via e-mail, “is that we have forgotten the larger goal — independent mobility for children.”

Following similar programs in Australia and Europe, SR2S got its start in the United States four years ago, when Rep. James Oberstar, D-Minn., persuaded the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to provide $50,000 grants for test projects in Marin County, Calif., and Arlington, Mass. Both programs posted significant increases in the numbers of kids who walked and biked to school, a result that helped propel the billion dollars into the highway and transit bill now making its way through Congress.

In lieu of federal funding, SR2S programs already exist in 26 states. The majority, like the newly minted program in Portland, Ore., are local efforts, although California set up a $20 million statewide SR2S program that has received over $240 million in project requests from local jurisdictions.

Wendi Kallins, project manager for the Marin County SR2S program, which has become a national model for the burgeoning movement, says parents routinely cite safety as the main reason they prevent their kids from walking or biking to school. But more often than not, parents’ safety arguments are like falling down the rabbit hole; plunge deeper, and it gets curiouser and curiouser.

Fifty percent of the children hit by cars near schools are hit by vehicles driven by parents of other students, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Researchers for the Marin County program found that up to 30 percent of morning traffic is caused by parents driving their children to school. (These figures have since been validated in other parts of the country.) And as Dave Glowacz, the education director at the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation, points out, driving to school has so thoroughly penetrated the K-8 consciousness that school “arrival” and “dismissal” times have been linguistically recast as “drop-off” and “pickup” hours.

In the SR2S vernacular, parental concerns about safety have as much to do with “stranger danger” — the chance that a child walking to school will be snatched off the sidewalk by a complete stranger — as a fear of traffic. In the United States, the actual incidence of stranger danger is decreasing; the number of kids kidnapped by strangers nationwide in 2002 was 115, down from 200 in 1988. “But when you’re dealing with gut-level fears, there’s not much you can do,” Kallins said. “The whole level of fear in our culture is increasing.” She describes one father who attended an SR2S meeting: “‘With my pretty blue-eyed daughter,’ he said, ‘I’m convinced she will be the one.’”

Child-abduction terrors exploit the gap between perception and reality. They also reinforce a logical fallacy — “I won’t let my kids walk because it’s not safe; it’s not safe because there aren’t enough people walking” — that cuts straight to the heart of pedestrian and bike advocacy. In the late 1960s, 90 percent of children who lived within a mile of their school walked or biked. Today, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 31 percent of such kids do so. Instead, working parents drive their kids two blocks to school to save time, then spend 5 to 10 minutes circling the building to find a safe place to drop them off — a description that fits not only my neighbor across the street but also thousands of other parents across the country. Then there’s the mother who smashed a kid in the face as she was opening the door of her SUV to drop off her own child.

“It’s just mayhem,” says Glowacz, who gathered data about kids in a northern Chicago suburban elementary school who were hit by cars while biking to school, only to discover that the only documented incidents occurred near school grounds during drop-off and pickup times.

Parents, of course, harbor legitimate reasons for not wanting their kids to walk to school. When the car is king, the simple act of crossing the street is fraught with risk, especially for children who are more inclined to be chatting with friends or blowing the fuzz off dandelions than paying attention to the steel-and-glass menace headed their way. New suburban schools are sited miles from students’ homes, cash-strapped municipalities can barely pay for road paving, much less sidewalks and crosswalks, and cellphone-equipped SUVs are only getting bigger and more dangerous.

In the battle to make streets safer for pedestrians, bicyclists and children, activists have taken aim at federal transportation laws and state departments of transportation, which have historically focused on shoring up highway networks at the expense of local streets. The passage of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act in 1991 signaled a major break with this tradition by supporting local bike and pedestrian projects through two new programs: Enhancements, and Congestion and Air Quality Mitigation.

Federal SR2S legislation, Clark said, would “further the shift” away from state networks to local improvement projects, which invariably involve more innovative and flexible approaches to traffic problems. In suburban Marin County, for example, Kallins said identifying a champion in the schools who could organize parents, teachers, children and community members was “absolutely essential.” With the assistance of a private traffic engineer, David Parisi, several cities in Marin County did implement SR2S engineering improvements, including enhancing school crosswalks, installing high-visibility signs, and modifying traffic-signal timing to assist pedestrian crossings.

