The New York Times reports:
…Roughly 600 University of Oregon students in 25 classes will devote 80,000 hours to Salem during the coming year. The novel program, part of the university’s three-year-old Sustainable Cities Initiative, will focus on making Salem more economically, socially and environmentally sustainable.
Students in architecture, planning, law, journalism and business classes will explore how Salem could nurture green business clusters, reuse industrial byproducts, connect parks with bicycle paths, redevelop brownfields and design energy-efficient municipal buildings, among other things. Just as important, the students will consider market and regulatory barriers to implementing their ideas.
“If there isn’t a lot of economic activity and ability to make these kinds of substantive changes in the built environment today, then it’s the perfect time to be laying out the ideas and plans for the future,” contended Marc Schlossberg, a planning professor and co-director of the Sustainable Cities Initiative. “We like to call this tilling the soil.”
Read the full story at http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2010/08/23/23greenwire-in-oregon-students-seek-key-to-a-sustainable-c-87835.html
