Are we greening our cities, or just greenwashing them?

Architecture and urban design is chasing a green fever dream. Everywhere you look, there are plans for “sustainable” buildings, futuristic eco-cities and aquaponic farms on the roof, each promising to add a green touch to the modern city.

All of these are surely good ideas at some level. They are trying to repair some of the damage our lifestyle has done to the planet. But, despite the rhetoric of reuniting the city with nature, today’s green urban dream is too often about bringing a technologically controlled version of nature into the city and declaring the problem solved, rather than looking at the deeper causes of our environmental and urban problems.

One of the most striking examples is Apple’s “spaceship” campus now under construction in Silicon Valley. Though it seems to be sustainable and energy efficient—80 percent of its 175-acre site is preserved for landscaping, it is by any measure a huge, expensive and massively resource-intensive project. As a suburban white-collar workplace, it must include vast garages for 13,000 Apple employees. Thus, it will leave no smaller environmental footprint than a traditional office park.

Designing a perfect green building or eco-city isn’t enough to save the world. Although our buildings, like our cars, have been inefficient environmentally, architecture isn’t directly responsible for humanity’s disastrous environmental impacts. An economic system based on the destruction of nature is the real problem. No green building can help us repair the ecological damage we have caused, nor can any number of aquaponic farms bring us back to the real nature.

Instead of adding “nature” to the urban lifestyle, architects may work to design better relationships between our cities and nature, and to promote just relationships between the people in them.

Giving Money to Families with Kids Can Relieve Child Poverty

Nearly 1 in 5 American children is officially poor. That’s roughly 15 million kids. But the number living with a significant deprivation——insufficient food, seriously overcrowded housing or a lack of access to medical care due to cost-is actually much higher. According to the latest studies, it’s more like 1 in 3.

A mountain of evidence now shows that poverty can lead to cognitive (认知的) and emotional damage in children. Child poverty is too harmful and punishing to ignore. A growing number of academics believe there is a solution: the government should give monthly cash allowances, without conditions, to every family with kids.

When Michael Harrington’s classic book, The Other America, called attention to America’s general poverty rate of about 25% in 1962, Washington developed social programs that brought the rate down sharply. Valuable policies intended to relieve child poverty have been enacted since then, but they are not enough: 1 in 3 children does not receive the full benefits of these programs because their parents do not qualify for them.

A family with two children receiving $300 to $400 a month per child could improve their standard of living immediately. Money can buy food, heat, coats, eye-glasses and regular doctors’ visits, including transportation, and help pay for childcare. It can also help reduce family stress and help parents provide a psychologically nourishing environment for learning and social development. Studies demonstrate children’s improved educational performance when families are simply given more money.

For far less money-about $100 billion-the number of children living in official poverty could be cut in half. Such a policy would be a humane, practical, efficient victory for a nation too willing to neglect its poor.