The “encouragement” piece of the program, Kallins emphasized, was instrumental in increasing the numbers of kids who walked and biked to county schools. Promotional campaigns included frequent-rider contests sponsored by Trek — the winner gets a bicycle — adult-supervised walk-to-school programs such as Walking Wednesdays, and safety art, in which kids designed and posted signs around the school about the benefits of walking.

In February 2000, a survey of parents in Mill Valley showed that almost 70 percent of the students were driven to school. By the spring of 2002, walking to school rose from 21 percent to 38 percent — an 80 percent increase in two years.

In New York City, where relatively large numbers of kids do walk to school, the focus of a citywide $2.5 million SR2S program will be engineering improvements to improve safety and to counteract a growing trend toward driving. City contractors are finishing up mappings of crashes around 1,350 neighborhood schools. (“We call them crashes, not accidents,” noted Kit Hodge, campaign coordinator for Transportation Alternatives, a nonprofit that inspired the city to adopt the SR2S program. “It’s a philosophical difference.”) By 2005, pedestrian improvements and traffic-calming measures are scheduled to be installed around the 135 most dangerous schools.

Along with the opposable thumb, walking is what differentiates humans from the lesser primates — bipedalism, evolution experts like to say, is precisely what led to greater brain development and civilization as we know it. As for walking to school, it’s part of the American pastoral, from Tom Sawyer, who traded tall tales with Huck Finn about warts and dead cats en route to the schoolhouse, to Ramona the Pest, who immortalized a Portland neighborhood not far from my own and who walked to school without adult supervision — or authorial censure — when she was only 5 years old.

Fast-forward to the 21st century, where liability insurance for kids who walk or bike to school has become one of the major challenges facing SR2S advocates. In 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency funded a $96,000 Portland project to develop a Walking School Bus — in which groups of kids walk designated routes to school under adult supervision — at a local elementary school. Organizers spent months mapping safe routes, conducting outreach to parents, and running criminal background checks on senior citizen volunteers, only to have the project collapse in the absence of liability coverage for kids who might become injured or go missing. A senior-citizen-led walking school bus in Larkspur, Calif., met with a similar fate, according to Kallins.

“The fact that one would have to even consider kindly senior citizens being sued for walking kids to school says a lot about our culture,” she observed.

The risk-management mentality in K-12 education grew out of a litigious climate in the 1980s, said Glowacz, who led a session on SR2S and liability during the September 2004 Pro Walk/Pro Bike conference in Victoria, B.C. — a presentation that drew more than 160 people. To limit the liability for schools, he said, courts ruled that districts can be held responsible for “willful and wanton negligence” only if they were aware of an imminent danger and didn’t do anything about it.

Many schools have interpreted “willful and wanton negligence” by banning or discouraging organized walk and bike programs. (The ironies multiply; if a child is hit by a car while walking to school, Kallins points out, the driver, not the school, should be held responsible). In a case that has become part of SR2S lore, the superintendent of Wauconda Community School District 118, the site of Glowacz’s data-gathering project, temporarily banned kids from cycling to all schools in the district last year after a boy who had been walking his bike near the school grounds was hit by a car driven by his gym teacher.

The prohibition inspired Glowacz — and community members — to adopt an aikido approach to the problem at Wauconda Elementary school. They used the research procedures of SR2S (called SRTS by the Chicagoland Bike Federation) to fulfill the school’s liability mandate, a plan that succeeded because the data so clearly demonstrated that the evil, in this case, came from within. Since the data proved that the real danger was caused not just by drivers, but by drivers during drop-off and pickup times, Glowacz was able to argue that the school had to do something to change the situation. “The [liability] focus shifted from kids on bikes to kids being dropped off at school,” he said.

Many SR2S programs have also found liability coverage through local police departments. It’s also worth noting that SR2S liability insurance is much less of a problem in the U.K. and Australia because of universal healthcare coverage.

