Group items tagged

The new up-and-coming trend in landscape architecture? Redesigning streets and sidewalks to be more "people-friendly" by creating public spaces. This article focuses on Viva Vancouver, an organization advocating for the creation of mini-parks in urban areas and whose most recent accomplishment is transforming two parking spots into a shiny new deck with seating for 4-8 people. Portland organizations like City Repair have been into this idea of placemaking for a long time, touting the benefits of creating public spaces to facilitate gathering between strangers and to make the rough urban landscape a bit more homey. Good idea? Or is spending $18,000 to make a wood structure in a parking lot absurd?  

A challenge to the idea that vertical farming may be more energy efficient than traditional approaches. Like the debate around local food though, it bothers me that we focus on energy and/or CO2 emissions when we measure environmental impact. In a much bigger picture, I'm not even so sure that another agricultural revolution, like this, is really what's best for the planet in the long run.

Good points all. While the excitement about vertical farms is good for attracting investors, the economic realities of all the systems involved are definitely questionable. That said, the Economist left out some things that are worth mentioning, both for and against the idea. First of all, the use of hydroponics is thrown out pretty willingly and easily, but its hardly simple. For one, you're moving away from the use of soil (and fertilizer, manure, other related mediums) as the primary medium for agricultural production. We are simulatenously just realizing that we don't really know much about soil as a medium. And even with water we have the same problems. The "known unknowns" are pretty great either way, and scale plays in. Most hydroponics (though there are major exceptions) are run by research organizations or universities, which means there is a lot more free and regular support, particularly from the sciences, than most commercial operations will be able to afford. Its much easier, when things go wrong, to have a cadre of free sciences hovering around. As for "you can grow anything in hydroponics", speaking from work I've done with those systems, you can - but good luck with a lot of it. Plus water filtration becomes an issue, though there are biological ways of handling that (even then you're creating a very limited ecosystem - they can get thrown off ridiculously easily). On the other hand, while light inputs are definitely a notable consideration, light science and "light engineering" is making leaps and bounds. So while I'd say issues with light are writing it off just yet, I wouldn't count on that as the everlasting limiting factor. Along with the various spinning, rotating, window side containers there are also various types of windows, "light tunnels", and even the good ol' basic efficient lighting systems and such to consider. And design, rather than technology, can also contribute - several vertical farm designs "stagger" floors to reduce

shading from the building itself. Also, for anyone following alternative agriculture from the technology/commerce/urban ag side, there are two details the Economist got wrong. Sweetwater Organics, featured on NBC a few weeks ago, is already running a commerical hydroponics farm out of an old railroad warehouse. The nutrients for their water chemistry come from fish (poop), who are also raised in tandem with the plants, also for food. Also, at least one vertical farm plan has moved off the drawing board (sort of) into fundraising stages, and the land for it is cleared (both physically and legally) for building. This is at Will Allen's Growing Power, in Milwaukee, WI. Will, the "father of modern urban agriculture" and a frequent visitor to the White House with Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" program, is hoping to build the five story building within a few years. It will be located (and provide food to) in a food desert, in one of Milwaukee's largest low-income housing projects. So the world will soon have a test case for this idea. Other cities may follow, but as far as I know the closest one (in terms of multiple floors of greenhouses) is planned for Toronto, and is at least two decades out - which probably means its anyone's guess whether it'll happen.

For the cities symposium, some interesting ways to make urban design a bottom up, but intentional process (distinct from top down intentional or bottom up unintentional - 10 points to whoever comes up with a link showing some top down unintentional, though perhaps we could count side effects of a policy that creates forced moves in design somewhere else in a city). Fun to look at, though I wonder what sort of people find this appealing, and what sort of folks might find this threatining, obtrusive, or messy - our own Portland is one of the examples.

Looks a lot like GIS to me. But what's this? Not using a broad tract system to generate region averages, but instead more detailed and neighborhood specific system? These maps only show racial segregation, but its a promising basis for the improvements for which Davidson advocates in EJ analysis.

Here's Portland's map: http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4982015862/in/set-72157624812674967/ This is an important and significant perspective. Compared to other cities, we're not working with a lot when we talk about diversity and segregation in regards to environmental justice. Comparing our EJ mapping to EJ mapping in cities with much more significant segregation would be interesting! (Who wants to do some more GIS mapping for fun over fall break??)

This (http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?chicagodots) is Bill Rankin's website, the cartographer who first produced one of these detailed maps in 2009 and inspired Eric Fischer to produce all the others (found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/72157624812674967/with/4981417821/). Check out the downloadable files on Rankin's website (there's one for race and one for income); he includes includes a traditional GIS map of the same data for comparison. (I recommend saving them to your computer and viewing them at a smaller scale to see the patterns more easily.) This is from his website: "There are indeed areas where changes take place at very precise boundaries... But transitions also take place through gradients and gaps as well, especially in the northwest and southeast. Using graphic conventions which allow these other possibilities to appear takes much more data, and requires more nuance in the way we talk about urban geography, but a cartography without boundaries can also make simplistic policy or urban design more difficult - in a good way."

This is a post from a really great blog called Secret Republic about urban design and green building. The blogger is currently in Sweden and visited a school with some really innovative ideas about environmental education, and they're employing some cool eco-design strategies too!

A fascinating review, certainly to understand the technological advances of this "sustainable city" but also to understand its shadows: "[the designer's] fantasy world is only possible as a meticulously planned community, built from the ground up and of modest size. What Masdar really represents, in fact, is the crystallization of another global phenomenon: the growing division of the world into refined, high-end enclaves and vast formless ghettos where issues like sustainability have little immediate relevance."  Is this what we are after?