All that Sustainability Jazz.

Those of us currently recovering from a Bachelors of Urban and Regional Planning degree program might be a bit cynical about implementing the principles of Sustainability in a real world practice. In fact, we might be very cynical, even hopeless about the very thought of it.

The Denver Post has an article that imagines a future where a neighborhood might survive through the coming increases in energy costs. And it's not as dramatic as some might think - no eco-village where we live amongst the animals. The critical aspect to changing energy consumption is that communities must work to more intellegently use scarce resources. The current pattern allows the individual to make decisions that result in redundancy and waste. Furthermore, the community can plan out methods of extracting energy from new sources (wind, solar, biomass, etc.) that are unfeasable to the individual.

Superbia! is mentioned at the end of the article. Sounds like a good read and something that forward-looking Planning departments should have on hand. Speaking of books on sustainability (in this case on a global scale) I'd like to leaf through Raising Less Corn, More Hell. Really fascinating idea.

Two Tiny Rocky Islands: Nauru and Hashima

Some people might call them ecological or economic disaster sites. I like to think of them as little tragedies stranded out at sea.

Nauru has strip mined phosphate for the past 100 years. The eight-square-mile island achieved independence in 1968 only to face complete economic dependence by 2003, when the mining operation had dried up entirely. There is not a single square mile of arable land left on this dot in the Pacific which is 400 miles from its nearest inhabited neighbor. The cost to restore Nauru to its once-tropical luster is $230 million over the next 20 years.

Hashima claims to have the title as the most densely populated area on earth. Now the rocky outcropping near Nagasaki is uninhabited. Mitsubishi operated the tiny island like the "company towns" of mining operations in West Virgina or the U.P. - all the residents worked for the mine in some fashion. Unlike Nauru, Hashima's population and economy vanished with changing energy demands: coal was out, gas was in and the company closed the mine. (Found on Things)

The Spire

Chicago is beyond any question North America's Super-Tall Building capital. Even though the visually unsettling Freedom Tower (if built) would take away Sears' Tallness Title, Chicago persists in its collection of super-tall structures. And, if Fordham Company and Santiago Calatrava get their way another landmark will soar over Lake Michigan.

Proposing to build the tallest building in any city is bound to generate some interest. Bigger cities lead to more intense interest. And the inevitable outcome of proposing a 2,000 ft. condominium/hotel is a plethora of opinion.

The Slatin Report has two op-eds on The Spire: The first sees it as a development that uses architecture (or the brand-name of an architect) as a financial attractor, the second takes the view that Fordham is simply trying to distract people from other financial problems the company is having.

However, trying to be optimistic about things that are as nascent as this, I enjoyed USA Today's 'Rising Above Fear'. The Freedom Tower demonstrates how a skyscraper can be (potentially) big in spite of 9/11 fears - but also a brutish and a terrible presence. The Spire is practically the polar opposite of that in terms of its appearance.

Finally, there is a piece in the Tribune which asks some pertinent questions about the proposal. The second-to-last paragraph is worth consideration:

"One more thing: How skyscrapers meet the ground is as important as how they
scrape the sky. It is not encouraging that Calatrava's tower will emerge from a
tiered, four-story podium like a stripper popping out of cake. That is a crude
way to bring a skyscraper to the street. It makes this tower resemble a piece of
sculpture on a pedestal, fit for an on-the-make, look-at-me Persian Gulf
boomtown like Dubai."

*Watch out for a big-ol' post on Dubai in the near future

Pruned

Pruned is easily the best landscape architecture weblog I've ever seen - and probably one of the coolest websites I've found this summer. This guy finds some amazing stuff: like this post about the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River Valley. Keep an eye on this one (it has been added to the list of links on the left in case you don't feel like bookmarking this just yet).

Wind on the Water

NIMBYism has held off many wind turbine projects around the world - and it's understandable: people want to see the beautiful waterfront views they paid so much for regardless of the environmental costs of continued resource consumption.