A partnership of parents, teachers, planners, health advocates and the private sector, SR2S comes as close as you can to a village raising a child in the United States. With its feel-good emphasis on kids, the program also offers the bike and pedestrian movement an unparalleled opportunity to build enthusiasm — and acquire funding — for sustainable land-use and transportation practices.

And yet, as a parent and a pedestrian advocate myself, I’m well aware of the contradiction that governs the entire walk-to-school movement: the thrill at seeing hundreds of kids walking to school during organized events such as International Walk to School Day on Oct. 6, tempered by the twinge of discomfort at their Nike sponsor-clad bodies, the police escorts, even the “on message” signs about the health and exercise benefits of walking to school. This isn’t your father’s walk to school.

As Engwicht points out, under SR2S, adults view walking and biking to school as a transportation problem — how do you get kids from home to school as safely as possible. But for children, walking to school is not about transportation, much less health or exercise. “It is about the chance for an adventure,” Engwicht said. “To spend time with friends, to explore the physical environment, to build a relationship with the built environment and develop a sense of place.”

Roerty, of the National Center for Bicycling and Walking, agrees. “We’ve forgotten the kid in the program,” she said. She cites her own daughter, who likes to cut through people’s yards on the way to school, as an example. “Kids like risk.” she said, noting that some experts have jokingly proposed renaming the program “Un Safe Routes to School.”

Among alternative transportation advocates, the dictum is: “Everything old is new.” But can a fearful, risk-averse car culture afford kids who wander to school instead of walk, who explore alternative routes, who stop and smell the flowers and splash in rain puddles?

Engwicht proposes a system of “activity nodes” throughout the city, where adults would sit and watch children as they moved from place to place. “SR2S, including the Walking School Bus,” he said, “needs to lift its focus from overt, constant supervision of children to covert, background supervision.” It’s a kind of wireless-networking approach to the problem, and perhaps one small step toward the ultimate goal: devolution of SR2S into its lowercase counterpart, walking to school.

But for many advocates, that move is still off in the distance.

“It’s madness,” said Clark, referring to the need for programs encouraging people to walk. Unfortunately, he said, the state departments of transportation haven’t done enough on their own. “Hopefully Safe Routes will turn it around.”

Green building is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the exploding market for environmentally friendly materials and technologies. According to the National Association of Homebuilders (NAHB), in 2002, programs such as Built Green certified more than 13,000 homes in the United States. Next year, the U.S. Green Building Council will pilot its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Homes program, certifying state-of-the-art green residences. States and municipalities also continue to strengthen residential codes for energy efficiency, indoor air quality and water use.

But there’s an elephant in the living room of most of these green homes. Call it square footage — lots and lots of it. Fifty years ago, the average house size was 1,100 square feet, and the average household size was 4.2 people. Today, the average house size has increased to 2,150 square feet, while the average household size has declined to 2.3 people.

“That’s a killer combination,” said Mike O’Brien, a program manager in the Portland, Ore., Office of Sustainable Development. “In the space of 50 years, we’ve reversed the equation completely.”

Here’s what the green residential landscape looks like in the 21st century. In the United States, advances in green-building technologies have to compete with the proliferation of 3,000-square-foot-plus homes — simultaneous trends that underscore one of the key paradoxes of sustainable development in the United States.

“In spite of everything we’ve done to make the building envelope more efficient,” O’Brien said, “we’re still using more energy in our homes.” Nadav Malin, the editor of the monthly newsletter Environmental Building News, agrees. Most of the green features people are incorporating into their homes represent ecological improvements in the 10 to 50 percent range, he said via e-mail. But even a 50 percent reduction in the ecological footprint, Malin noted, “would be totally offset by a doubling of the house size.”

The American proclivity for living large does more than raise questions about whether a 4,000-square-foot single family home should ever qualify as a “green” residence. It also calls into question one of the fundamental tenets of sustainability — that market demand for green products and technologies will save us from environmental apocalypse. If we all go solar, if we install rainwater catchment systems and use sustainably harvested lumber, so the logic goes, then there’s no need to deprive ourselves of the luxuries that space — and the furniture and accessories to fill it — affords. But the issue of consumption, not to mention overconsumption, is curiously absent from the sustainability discourse. And in an era characterized by unprecedented consumer wealth, this could be the movement’s fatal flaw.

