Branding Sustainability

These days it seems like a hack meme in writing about Las Vegas to invoke the title of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown’s (still great) book Learning from Las Vegas and then say “we’re still learning.” But the fastest growing city in America keeps changing in the strangest ways, and every new move gives us so much more to learn from, or at least to think with.

I just finished up a short article on Sin City for the upcoming issue of the magazine. It’s about their new Union Park development project that’s been seeing so much press lately. The project is billed as a coup for city “greening” and Smart Growth and downtown revitalization and everything NAC stands for. The story is that an unused brownfield and former Union Pacific Railroad chemical waste dump located between downtown Las Vegas and the Vegas strip, the 61 acre patch of land known as Union Park is currently being converted into a master-planned, LEED certified, sustainability-centered “urban village.” High-density, mixed-income, mixed-use residence buildings are being combined with shops and offices, a casino, a celebrity-chef-helmed boutique hotel, a performing arts center and a Frank Gehry designed “brain research institute,” all in some kind of magnificent New Urbanist dreamland.

Nick Lalla

Full Story: http://americancity.org/daily/entry/1064/