Jaw dropping photos of Germany in 1929. So beautiful and joyful. Compare to the depressing Wal-Mart/KFC/minimall world we’re in today. As Nico says: ‘It looks like a fairy tale country to me.’
Link
(Via BoingBoing)

Beautiful photos, especially this one, of course. I think we have built towns, cities, and especially suburbs to the wrong scale for the last half century. This is most evident in the USA, which could start with a relatively blank canvas, while European city-planners had to content with old stuff. I bet for several decades European city planners were envious of the way Americans built their new cities…

People have been focused on the car and as a result everything has been built to the scale of the car – just spend a few days in Dallas or Houston, if you don’t believe me. Then compare that to a few days in Boston, which is more pedestrian friendly, or European cities like Cologne. Well, the love for the car may at last be waning. Gasoline costs upward of $3 and we really haven’t found a decent alternative yet to it yet. Hopefully we will start looking into building to a human scale again.

From David Byrne’s Journal:

There’s a trickle-down effect — once oil and gas cost more the electricity will eventually cost more and it will cost more to pretty much make anything and do any kind of business. Even service industries have to heat or cool their offices and run their computers. Everything will eventually cost more and folks will go out less. Maybe they’ll form communities again and sprawl will start to reverse itself, to implode.
That’s my rant. Those nutty solar panels and funny bio-diesel cars might not be such a joke before long.

I do believe that micro-power generation will become a very big thing. Regenerating our laptop battery by riding an exercise bike, regenerating our iPod battery with energy created by walking. We will all be a lot healthier…