Within the green home market, there does exist a niche for small houses, fueled largely by the runaway success of “The Not So Big House” book series by Minnesota architect Sarah Susanka and, to a lesser extent, an emerging trend toward sleek, efficient — and affordable — modular housing. But for the most part, the green housing market mirrors the megahouse trends in the conventional homebuilding market.

“My clients want to build green, but they want to build bigger,” says George Ostrow, principal of Velocipede Architects, a leading sustainable design firm in Seattle. Ostrow links big green houses to fuel-efficient SUVs and other green-living oxymorons. “It’s a contradiction of our culture,” he said.

Whether it’s a McMansion or an architect-designed estate, big green homes offer a recognizably American take on eco-friendly trends sweeping the country.

There’s the 4,200-square-foot solar-powered home featured in Salon last month — a house “so spacious it includes an entire guest wing the couple never uses.” Rob Harrison, another Seattle architect who specializes in sustainable design, cites a 4,100-square-foot home — including garage and attached greeenhouse — he recently designed for a single family household in Redmond, Wash. Among other features, the house will incorporate advanced framing, Forest Stewardship Council-certified lumber, hardwood floors and plywood, as well as sustainably harvested cork floors. The main roof slopes south for future photovoltaic panels, and there is porous paving on the driveway.

“We had many green features,” Harrison said. “But ultimately, because of the size, we are still using more resources.” The client’s personal requirements, including room for a regulation-size pool table and a music performance atrium for 30 people, made it impossible to reduce the footprint of the house, Harrison said.

“House size,” he says, “is probably the most important criterion and often the most difficult one for us to meet.”

Not all green designers and builders hew to the notion that less is more. Take William McDonough, the visionary green architect who likes to invoke the cherry tree — in which thousands of blossoms provide fruit so that one pit might take root and grow — as a model for sustainable production.

“No one would ever look at the ground littered with cherry blossoms and say ‘how inefficient how wasteful,’” writes McDonough in his book, “Cradle to Cradle.” Instead, he observes, the blossoms decompose and provide nutrients for soil, plants and other organisms. Nature, in his view, is both abundant and productive — qualities that “eco-effective” design (a McDonough alternative to “eco-efficient” design) can and should emulate.

Allison Ewing, a residential architect at McDonough’s Charlottesville, Va., firm, applies this theory to the 4,000-square-foot-plus green homes she designs. “Our belief is that if it’s solar powered, you can have all the hot water you want,” she said. “As long as you have cradle-to-cradle design, we say, celebrate abundance.” Responding to a question about house size and ecological footprint, Ewing reiterates another favorite McDonough saying: “We’re not in the business of telling people to be less bad,” she said. “We’re about 100 percent more good.” Ewing cites a recently designed 4,500-square-foot residence that incorporates geothermal energy sources, radiant floor heating and sustainably harvested wood — a house that apparently catalyzed a local market for sustainably harvested lumber. A smaller residence, she said, would not have had the same impact on the local green economy.

As a metaphor, design principle and incubator for sustainable markets, the idea of productive abundance is compelling. It’s much less compelling when viewed in context of American consumption habits. Is nature abundant? Or is it frugal? When it comes to picking design metaphors, the natural world is, conveniently, a free market. And as Ostrow and Harrison point out, the trend toward large green houses is driven in large part by the lack of awareness surrounding square footage and ecological footprint, not because of any lofty ideas about nature’s fecundity.

A reflection of American priorities and lifestyles, the march toward bigger homes also gets a push from complex zoning regulations and real estate and banking practices. Mortgage banks lock in large house sizes by requiring the value of the home to be three times the value of the land, said Art Castle, executive vice president of the Home Builders Association of Kitsap County, Wash. “If you put a house outside of these perimeters, you create a market aberration,” he said. “A lot of lenders are unwilling to support smaller houses.”