But there might be a solution. The Vertical Axis Aerogenerator is in the prototype stage and could be ready for production in 3 to 5 years. (Note: this might work great on Lake Michigan because of the high sustained wind speeds.) It's difficult to tell from the picture on this page, but the designers believe this could even be a visual focal point for a community's water resources instead of an eyesore.

I love reading good news before I drink my coffee

Checking over some otherwise bland news this morning I found this piece on Michigan's new 'Food Policy Council.' This rocks my world - and maybe they'll actually accomplish something worthwhile. Two areas they're investigating seriously interest me: getting local and fresh food into public school cafeterias and selling more Michigan grown crops to Michiganders. After all, as the article mentions - we're second only to California in terms of crop diversity.

Granted, any improvement to the current situation is a long ways off (ironically I read this while eating an apple grown in New Zeeland). But this is the critical first step that might give enough people inspiration to continue working on this.

Open, resilient, adaptive cities.

Our sages give a fascinating answer. The spies saw the walls around the cities and concluded that if the cities are strong, the people are strong. It's a natural assumption but the truth is the opposite. If cities are surrounded by high walls against invaders, that's a sign that the people are weak and afraid. It's when you see a city without walls, that you know the people who live there are strong.

And so it's proved to be. Historically it's been the countries most open to refugees that were the strongest: the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, Britain and America in the 18th and 19th. Why? Because refugees almost always give back more than they received. Helping others, we are helped.

From Rodcorp.

Africa

I've been fascinated with UNESCO world heritage sites lately. There aren't many, and often times they are difficult preservation tasks for already burdened nations and lower units of government - but they are inheritely unique and irreplaceable.

Two new sites were added in Africa that really caught my attention. Here's a clip from the BBC article:

The world's largest and oldest meteorite crater, the Vredefort Dome, in South Africa was added for its scenic and scientific interest.
Egypt's Wadi al-Hitan, known as Whale Valley, was listed for its amazing fossil remains of now-extinct whales.

Illegal television Show Killed

"Welcome to the Neighborhood" was supposed to illustrate how three white-bread, Christian, Austin families can eventually settle for the stripe of diversity of their choice as a neighbor. In order to do that the show forced a rainbow coalition of minorities and marginalized groups to humiliate themselves.

Some commentators on this anomaly of reality television saw "Neighborhood" as a worthy social experiment where people were forced to handle their stereotypes and preconceived prejudices. Granted, documenting any kind of community outreach of this kind would be interesting - if not very useful in real-world applications in community development.

However, the producers of "Neighborhood" forgot about the Fair Housing Act that in very plain language prohibits this kind of discrimination. And don't for a second think it's not discrimination just because a non-white or marginalized resident is going to occupy the house. The neighborhood is acting as the real estate agent in this reality show: through this process they are expressly choosing the least-offensive family for the home.

The question that bugs me still is this: if the show were to air (and by some chance be a smash hit) would hit have any capacity for changing the way people think about cultural and racial segregation in their neighborhoods? Or would it have further deepened these divisions? There's no way to know now. The corporate leadership at Disney/ABC apparently would rather burn heaps of money than face any kind of public humiliation about discrimination.

Read the National Fair Housing Alliance's Call to Action on this subject and a synopsis of the story from Newsday.

Divergent Transportation Trends

You though that episode of Seinfeld where Kramer and Newman get the homeless to pull rickshaws down the streets of New York was a joke? Nope. Well, not any more - and they're not called rickshaws - they're pedicabs.

An SUV horn blasted several feet from my left ear, and I nearly shot through the plastic shield. Visions of Singapore circa 1935 evaporated as I white-knuckled the sides of the carriage in sudden terror -- I was in a tin can on spoked wheels smack in the middle of Manhattan traffic beside drivers with the black hearts of those chaps in "Ben-Hur" who sported sharp, competitor-destroying blades on their chariot wheels. I was going to be crushed like an ant.

On the other side of transportation is an interesting article from Maine relating the build-up of the Cold War to that of our Interstate Highway System during the Eisenhower years. Sure, it's all theoretical and this doesn't propose any kind of solution to the sustainability issues presented by an auto-dominant system, but it's still fascinating.