The Congress for the New Urbanism took place on Rhode Island 1-4 June 2006.
From wikipedia: 
New urbanism is an urban design movement whose popularity increased beginning in the 1980s and early 1990s.
There are some common elements of new urbanist design. New urbanist neighborhoods are walkable, and are designed to contain a diverse range of housing […]

Jago Dodson informs us via Energy Bulletin of his new report, written with colleague Neil Sipe,  examining the spatial vulnerability of Australian urban areas to fuel price and mortgage interest rate rises.
An earlier paper "established a basic method for assessing oil vulnerability via a spatial index that measured a combination of car dependence and socio-economic […]

I was quite blown away by these stats — based on US figures — but no doubt quite similar here in Australia.  About half the energy used in the US goes into constructing, heating, lighting and maintaining the nation's buildings.
 
That's taken from an article by the Rocky Mountain Institute's Greg Franta based on IEA […]

I'd like to draw your attention to two reviews of the book Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (Architectural Press, 2005) edited by British architect Andre Viljoen.  I met Andre a year ago in Dublin after he presentated at the FEASTA Food Security in an Energy Scarce World conference, so while I haven't read the book I […]