The bias toward large homes has even penetrated green-building rating programs, according to an analysis performed last year by the Pittsburgh-based Integrated Building and Construction Solutions (IBACOS). The study found that the Home Energy Rating System, a federal program that rates energy efficiency performance for new and existing homes, requires smaller houses to incorporate more advanced energy features than larger houses, assuming a given occupancy. “The whole motivation for doing the analysis was that house size is not being taken as seriously as it should be, ” said Eric Newhouse, an IBACOS systems integration designer and the coauthor of the report, “Analysis of Energy Consumption, Rating Score and House Size.” The paper was presented at the U.S. Green Building Conference last year.

In 1998, Environmental Building News published an article comparing energy and materials use in large and small houses. Using data compiled by the NAHB and Energy Balance, the article showed that a 1,500-square-foot home with low energy performance standards will use less energy for heating and cooling than a 3,000-square-foot house with high energy performance standards. Because big houses tend to have more design features, the NAHB also estimated that large homes consume proportionately more materials. Thus a 5,000-square-foot house will consume three times as many resources as a 2,085- square-foot house, even though its square footage is only 2.4 times greater.

Six years later, experts say the correlation between square footage and resource and energy use is still valid. Size matters even if a residence incorporates solar power, rainwater catchment and other “off the grid” technologies, says Newhouse. “Bigger houses use more materials,” he said. “and there’s no perfectly environmentally friendly material.”

Acknowledging the issue, some green-building rating programs have started to incorporate a matrix for house size. Like many green residential programs, PGE’s Earth Advantage certification in Portland, Ore., is based on a combination of required measures and additional points that can be earned for a home’s green features. Last summer, Earth Advantage created four advanced levels of certification, two of which incorporate a matrix for house size. For example, under the new Earth Advantage Gold Environmental and Water Efficiency package, a 2,500-square-foot home needs to earn 50 more environmental responsibility or resource efficiency points than a 1,999-square-foot home in order to earn the same ranking.

The Vermont Built Green (VBG) program, which piloted last year and is recognized as the most comprehensive program in the country, takes this idea one step further. To earn VGB certification, a home must meet 54 requirements and earn at least 100 points. Under this system, the easiest way to earn certification is to meet the minimum requirements and build a very small house. For example, a two-bedroom house earns 100 points if it’s 1,000 square feet; 25 points at 1,500 square feet. By contrast, a four-bedroom house at 5,200 square feet loses 100 points, meaning that the house will have to earn 200 points — twice as many — for VBG certification.

“House size is the centerpiece,” said Richard Faesy, project manager of the Vermont Energy Investment Corp., which administers the VGB. “We hope to spur education and discussion to get people to acknowledge size is a significant factor in green homes.”

Building small isn’t nearly as sexy as installing photovoltaic panels for solar power. But there is a niche for small green homes, especially among young families in search of affordable housing. Kristin Bacon-Brenes, who shares a 1,550-square-foot, three-bedroom home in Portland, Ore., with her husband and two young children, is one such convert. Boasting a rainwater catchment system, solar and radiant heating, reclaimed lumber from a dismantled granary, bamboo flooring, and reclaimed sinks, toilets and marble, the house won the 2003 National Green Custom Project award from the NHBA Research Center. “We had 18 people here for Thanksgiving,” said Bacon-Brenes. “Everyone was so surprised at how good it felt.”

To create a feeling of spaciousness, Bacon-Brenes and Portland architect Andre DeBar said they incorporated principles from Susanka’s “Not So Big” books: an open floor plan with modular spaces, definition between the entryways and rooms, and diagonal lines of sight.

A surprisingly chi-chi source of small green homes can be found in contemporary modular housing — a 21st century incarnation of modernist, mass-production architecture that bears little relation to the fake Tudors or trailer parks most people associate with prefabricated construction. One example is the “Q series” of modular homes, designed by Kohn Shnier architects and manufactured by Royal Homes in Toronto. A sleek, wedge-shaped structure with floor-to-ceiling windows and simple plywood interiors, the Q comes in variable sizes up to 850 square feet, with a price tag around $150,000. Lloyd Alter, managing director of the Toronto Site for Royal Homes, calls the Q the “anti-monster home.” With good design, you don’t need a lot of space, says Alter, who advocates for what he calls the housing equivalent of IKEA furniture: “good affordable design you can get off the rack.”

