Cul-de-sacs are apparently terrible:
http://theweek.com/...
But what if we could leverage the space for #climatechange victory gardens?
Wouldn't it be possible to re-zone (or whatever you'd have to do) to allow on-street parking at the entrance to each cul-de-sac, then dig up the central disc of concrete and plant a garden there? Or put in dovecote? Or a chicken house? Or an apiary?
David Suzuki has a nice resource page on how eating local foods can help fight climate change: http://www.davidsuzuki.org/...
Fewer transportation emissions are associated with locally grown foods - and even fewer with foods grown right outside the front door. So it stands to reason that if folks clubbed together in local communities to form cul-de-sac garden clubs, we could grow our own climate change "victory gardens" and eliminate a big chunk of the trucked in vegetables on which we currently rely!
We could also raise chickens, or have a single goat for a cul-de-sac, run an apiary or dovecote, or plant a stand of fruit trees or berry plants. Areas of a given neighborhood that are at the edge of formerly wild lands could be turned back into wetland areas, or allowed to grow up with whatever indigenous flora was previously there. Even with the "center and edge" problem this would still be a more environmentally sensitive, productive use of land than lawn.
Failing emptying the suburbs in favor of moving people to cities (which would create a transportation challenge of its own) I envision re-purposing suburban land that is now either wasted under concrete as parking, or used to grow water-sucking, value-free lawns of monoculture grass.
This is, of course, a half-formed (quarter-formed?) scrap of an idea at the moment. Has anyone else thought of this? Well of course you have!
What conclusions did you reach? What questions did you ask? What obstacles did you foresee? Did you do a back-of-the-napkin projection of how much produce Americans could grow locally this way? Or how much fossil fuel we could save?
Want to use the comments section to kick the concept around? Or tell me I'm insane? :-)