Greatest insurance against the apocalypse: Base isolation Almost 80 years after the 1906 earthquake, but only about 30 years after Wile E. Coyote first tried to catch Roadrunner with a pair of springs tied to his feet, the first earthquake-proof building was constructed in 1985. Taking a hint from Coyote, the entire basement of San Bernardino County’s Foothill Communities Law and Justice Center was filled with reinforced rubber bumpers to absorb shaking.

IMPACT: Main Street USA has been revived, only now it's called the New Urbanism, and it is shaping new neighborhoods around the world as a friendly, walkable alternative to suburban sprawl. Visionary California architect Peter Calthorpe and a core of Berkeley professors decided in 1988 to push urban planning forward by looking backward. Their deceptively simple concept: neighborhoods made of a dense mix of homes, stores, cafes, and offices clustered around a train or bus station. As average commutes slowed to 10 mph, mixed-use transit neighborhoods have popped up in Dallas and Denver and spread across the Pacific to Asia and Australia. They've reshaped Pasadena, Burbank, Oakland, Sacramento, and smaller cities in between. Next up is New Orleans, and eventually China. The insidious strip mall, in fact, may fade to a memory. Berkeley architecture professors David Solomon and Harrison Fraker (the latter now dean of the College of Environmental Design) helped Calthorpe give birth to the idea with a series of workshops and the 1989 booklet, The Pedestrian Pocket Book: A New Suburban Design Strategy. In 1993, Calthorpe joined a nationwide group of planners and architects to form the influential Congress for the New Urbanism.

Courtesy of Calthorpe Associates

EUREKA MOMENT: Calthorpe was working on Sacramento's light-rail system when he realized that to conserve energy you have to do more than fix buildings; you have to fix neighborhoods. "The railroad track was the logical place for new growth. The answer to sprawl was right in front of us," he says.

	|	25 brilliant ideas	|