Other players in the modernist prefab movement include 33-year-old Missouri architect Rocio Romero, whose stylish, light-filled 1,150-square-foot “LV House” comes in panels of corrugated aluminum. The basic LV kit costs $29,000 plus shipping, around $3,000 — but doesn’t include electrical or plumbing systems.

Whether or not modular housing evolves into the next big thing, prefabrication reduces construction-related waste and square footage, and tends to privilege flexible spaces and plenty of light. And the efficiencies inherent in modular construction are intriguing. Alter cites a Danish design called “flip spaces,” in which bedrooms span two units in a condo or apartment building. When the kids in one family move out, the bedroom “flips” to the other unit. “There are a lot of flexible design ideas that can be done if the house isn’t sitting alone on a lot,” Alter said.

In the meantime, families who are content with smaller-than-average houses are still the exception. As for big green houses, well, they evoke the parable about boys who will turn any toy — blocks, balls, stuffed animals — into a war game. Give Americans sustainable technology, and we’ll super-size it beyond recognition.

“If we wanted to sell our home, who would we sell it to?” asked Kathleen O’Brien, who lives in a 1,650-square-foot, two-bedroom Built Green house on Bainbridge Island, Wash. “Maybe another couple or family with one child, with our same philosophy.” Other than that, O’Brien said, the possibilities are limited. “Resale value is another market constraint on small homes.”

In 2003, American Apparel grossed $80 million, double its sales figures for 2002. Those numbers are expected to double again in 2004. Last November, the company opened its first three retail stores, two in New York City and one in Los Angeles; by the end of the year, there will be outposts in London, Frankfurt and Berlin. The globetrotting Charney is scouting retail and manufacturing locations in Thailand, Mexico and China, where, he says, American Apparel is committed to paying store and factory workers U.S.-dollar minimum wage.

“Our goal is to become the biggest apparel operation in human history,” says Charney, who cheerfully confesses to being, well, a megalomaniac. “We will challenge the Gap in my time.”

Four years into the 21st century, any 10-year-old knows that outsourcing labor is the dominant trend in global manufacturing. More than 30,000 U.S. textile workers lost their jobs in the past year and a half, according to the American Textile Manufacturers’ Institute.

But nationally and internationally, subcontracting in the garment industry is associated with lack of oversight and substandard labor conditions, says Richard Appelbaum, a UC-Santa Barbara sociologist and the author of “Behind the Label,” a book on L.A.’s garment industry.

“The real problem with today’s manufacturing is the outsourcing,” he says. “It makes it almost impossible to know where the supply chain ends.” (The word “sweatshop,” after all, was first used in reference to subcontracted garment workers in 19th century England who labored in their own homes.)

Enter American Apparel, where Charney pays his 760 predominantly Hispanic shop workers an average of $11 an hour, in addition to providing health insurance, paid vacation and free English classes. The company’s favorable working conditions are far from the norm, says the nonprofit Garment Workers Center in L.A., where sewing has become the largest sector in the county’s manufacturing economy. According to the Department of Labor, only a third of the city’s 5,000 garment factories comply with federal and state labor laws, such as minimum wage standards, overtime pay and record keeping. Over half routinely violate health and safety standards.

But don’t confuse Charney with Cesar Chavez. Heir to the Jewish “garmento” tradition — his grandfather in Montreal was an “immigrant business hustler” — Charney wants to be recognized as a brilliant entrepreneur, not a benevolent employer. He has a love-hate relationship with the union-led anti-sweatshop movement and says that “bringing a little dignity to the workplace” is simply a byproduct of the company’s hyper-efficient “vertically integrated” business model. Apply principles of good design to fashion and to factories, says this son of a painter and an urban planner, and you can solve any problem — even the social and structural woes of present-day capitalist production.

