CHUCK HARRIS: THE BIG GARDENER

Charles Harris, past Chairman and Professor Emeritus of Harvard's Department of Landscape Architecture, thinks broadly about the way we treat and mistreat land and natural resources of our land. He is very disappointed that those with power and funds have not made a new mode of automated personal transit (podcars) happen in the USA. He sees clear benefits and tries to visually introduce this new technology into today's and tomorrow's urban landscapes.

Light transit can help create and fit into walkable urban environments.

Known as Chuck to hundreds of students and colleagues, Harris points out that historically eighty percent of Southern New England's land was occupied by humans in some way in 1850 -- mostly agriculture, forestry and a growing number of villages, towns and cities with streets and industrial uses. Only 20 percent of the land was left as forest. By 1950 -- one hundred years later -- 80% of Southern New England land had returned to nature, because its rocky hills with short growing seasons simply could not compete with the broad fertile plains of the Heartland, drained swamplands in the heart of Florida or irrigation in California's Central Valley. The result today: only one New England acre in five is directly used by humans. Trees and other forms of natural areas have reclaimed the other four.

Historically human settlements have tended to cluster along coastlines, waterways, and major land-based travel ways. Today's settlements have continued this pattern of clustering and spreading, often in unplanned ways into surrounding agricultural and natural areas. This has resulted in vast suburban areas that have overpowered the surrounding natural resources. Recently there is a reverse trend away from low density, car-dependent suburban development to clusters of higher density with a mixture of uses. These new and old nodes need podcars to transform the unsustainable auto glut of contemporary life.

Rather than plot out maps, crunch numbers or argue the logic of pod-oriented develop, Chuck with pen in hand has sketched out it in creative proportion, as shown above. Such illustrations can be very powerful and be worth more than 10,000 words.