Those who are accustomed to our complaining about WaPo ads – and MainStream Media ads in general – may be surprised but today’s WaPo on page A-7 has an ad that is worth a careful look.
After you have looked at the “Do you see a Tree?, We also see a universal challenge.” ad, check out the Veolia web site to find out about this Enterprise that provides “water, waste, energy and transport services” for urban areas.
Here is the story:
The ad has for a background a high-oblique air photo of what appears to be a swatch of French Countryside. It may be Tuscany or Bavaria or ?. It may even be New Zealand or South Africa but it ‘looks like’ the countryside in Europa. In this swatch of Countryside the farmsteads are not centered on hamlets because the artist did not want to distract from the ‘Tree.’
The ‘Tree’ is an Alpha Village scale urban place with a divided parkway serving as the “trunk.” It could be a large Lewenz (‘Parallel’) Village but does not have the Autonomobile Free Core. In the graphic one can identify a number of land uses that ‘could’ represent a Balance of J / H / S / R / A.
What is very apparent is the Clear Edge and the relationship between Openspace inside the Clear Edge with Open Land outside the Clear Edge.
Could it just be that Veolia, an Enterprise that provides water, waste, energy and transport services, knows a thing or two about the settlement patterns the result from the fair allocation of location-variable cost?
OK, perhaps it is just a nice graphic that happens to be useful to illustrate those realities.
We will never know.
On a related topic, NPR did a two part series on 31 March and 1 April on the climate and lifestyle impact of dysfunctional and functional human settlement patterns. The Atlanta New Urban Region is the venue. The functional example – Atlantic Station – was designed based on the Richard Thornton graphic we included and described in our “All Aboard” column of 16 April 2007.
It is a small world and getting smaller with fewer places to hide for the 12 ½ Percenters.
EMR