“The problem is there’s no standardization in apparel,” says Charney. The fashion industry changes styles every three months, he says, giving artists and designers too much freedom and flexibility. And as long as apparel producers keep churning out new product lines, the industry will continue to depend on a subcontracting model. “We keep feeding consumers these ridiculous choices,” Charney says. “But it’s on the backs of inhumane labor.”

The American Apparel aesthetic, by contrast, harks back to what Charney calls the “commodity fashion” roots of U.S. apparel. Here he waxes nostalgic about American standbys such as Hanes underwear, which he has been buying for 13 years, or the “simple American” purity of a pair of Levi’s cords. “If we applied a little bit of universalism to fashion, if we apply principles of modernism that have been developed over the past century, these kinds of clothes can be made in a vertically integrated setting, where it’s much more efficient, more profitable, and much easier to communicate with the customer. Then, secondarily, we can say we know the face of our workers, that we’re sweatshop free.”

At American Apparel’s corporate and manufacturing headquarters, Charney appears to have done the unthinkable: He’s made working in a garment factory hip, not just for his young creative and corporate staff, but for the Latino shop workers as well. Fingers fly as teams of sewers are paid by the piece (a modern-day version of the old sweatshop payment system), but shop workers also partake of such trendy on-site services as yoga and massage and wear the T-shirts they make to work. The company offers counseling for co-workers who get involved romantically and then break up again, nobody cares if you smoke a joint, and seven or eight times a year working class joins management in one big beer and pizza party. It’s like one of those multicultural Benetton ads, except, well — it’s an American Apparel ad and it’s real.

“The secret to American Apparel is that none of us are really Americans,” wrote Charney, a Montreal native, in a precursor to the company’s mission statement a couple of years ago. (He earned, for his pains, a punch in the face from his former girlfriend, who called Charney anti-white. “She wasn’t a very sophisticated thinker at the time,” he says.) Quoting from a book of photos compiled by Dennis Hopper’s daughter, suggesting that Jane Fonda decided to come to L.A. after seeing the seminal ’60s road-trip movie “Easy Rider,” Charney contends that American Apparel is providing similar inspiration to a new generation of young people migrating to L.A. He might as well quote from any number of enthusiastic employee testimonials.

“Working for Dov gives me hope that the prevailing morally bankrupt and generally unsustainable business practices that run rampant around the world can, with a lot of hard work and smarts and vision, be changed for the better,” says Kabira Hochberg, Charney’s 20-something, Vassar-educated personal assistant, via e-mail. “He’s a maniac, but he is going to change the American landscape, and possibly, capitalism itself … And I love that I’m working in a factory.”

Alexandra Spunt, a former freelance journalist who moved to L.A. after interviewing Charney for the Montreal Mirror in August, says she feels “quite privileged to work in the creative department of a non-institutional company that’s both socially responsible and prosperous.”

“Many young people are caught between wanting to do good work and wanting to make money,” says the 24-year-old Spunt, who now oversees all aspects of the company’s image. “I get to have my cake and eat it too.”

Any company that generates this kind of adulation — and experiences this kind of growth — is bound to have detractors. Ilse Metchek, the executive director of the California Fashion Association, is one of the skeptics. American Apparel’s “contrarian” vertically integrated model wouldn’t work for most of the fashion industry, she says. But her argument against vertical integration is exactly the same as Charney’s argument for doing all the work in-house. “Because of the diversification of product,” says Metchek, “the work [must be] contracted out. In Dov’s case, they make all the same thing, all the time.”

Arguing that unions or workers’ cooperatives are the panacea for cheap-labor manufacturing trends, members of the anti-sweatshop movement also cast a dubious — if slightly envious — eye on Charney’s operation. “Charney’s a charismatic guy,” says Appelbaum, summing up the party line. “But his company is based on a patrimony — in other words, his good graces. It’s definitely a step forward, but I don’t think the future of apparel production should reside on the largesse of factory owners. It should reside on workers representing themselves.”

