Green ArchiTEXT

The science of cities: Life in the concrete jungle (via Nature)

By Courtney Humphries

Nathan Phillips steps out onto the roof of Boston's Prudential Tower and looks down at the city 50 stories below. Up here, the rush of the wind has replaced the cacophony of car horns, screeching brakes and conversations filling the streets. And the rarefied air carries none of the odours that wrinkle an urban nose. The roof is “essentially a different atmospheric environment from the rest of the city”, says Phillips, an ecologist at Boston University in Massachusetts.

That rarefied air is what brings Phillips to the top of the tower. He has set up four book-sized collectors, one at each corner of the roof, to capture air blowing across the city. Black tubing carries the air samples to a tank inside the building, where a computer analyses their levels of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane and water vapour.

Like most cities, Boston brews up a blend of gases that covers the urban area like a dome. The top of the Prudential Tower is inside or outside this metropolitan atmosphere, depending on the weather. From his rooftop eyrie, Phillips looks towards three other sampling sites around the city and another some 70 miles west, in the green hills outside the pollution zone.

Phillips and his colleagues are using data from these sites to model how carbon dioxide and other gases move through the city, and how the mix differs from the air in rural areas. The work is part of an interdisciplinary project to study Boston's 'metabolism' — how elements are exchanged between natural and human systems. Phillips and his team are now focusing on atmospheric carbon — particularly carbon dioxide and methane. Next, they plan to look at carbon in the city's soils and water, and to track the flow of water, nitrogen and pollutants. “The goal is to understand the function of a major city,” Phillips says. READ MORE >>

via www.nature.com

Tools of Engagement: A/E/C Begins to Adopt the Cloud

Overlooked this excellent piece from Design Intelligence, April 20, 2012 - and worth re-posting here:

By Bradley Horst

Information technology strategy increasingly means enabling engagement. The cloud, mobile, and social platforms can take you there.

The A/E/C professional practice environment continues to change, challenge, and evolve our organizations dramatically. I often ask myself how this is changing us and where is it leading. Both are difficult questions to answer, although I think there are clues all around us, sometimes in adjacent industries. What was once considered impossible from a computational standpoint is now possible and affordable through modern technologies and innovations. Long-held assumptions about what a professional services practice could be or should be, how it should look, and how it should behave are changing, especially in light of solutions built around the cloud, mobile, and social computing platforms. If ever there was a time for your firm to have a clear and deliberate forward-thinking information strategy, this is it.

The connective tissue that ties together the cloud, mobile, and social platforms is information, or as some might call it, Big Data. I like to think of it as information rather than Big Data because information holds within it a degree of context that makes it more meaningful than mere data. To take this a step further, add expertise to information and you get business intelligence, which leads to even better customer experiences. The argument might look something like this:

• If, Big Data + Context = Information
• And, Information + Expertise = Business intelligence
• Then, (Big Data + Context) + Expertise = Better intel (i.e., a better customer experience)

Intuitively, I think we all know that the proactive management and strategic deployment of digital information (or intel) holds the potential to grow a firm’s knowledge and expertise exponentially throughout the practice over time. So what does it all mean and how do we use it to our business advantage? READ MORE >>

via www.di.net

RMI: Blueprint to the new energy era [Infographic]

Great infographic via Rocky Mountain Institute's Reinventing Fire campaign:

See the full Reinventing Fire infographic here.

"I'm a City Changer" Campaign Explores Inspirational Ideas to Improve Life in Cities

UN Habitat's worldwide I'm a City Changer campaign works to create awareness among citizens on urban issues to achieve better cities: 159 inspirational ideas and counting - from Nairobi to São Paulo, Geneva to Cincinnati.

Living Building Challenge: What if every single act of design made the world a better place? (VIDEO)

The Living Building Challenge | David Henderson-Hean & Todd Brooks from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

THE LIVING BUILDING CHALLENGE is a Semifinalist in the $200,000 FOCUS FORWARD Filmmaker Competition and is in the running to become the $100,000 Grand Prize Winner. It could also be named an Audience Favorite if it's among the ten that receives the most votes. If you love it, vote for it. Click on the VOTE button on the right side of the video player. Note that voting may not be available on all mobile platforms, and browser cookies must be enabled to vote.

THE LIVING BUILDING CHALLENGE
produced & directed by: David Henderson-Hean & Todd Brooks

#citychat No. 7: Post-Disaster Planning (via CoLab Radio)

Yesterday, @MITCoLab hosted #citychat 7 via Twitter: focused on urban design and international humanitarian response after a disaster.

See the full transcript and other details via Storify.

Tactical Urbanism: Radical Ideas to Improve Public Spaces

Tactical Urbanism in Lithuania and abroad from Mindaugas Danys

Place Capital: Re-connecting Economy With Community

...reform—of transportation, food systems, and so many aspects of the way we live—is no longer about adding bike lanes or buying veggies from a local farmer; the time has come to re-focus on large-scale culture change. Advocates from different movements are reaching across aisles to form broader coalitions. While we all fight for different causes that stir our individual passions, many change agents are recognizing that it is the common ground we share—both physically and philosophically—that brings us together, reinforces the basic truths of our human rights, and engenders the sense of belonging and community that leads to true solidarity.

Even when we disagree with our neighbors, we still share at least one thing with them: place.  Our public spaces—from our parks to our markets to our streets—are where we learn about each other, and take part in the interactions, exchanges, and rituals that together comprise local culture. Speaking at PWPB, Copenhagenize.com founder Mikael Colville-Andersen made this point more poetically when he said that “The Little Mermaid statue isn’t Copenhagen’s best monument. I think the greatest monument that we’ve ever erected is our bicycle infrastructure: a human-powered monument.”

Photo: Spacing Magazine via Flickr

Our public spaces reflect the community that we live in, and are thus the best places for us to begin modeling a new way of thinking and living. We can all play a more active role in the cultural change that is starting to occur by making sure that our actions match our values—specifically those actions that we take in public places. READ FULL ARTICLE >>

via www.pps.org

Biomimicry Receives Cooper-Hewitt's Design Mind Award

Janine Benyus and Biomimicry 3.8 was recently recognized with the Design Mind Award as part of the Smithsonian/Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards program. Congrats!


NDA 2012 - Design Mind - Images by Cooper Hewitt

Legible Cities: Tapping Big Data to Read the 'Big Picture' of a City

Thanks to Dawn Taylor of AIA KC for pointing me to this great concept on Legible Cities!

If information is the currency of the world, then many cities have under-leveraged assets buried deep in their data on urban conditions and city operations. The promise of releasing this big data to the people is a new approach to understanding cities by making them more legible. Now it is difficult, if not impossible, for someone trying to read the “big picture” of a city. Legible Cities ties together data, outdoor displays, sensors, wireless networks, data visualization and ways of accessing information to make cities more navigable, legible, and livable for its inhabitants. Legible Cities mediates physical and virtual space through installations, digital signage, mobile apps and online and off line programs.

In Legible Cities time is used to measure and report the “now”, for events, locations, communications and services that range from real-time bus schedules to virtual land use planning and more. Providing an historical lens into the city’s past will inform the present into the future. This is a revolution in measurement. “…There are now countless digital sensors worldwide in industrial equipment, automobiles, electrical meters and shipping crates. They can measure and communicate location, movement, vibration, temperature, humidity, even chemical changes in the air.” READ MORE >>

via unifiedfield.com