February 2011
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Watchplantedcity:
Slideshow | Patrick Condon’s ‘Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities: Design Strategies for the Post-Carbon World’
From Island Press:
How can the design of cities address the challenge of climate change? Patrick Condon, author of Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities, presents simple guidelines for community design that can help cities flourish in the post-carbon world.
For...
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Watchplantedcity:
Talk: Joyride: Walking and Pedaling Toward a Healthier Planet
Mia Birk was in Vancouver last week to talk about making our lifestyles, cities and planet healthier by getting around more by foot and pedal. Birk, CEO of Alta Planning + Design, an advisor to the Post Carbon Institute, and former manager of Portland’s Bicycle Program (1993-1999) recently wrote the book Joyride:...
January 2011
4 posts
climateadaptation asked: Hi there, sweet tumblr! m
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December 2010
5 posts
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Watchplantedcity:
Video: Streetcars, light rail around the world
This video is from the CNN article Can streetcars save America’s cities? which profiles efforts to improve transportation choices and arguments against and in favour of streetcars.
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November 2010
5 posts
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WatchDocumentary: Fixing the Future
I watched Fixing the Future last week and it was a breath of fresh air given all the uncertainty in the world right now. The doc follows host David Brancaccio as he travels the US profiling communities building vibrant, locally focused economies that also work to improve the health of our planet’s natural systems. A blurb on the website explains that...
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WatchVideo: Prince Charles Calls for a Sustainability Revolution in New Documentary ‘Harmony’
Prince Charles has a long and well-documented interest in a number of topics (e.g. urban planning, organic farming, microcredit, heritage) that are associated with sustainability these days. In recent years, he has emerged as a sustainability advocate while backing up his rhetoric with a number of...
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October 2010
10 posts
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Planetizen's 'Halloween Costumes for Urban... →
Planetizen, a “one-stop source for urban planning news, commentary, interviews, event coverage, book reviews, announcements, jobs, consultant listings, training, and more,” has released its third annual list of Hallowe’en costumes for urban planning enthusiasts! Here are the creative ideas that made the cut:
Pocket Park Show your friends how to take advantage of underused...
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WatchVideo: The LightLine of Gotham
One of the things that I love about cities is how they are constantly serving up new and different forms of expression and stimuli. These can be simple, such as the daily sights and sounds of people passing each other on the sidewalk, or more formal events that draw attention to a particular time or place.
The above video is a case of the latter and documents a...
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'Study: Rethinking Energy in Canadian Communities... →
A new study, The Capacity for Integrated Urban Energy Solutions (ICES) Policies to Reduce Urban Greenhouse Gas Emissions, from the Canadian organization Quality Urban Energy Systems of Tomorrow (QUEST) looks at making energy a foundational building block for future urban and regional planning. The study estimates that if integrated community energy solutions were applied in Canadian towns and...
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WatchDocumentary: Riding Bikes with the Dutch
A young American family travels halfway around the world looking for bicycle bliss and ends up rediscovering their own home. After a home exchange in Amsterdam with my wife and young son, our whole outlook on cycling changed. Instead of being satisfied with being stuck in grid lock in Southern California, we began to see how the simple act of riding a...
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Book: 'Pathways to Urban Sustainability: Research... →
Pathways to Urban Sustainability: Research and Development on Urban Systems is a new book from Daniel Schaffer and Derek Vollmer. The book’s publisher, the National Research Council, has made it available as a free download for those happy reading a PDF version.
The book is described as follows:
More than half of the world’s people now live in cities. In the United States, the...
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The False Safety of Bike Lanes →
(via Planetizen)
Cyclist Rachel Brown put out a video recently to prove that bike lanes make her commute more dangerous, not less, because they create a false sense of security. Streetsblog reacts.
Here’s Rachel’s video:
Ben Fried at Streetsblog calls this the “vehicular cyclist” point of view. Ben believes this belief fails to account for slower, newer riders:
...
September 2010
12 posts
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WatchVideo: Net Zero Homes
from CNN:
What if the power company sent you a check every month instead of a bill? Sounds pretty good, but is it possible? For about 100 households in America, the answer is yes. They call them “net-zero houses,” and they produce more energy than they use and they could be the way we all live in the future.
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“Perhaps what most dates Suburban Nation regards the problem we marginally...”
– ~ Andres Duany, architect and co-founder of the Congress of New Urbanism, writing in the preface of the 10th anniversary edition of Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream.
