Greensburg, Kansas, rebuilding from scratch after nearly being wiped away by a tornado last year, is quickly becoming a model for going green.
Along with Masdar City, a planned car-free community outside Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, and other developments, the rural Kansas town offers vivid examples of sustainable living in a “Green Community,” a new exhibit at the National Building Museum in Washington. The exhibit opened on Thursday and will run for a year.
“They are really making a wonderful opportunity out of an absolute tragedy,” curator and architect Susan Piedmont-Palladino said of Greensburg. “Masdar and Greensburg do make a really good pair because they’re both looking at the whole package of green technologies — from very old ways of doing things to high-tech ways.”
PHOTO: AP
Where windmills once dotted the Kansas landscape, Greensburg plans to embrace them again to harvest enough wind energy to power the town of about 700, which had twice as many residents before the tornado.
Greensburg gets only 56cm of rain a year, so street runoff and rainwater that hits buildings will be collected and used to irrigate plants, part of a master plan that “treats each drop of water as a precious resource,” said Stephen Hardy, a city planner with the architectural firm BNIM, which is helping with the effort.
And the town has resolved to build public buildings that meet the most stringent standards for efficient design. Even the John Deere dealership is pursuing certification from the US Green Building Council and plans to sell wind turbines for homes and businesses.
“Any time you’re trying to rebuild a town, there are huge economic hurdles,” Hardy said. “The fundamental shift in their thinking is they don’t want to build a building they’ll be paying for for 20 years. They want a building that will be paying them back.”
The Building Museum exhibit breaks some traditional rules by using no precious artifacts and few physical objects to tell the story of green communities.
Instead, it uses satellite photos, community snapshots, short documentaries and interactive displays on the myriad ways people can make their towns greener.
The center of the space is like walking through a huge bar graph.
Giant, transparent columns are filled with shredded tires or plastic bottles — materials otherwise headed to the dump. Marked on the columns are raw statistics on recycling or mass-transit use among various cities.
The numbers show Houston has the lowest recycling rate, with just 2.6 percent of the city’s trash being salvaged, while San Francisco, which has an organic composting program for food scraps, topping the chart at 70 percent.
“None of these issues are brand new,” Piedmont-Palladino said. “Ever since the Roman senate passed a law requiring water to be stored for dry periods, it sort of reminds us that ... it’s been the key to successful living forever. We have just forgotten.”
More than a dozen communities are noted in the exhibit and they offer a mosaic of green initiatives worldwide, Piedmont-Palladino said.
Atlanta, for example, is featured for its redevelopment of an old steel mill site in the walkable Atlantic Station development.
This is the Building Museum’s third in a series of green-themed exhibits, which have drawn record numbers of visitors despite the museum’s not being on the usual Washington tourism route.
Having small towns and big cities embrace environmentally friendly architecture and technologies will help change people’s minds about how realistic environmental building can be, Piedmont-Palladino said.
In Greensburg, the vision to go green has helped maintain an optimism that the town can indeed rebound from all it has lost.
“Ninety percent of the town was just gone overnight and yet the social fabric was intact, even without the buildings,” Hardy said. “That has driven them in a way that’s unlike any community I’ve worked with.”
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS