If you believe in dinosaurs and that the growing number of earthly catastrophes is caused by global climate change, consider the American Museum of Natural History’s new exhibit. Climate Change: The Threat to Life and a New Energy Future, explores a 400-year timeline of industrial milestones and how they contributed to our current inconvenient truth. More than just a bunch of gadgets demonstrating how to be greener, the exhibit demonstrates data on ocean acidification, urban flooding and more.
The exhibit runs through 16 August. Learn more at AMNH.org.
If you don’t believe in dinosaurs or that (naturally) there’s no need to recycle or get off of fossil fuels, then don’t bother.
23/01/2009 • 2:30 pm 0
If you believe in dinosaurs
22/01/2009 • 9:20 pm 0
Cow dung for electricity, green homes win $1.5 million
Grameen Shakti — the word comes from a Sanskrit root meaning energy, force or empowerment — has enabled as many as 2 million people in Bangladesh to light their homes using solar power. It has helped thousands more use chicken or cow dung either to make electricity or as a fuel in cook stoves that are efficient, safe and clean. The Bangladeshi non-profit’s managing director Dipal Barua just made his company a lot greener with a $1.5 million prize. Read more.
Filed under: development, energy, green, housing, sustainability
21/01/2009 • 2:30 pm 0
Predictions in Green Building
The International Builders Show will begin soon in Vegas, and therefore there is lots of news and PR floating throughout the Internet machine and air waves. One interesting tidbit comes from CustomHome online magazine. This week it reports some expert predictions on green building for this year and beyond.
Some of those predictions, foreseen by green building/sustainable planning consultant Jerry Yudelson, PE, LEED AP, include the following:
“The green building industry will grow by more than 60 percent this year.”
“The focus of green building will begin to shift from new buildings to greening existing buildings by retrofitting, upgrading, and renovating.” (This gets rave reviews from preservationist-oriented, super-green supportive SpaceDesignJournal.com.)
“Local governments will increasingly mandate green buildings for both themselves and the private sector.”
Read the full article.
Filed under: construction, green
21/01/2009 • 2:00 am 0
Some of it sounds right: Now let’s implement it
Embedded video from CNN Video
“We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.”
“We will harness the sun and winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.”
“All this we can do. All this we will do.
“There are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done, what free men and women can achieve when imagination has joined a common purpose.”
“The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.”
“…Know that your people will judge you based on what you can build; not on what you can destroy.”
Filed under: community, green, housing, Obama, sustainability, technology, transportation
18/01/2009 • 10:00 pm 0
Fabricating some prefab realities
“My theory: the rong people are behind the prefabricated housing movement in this country,” Karrie Jacobs starts in her Metropolis mag piece, “Industrialists without Factories.”
She should know, having written a plethora for Metropolis mag about what she calls the prefab mania.
And it is a mania. I’m a fan of modular housing (not necessarily the same as prefab) but can’t we go more toward the chick who designed the most popular of choices (which seemingly haven’t been used, BTW) for emergency housing back in 2005? (Sorry I can’t recall her name but she’s in NY somewhere.) Let’s make it available like the old Sears homes.
Jacobs discusses prefab products made of innovative materials, and discusses also that architects claim it’s difficult (if not impossible) to find capital to find such ventures. That seems terrifically bogus to me. Drive to any major shipping area of the US and see the miles of graveyards of shipping containers. How many architecture contests are being won by using these? How many other materials that are exceedingly sustainable and don’t require high capital funding are already out there? C’mon, folks. Step up and smell the rotting shipping containers– or bamboo, or hemp, or rice, or mud.
Jacobs suggests industrial designers, who are trained to formulate designs for mass consumption, perhaps rather than architects should be involved with prefab designs. To that point, Metrop Mag writes in an earlier issue that the AIA passed a resolution (several years ago, that is) stating it was “inherently opposed to any peas-in-a-pod-like reproducible designs.”
That article also states one of Buckminster Fuller’s maxims: “Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting.”
Filed under: architecture, construction, design, green
10/01/2009 • 11:32 pm 0
Coletta Interview Part 2: Smart cities and where we’re going
Richard Florida and Carol Coletta. Photo credit
I’ve been listening to Carol Coletta’s Smart City, a weekly public radio program, for more than a year. So full of information it is, that I archive each episode. Among other things we discussed during Friday’s interview was Obama’s infrastructure plans and the likelihood they’ll be akin to a WPA program. Her show the week of our interview just happened to be on that same subject.
But first, let’s start with what makes Carol Coletta an international name in urban planning. Coletta served as president of Coletta & Company, a Memphis-based consultancy that creates strategic community investment plans for major corporations. She’s served as executive director of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, a partnership of the National Endowment for the Arts, U.S. Conference of Mayors and American Architectural Foundation. Carol was a Knight Fellow in Community Building for 2003 at the University of Miami School of Architecture and is currently a candidate for a Master of Design Methods at the Institute of Design at IIT. She is frequently interviewed as an expert on urban issues by national media and is an active speaker on the success formula for cities and creative communities.
What are three characteristics smart cities share?
“They have a lot of talent. That is, human capital. They know how to attract it, keep it, and develop it. They have dense connections between people and resources and money. They also understand and act on their distinctiveness. They have strong vital cores.”
And what are some examples?
“Chicago; Portland, Oregon; Austin, Texas; San Francisco; Seattle and Boston.”
Obama talks a lot about a major infrastructure initiative, which might employ some 3 million people. What will that entail? Will it proliferate car-centered development or encourage public transportation or perambulation? Will it lead to some sort of WPA programming?
“If the states drive the list of projects– the shovel-ready projects– it will be business as usual. These are new roads, new bridges. We don’t need new capacity; we need to think beyond the system we’ve built for the last 50 years and say, ‘Is that really 21st-century infrastructure?’ (For Obama) the idea is to put people back to work. If the governors drive this, it’s not going to be pretty. Read Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl’s Transport Revolutions. They pointed out that electricity is a carrier, it’s not an output. You can create it with water, coal, nuclear, bio fuels… in many ways. We could retrofit autos and buses, etc. to use those alternative electricity sources. I think a WPA program would be terrific, but even that takes time to gear up, like the sustainable infrastructure plans.
“Smart Growth America (A nationwide coalition promoting a better way to grow; one that protects farmland and open space, revitalizes neighborhoods, keeps housing affordable, and more) has provided good ideas for how to find the right workers and projects…. What you could do to put people to work really fast is to retrofit schools and government buildings. We could also retrofit residential buildings with funding from projected utility/energy savings. The Clinton Initiative (for example) worked to retrofit office buildings.”
How will the recent real estate boom and its resulting economic woes help shape land planning and urban design?
“The notion that you can take any piece of land in America and build whatever the heck you want to on it is over. You can see it in increased transit use. People have more incentive to live closer in. Other means of transport won’t be seen as a sacrifice but as a preference. People will rediscover the joys of real community and look for public transportation options, living more conveniently. The age of megamansions is dead. People will stop wanting to have so much space and so much storage and so much materialism. They say, ‘Do I want a backyard or Millennium Park two blocks from my house? Millennium Park, thank you!’”
The following books and URLS served as props for the interview and/or were recommended by Coletta.
Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl’s Transport Revolutions
SmartGrowthAmerica
Richard Florida’s Who’s Your City?
Duany, Plater-Zyberk, Speck’s Suburban Nation: the Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
See part one.
Filed under: books, community, green, housing, real estate, urbanization
09/01/2009 • 5:41 pm 0
Doyenne of Smart Cities: An Interview with Carol Coletta
Carol Coletta is president/CEO of CEOs for Cities and host/producer of the nationally syndicated public radio show Smart City.
Radiohead’s early music plays a little too loudly at the Intelligentsia on Randolph, within walking distance of Millennium Park and the Chicago Cultural Center, so I edge my pseudo-aluminum chair to hear what Carol Coletta’s saying. With her blonde, stylishly disheveled coif and subtle makeup seemingly perfect, you’d never guess she’d awoken at 430 a.m. in Memphis to catch her plane to Chicago. Having homes in both places, she’s a frequent traveler, and in her gently Memphis dialect she also discusses her trips to Australia, South Africa, and China.
The conversation was extensive, though certainly I would have loved to talk to her all day. I didn’t get to ask her about the likelihood of cohousing and cooperative communities making it into the mainstream as an indirect result of this tired economy. I didn’t get to Rorschach quiz her on homeowners associations. Nor was I able to ask about her initial thoughts on NIMBYism. And while I didn’t get to ask her about what books or resources she’d recommend for space design aficionados or experts– she did slip some into our easily flowing and jam-packed conversation; you can find them in part two of the interview, coming tomorrow.
Do you lean toward Thomas Friedman’s theory that information technology erases distance and therefore enhances anyone’s creativity and productivity tools anywhere, or toward Richard Florida, who says there’s something uniquely, intellectually, creatively inspiring about metropolitan areas?
“Tom Friedman is correct in that tech makes us more productive and lets us work from anywhere. Richard Florida is right because the chance meetings that cities enable makes us more productive. Bill Bishop has done wonderful work in that same area, making the same point of (Florida): the more educated you are, the more mobile you are. People from 25 to 34 years old are more mobile.”
–From 1990 to 2000 these people went to 16 of the top 50 metropolitan areas of the U.S. That means the other 34 major cities lost those people.
How do we know New Urbanism isn’t just another Radiant City or City Beautiful?
“New Urbanism has been phenomenal in terms of its packaging and marketing. They have succeeded in building much better suburbs and have been good advocates for better roadways, smaller roadways. Doug Farr wrote a book called Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature, which is a brilliant piece of work. He’s on the board of the Congress for New Urbanism. LEED ND is trying to promote a different sort of planning. The two are very compatible in a lot of ways, certainly not incompatible. New Urbanism is better than traditional suburbs, what without their sense of place and location away from core area of cities.”
When asked how New Urbanism has helped or hindered the redevelopment of New orleans, Coletta pointed out Brad Pitt’s underwriting a design competition.
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“New Orleans is just as vulnerable to flooding again and the development hasn’t taken that into consideration. The great miscalculation is that everyone would come back, but they haven’t. It’s become a shrinking city like Cleveland, Detroit, Youngstown and Buffalo.”
In tomorrow’s post I’ll discuss shrinking cities, Obama’s infrastructural plans, the economy’s long-term effects on land planning, and more.
Filed under: architecture, community, construction, green, housing, Jane Jacobs, real estate, urbanization
06/01/2009 • 2:30 pm 0
A 12-year-old did it
Colin Carlson took a walk in the woods and came out a little green giant. The 12-year-old resident of Coventry, CT, started a county-wide eco-campaign after witnessing first-hand the effects of global warming on Darwin’s famed Galapagos Islands. If people disbelieved global warming, at least they might buy into the monetary savings of energy efficiency, he realized. How did he turn his hometown a different shade of green?
See Sunday’s NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams segment on Carlson, who just might be part John Muir, part whiz kid.
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Filed under: green
11/12/2008 • 2:30 pm 0
Obama’s plans may mainstream today’s development alternatives
SpaceDesignJournal believes cooperative communities, cohousing developments, smart growth, and New Urban communities will join mainstream residential development when the economy improves. Undergirding this thesis is New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks. Read his column from today.
People moving the ‘burbs in the 80s and 90s wanted a golf course and space, space, space, he writes. They wanted to distance themselves from their neighbors and anything outside the house. Today people want amenities such as coffee shops and closer-knit communities. Essentially we’ve seen homeowners start to revert to more traditional residential lifestyles, desires. They’re eschewing the social isolation for social and eco-sustainability offered by cohousing and the above-named residential development types.
Brooks discusses Obama’s infrastructure plans, which the columnist refers to as “once-in-a-half-century” because of Eisenhower’s highway system, and for good reason. Reports that came out two years ago about the state of the nation’s infrastructure system were appalling. We don’t live and travel as we did in the 1940s and 50s.
Here’s to hoping Obama’s economic plans umbrella a WPA-scale green-infrastructure and development plans in addition to alternative energy systems. SpaceDesignJournal.com believes these plans are not mutually exclusive but rather integral components of each other.
Filed under: community, green, urbanization
26/11/2008 • 2:30 pm 0
Interiors: Green heating your home
10 percent: Percentage of your heating bill you can save in the winter by using a ceiling fan which circulates warm air from the ceiling to the floor, according to a PlanetGreen article on eco-kind home heating.
Did you know too that fireplaces are not efficient heat generators? In fact, about 90% of their energy is lost through the chimney, along with loads of your home’s warm air and energy dollars, the article states.
Filed under: green
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