Kenneth Pigg Ron Burnett Steve Cisler Jessica Brown Ryan Turner Public Transit for the Information Highway Walter Siembab and Siembab Associates are located in Los Angeles.
Most urban communities face at least two challenges to long term sustainability.
The first is the near total dependence on the fossil-fueled private automobile which creates unhealthy living conditions through pollution, saps the economy through congestion and makes all of society dependent upon a steady flow of imported oil. The underlying cause of this dependence is the way in which metropolitan areas have been built with housing widely separated from all other urban functions. The second challenge is the gap between rich and poor which has been widening throughout the post-war years, and the related phenomenon of the spatial concentration of wealth and poverty. One cause has been disparities in educational achievement which tend to follow the structure of household income. Another is the need for access to the digital broadband network infrastructure which forms the means of production in the information economy.