The history of American Apparel overlaps with that of several nascent sweatshop-free apparel manufacturers. For example, Charney’s “hyper capitalist-socialist business fusion” mission statement was inspired partly by Adbusters, which is now manufacturing the Black Spot sneaker as an “ethical” alternative to Nike. American Apparel also vied, unsuccessfully, with SweatX (located just around the corner from American Apparel) and the Massachusetts-based NoSweatApparel for several million dollars from the Hot Fudge Venture Fund, founded by former ice cream king Ben Cohen. (In an act of internecine sweatshop-free apparel warfare, NoSweatApparel last month launched a No Sweat sneaker to compete with Adbuster’s Black Spot. Adam Neiman, CEO of NoSweatApparel, says he created the shoe, manufactured in a Jakarta, Indonesia, union shop, after discovering that Adbusters had decided to source the Black Spot from a non-union factory in China.)

Charney, who dismisses most union supporters as “false tribalists,” says that unionization would stifle American Apparel’s innovative business practices. Mindful of federal labor laws, however, he claims to support his workers’ collective bargaining rights — if they chose to exercise them.

“I think about 1 percent of the workers want to unionize,” says 24-year-old Jeremias Pablo, a sewing operations supervisor. “At American Apparel, we already have something like a union. We have a good boss, we have all those benefits, we have respect. The union should help other places where there is abuse and racism.” During the past year, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE), has tried several times to unionize American Apparel.

Charney has his own theory of workplace checks and balances. It goes something like this: The media is to American Apparel what the unions are to the labor movement. Last month, for example, when American Apparel fired one of its cutting managers for allegedly extorting workers, the incident was covered by Channel 22 in Los Angeles; a few days later, the story ran on television in Mexico.

“His first choice wasn’t to run to the labor board,” says Charney gleefully. “He went to the media! He said: ‘I’ve been fired unfairly!’ Well, you can’t do that when the company’s offshore. If it was a subcontractor working for American Apparel, we could say we don’t know anything about it, but because he has something to say against one of the great companies of L.A., the cameras were there right away, before I had a chance to wipe my ass and get out of bed.”

That’s what sweatshop free really means, Charney says. “We’re not saying it’s a perfect environment here. I’m sure some workers get kicked in the ass occasionally. But at least it’s in our shop. Especially in modern times, apparel is movable. With e-mail, fax machines, and logistics companies, you can move a box from L.A. to China in 20 hours. There are so few restrictions on the movement of apparel, the one thing that does ensure the workers’ rights is an integrated model, especially if it’s in a media environment like L.A.”

(By the way, says Charney, his cutting manager is “as guilty as he comes,” and the company is hiring a third-party investigator to prepare a report that proves it. “Hey, I love the guy, but he’s extorting money from our workers, he’s not sweatshop free, he doesn’t represent our ideals. So we had to make a correction.”)

The workers cheer, the media fawns, and the unions and fashion industry — strange bedfellows — grumble if not seethe. Meanwhile, Charney is moving on to new crusades. Thumbing his nose at the apparel industry’s “culture of collections,” he’s promoting a system called “style number identity,” where the same garment is made for at least 100 months. With stores planned for England, Germany, and the developing world, Charney is also building on the success of his New York and L.A. retail outlets, which have grossed millions in sales.

Hundreds of retail employees are ready to come into the vertically integrated fold, says Charney, who concedes, in a rare moment, that unions are right to target the oft-ignored retail sector. Whether in Bangkok or Mexico City, Charney plans to pay workers in his stores U.S.-dollar minimum wage. “Shop workers in Mexico make about $80 a week,” he says. “I could go into Mexico and pay $400 or $500 a week because my business model can accommodate my pricing.”

Vertically integrating on a global scale may seem like an oxymoron; it sounds like subcontracting by another name. But good logistics can overcome any hurdles, Charney says. To mitigate the environmental impact associated with air freight, for example, American Apparel plans to utilize dead space on passenger airlines instead of cargo planes.

Charney’s long-term goal is to open manufacturing plants in the developing world, with China and India as the preferred targets. But any American Apparel factory in China, he says, is going to sell the clothes locally — none of this shipping T-shirts back to the United States. It could be a perfect match. For the standardized navy blue clothing under communism, substitute the standardized American Apparel T-shirt under neo-capitalism. Call it sustainability. Call it a zeitgeist. American Apparel is not going away.