Click here for a previous post on Duany’s thoughts about Agricultural Urbanism.
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WatchAs an addendum to the previous post here’s the NYT video on passive house design.
SG
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WatchJan Gehl on ‘Cycling and Global Responsibility’
Cycling and Global Responsibility was the final presentation at Velo-city 2010, Copenhagen. The conference was about Bicycle Transportation. Speaker: Jan Gehl, founder of Gehl Architects, Copenhagen Jan Gehl: “You must show the cyclists that you REALLY want them to bike here”.
Gehl can be found discussing walkable and...
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Study: Bus Commuting 33% Less Stressful Than... →
A new study out of the UK finds that:
“Commuters who travel by bus suffer a third less stress than those making the same trip driving”
The extra car based stress is attributed to three main factors:
Driving in heavy traffic – especially against a deadline – requires a high level of vigilance, even for experienced motorists. This requires the brain to work especially hard...
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Watchplantedcity:
Finnish Architect Antti Seppanen’s ’U = Utopia’ video rap.
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WatchRichard Gilbert and David Bragdon on the Future of Transportation Systems | Post Carbon Institute
RICHARD GILBERT and DAVID BRAGDON discuss the future of transportation systems as we near the end of cheap oil. What are the solutions? How will we get there? Are we facing the end of the internal combustion engine? Richard Gilbert is a Toronto-based consultant who focuses on transport and energy...
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Watchplantedcity:
Nic Marks: The Happy Planet Index
From TED.com:
Statistician Nic Marks asks why we measure a nation’s success by its productivity — instead of by the happiness and well-being of its people. He introduces the Happy Planet Index, which tracks national well-being against resource use (because a happy life doesn’t have to cost the earth). Which countries rank highest in the HPI? You...
August 2010
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WatchRichard Cook on Sustainable Architecture in New Yorker Magazine:
For this month’s installment of New Yorker Currents, Paul Goldberger, The New Yorker’s architecture critic, spoke with Richard Cook, a partner in Cook+Fox Architects and the designer of the new Bank of America Tower, a Manhattan skyscraper, completed earlier this year, that is the largest building to receive a LEED (Leadership...
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Idea for Retrofitting Suburbia: 'The Suburban... →
In Metropolis Magazine Frank Ruchala Jr., Tom Alberty, Pippa Brashear and Michael Piper introduce a simple but interesting idea that could limit suburban exposure to high gas prices and reduce vehicle-based greenhouse gas emissions. Their idea:
What if every suburban subdivision had the equivalent of a local bodega? That’s the idea behind the Suburban General Store, which would provide a...
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WatchUrban Farms Sprouting on New York City Rooftop
Huffington Post describes the video above:
… Reuters takes a look at the initiatives of an ambitious organic farming business, Brooklyn Grange, looking to transform NYC’s vast expanse of empty rooftops into lush forests of food.
Brooklyn Grange’s first farm is a 40,000-square-foot warehouse rooftop that grows hundreds of...
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Frontiers: On the Edge in Merced and Malibu,... →
Design Observer has posted a series of photographs by Luther Thie and Kathrine Worel documenting two Californian communities made vulnerable by the economy and the environment:
Frontiers is a series of photographs that document homes/houses on the forefront of our interaction with the economy and the environment. Taken in 2009, these images depict Merced and Malibu, two distinct communities...
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The Global Cities Index 2010 | Foreign Policy →
Foreign Policy magazine has released their Global Cities Index 2010; packing it full of interesting facts, articles and images sure to please the urban enthusiast in all of us. The special release begins:
We are at a global inflection point. Half the world’s population is now urban — and half the world’s most global cities are Asian. The 2010 Global Cities Index, a...
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'New Evidence Links Sprawl to Parking Minimums' |... →
Angie Schmidt at Streetsblog reports on some of the impacts of minimum parking space standards:
New evidence connecting minimum parking requirements and sprawl is bolstering the argument for an overhaul of government policies related to much space we devote to the storage of cars.
A team of economists from the University of Munich recently released a study examining the effects of mandatory...
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Guerilla action aims to turn advertising space... →
Liem Vu | The Toronto Star
He removes a screw; inserts the doorknob and cranks open the frame as nearby sirens sound. Within minutes, he is gone, having replaced the ads with art.
One down, 41 to go.
His name is Jordan Seiler, the founder of the Public Ad Campaign, an initiative committed to reclaiming public space from what the campaign contends are illegal advertisers, and filling it...
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