Green ArchiTEXT

EngagingCities Explores Innovative Outreach as Key to Urban Space Design

By Alexis Canter and Brie Hensold

Nearly every public project conducted in the United States incorporates some form of public outreach. Today, in an increasingly global and digital era, traditional public meetings often fall short of reaching the increasingly diverse and information-saturated citizens of today’s American cities. Or, the efforts fail to incite the interest required to achieve the long-term buy-in for planning and design strategies that’s needed to see a project through to successful implementation.

Successful projects, on the other hand, leverage the process of outreach into sustained interest in outcomes. Public process participants, in the most ideal scenario, become the champions of the project through the long road of implementation and the ever more daunting challenge of ongoing governance. In this way, engagement becomes a critical path toward both project realization and design excellence.

Defining Innovation

Inspired by an academic exploration at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in the spring of 2012 and launched this week by Sasaki’s Urban Studio, the Currents: Engaging volume illustrates five recent innovations in public outreach as it related to the design and construction of public spaces. These are defined as process-as-event, on-the-ground, real time, early wins, and accessible materials. Each concept posits an alternative to the traditional public meeting format and is reinforced by a series of notable case studies in which outreach was a critical component of the design. READ MORE >>

via engagingcities.com

The Cool City Challenge: Getting a Low-Carbon Lifestyle to Catch On

By Mark Fischetti

Most people are aware that reducing carbon emissions could help the planet. But convincing a particular individual to change his or her behavior in ways that emit less carbon—not to mention the behavior of an entire city—can be a monumental challenge.

David Gershon, founder of the Empowerment Institute in Woodstock, N.Y., is taking on that challenge, with help from three urban managers who hope their cities can become models for the future.

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Now Gershon has enlisted three municipalities in California, each with 50,000 to 75,000 residents, to try to scale up the cool communities approach citywide. He hopes that the cities will in turn inspire others to follow suit. Gershon is relying on one key manager in each California location to lead the charge: Mitch Sears, the sustainability programs manager for Davis; Debra van Duynhoven, the sustainability coordinator for Palo Alto; and Richard Dale, executive director at the Sonoma Ecology Center in Sonoma.

The plan is to get 25 to 75 percent of each city’s citizens to reduce their carbon footprint by 25 percent within three years. READ MORE >>

via blogs.scientificamerican.com

2012 TED Prize Goes to...The City 2.0 (VIDEO)

SymbioCity, A Holistic Approach to Environmental and Economic Sustainability

Tonight at the Tulane School of Archiecture: Phil Thompson on "SymbioCity, A Holistic Approach to Environmental and Economic Sustainability":

"The Swedish American Green Alliance has a strong emphasis on the challenge of creating sustainable cities. Sweden is at the forefront of this area and has produced a complete concept called SymbioCity. This concept builds upon the notion that shared urban systems create synergies; holistic approach to landscape planning, transportation and waste management, from which the gain is both environmental and economic."

For more on the SymbioCity concept, check out their website here.

 

Salon's Dream City: The bold urban future starts now

By Will Doig

CREDIT: Salon/VikaSuh via Shutterstock)

America doesn’t do big projects anymore — we’re too broke, no one can agree on our priorities, that era of bold thinking is over.

That canard has been repeated so many times that it’s now accepted as gospel. Except it’s not true. In cities in every region of the country, pie-in-the-sky ideas are moving from brainstorm to blueprint to groundbreaking — and 2012 will prove it. From a massive re-imagining of a postindustrial Chicago landscape to the rebirth of the Los Angeles River, these seven ventures point the way to a brave urban future. READ MORE >>

via www.salon.com

TED Prize Winner for 2012: The City 2.0

For the first time in the history of the prize, it is being awarded not to an individual, but to an idea. It is an idea upon which our planet’s future depends.

The 2012 TED Prize is awarded to….the City 2.0.

The City 2.0 is the city of the future… a future in which more than ten billion people on planet Earth must somehow live sustainably.

The City 2.0 is not a sterile utopian dream, but a real-world upgrade tapping into humanity’s collective wisdom.

The City 2.0 promotes innovation, education, culture, and economic opportunity.

The City 2.0 reduces the carbon footprint of its occupants, facilitates smaller families, and eases the environmental pressure on the world’s rural areas.

The City 2.0 is a place of beauty, wonder, excitement, inclusion, diversity, life.

The City 2.0 is the city that works.

The TED Prize grants its winner $100,000 and “one wish to change the world.”   How will this prize be accepted on behalf of the City 2.0? Through visionary individuals around the world who are advocating on its behalf. READ MORE >>

via www.tedprize.org

Amplifying Creative Communities 2011 Northwest Brooklyn: The Opposing Designs of Urban Activism

This is the first in a 3-part series from Cameron Tonkinwise, sharing learnings from a two-year project from the New School's Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (DESIS) Lab. Amplifying Creative Communities, works to research, promote and amplify community-based solutions for sustainability.

By Cameron Tonkinwise

Compared to the first year of the Amplifying Creative Communities project, which took place in the Lower East Side, this second year's exhibition pays more attention to the stories of individuals who are fighting to materialize their innovations in Northwest Brooklyn (neighborhoods that include Greenpoint, Williamsburg and Bushwick). As Lara Penin, Assistant Professor of Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons the New School for Design and Co-curator of the exhibition and its workshops this November, notes, the narratives of heroically creative people, if you can find and capture them, are inspirational, and more appropriate to the United States' approach to social innovation.

What emerges from these stories is a rich picture of what it means to attempt change in dense urban contexts. They provide lessons for what a networked approach to social change demands, as opposed to Gillette's total designs and the competitive market's nondesigns:

There's not much room /
There's always space somewhere

There are lots of different kinds of cities, with different horizontal and vertical scales and densities, and within each of those cities are lots of different kinds of conditions. But in cities like New York, the number of people keen to be there means that nearly every square foot is programmed, usually with something expensive enough to deliver a growing return on investment to the owner. Further, what is there is invariably set in concrete, either literally, or, in the case of property rights, metaphorically. This means that urban change is difficult. Since there is no room to add onto the existing systems or structures, the task is one of 'unbuilding cities' (to use the nice title of a book), which is very difficult.

On the other hand, in a big city, there are often spaces that are neglected, either because the material is crumbling, or because they are between legal systems. These are often where motivated individuals site their experiments to change the city. This is the whole tradition of urban community gardens in New York City—that is where the Amplify Project began its research in the Lower East Side in 2010. In northwest Brooklyn, the waterways afford these kind of transition spaces: one story told in the Amplify exhibition is of an innovative photovoltaic system installer which operates from a series of boats set up as a co-working space by the marina owner interested in fostering the creative class.

via www.core77.com

Green Intelligence Forum: Creating the Sustainable City of the Future

The Atlantic is currently hosting the fourth-annual Green Intelligence Forum: Creating the Sustainable City of the Future, once again bringing together the world's leading authorities on energy and the environment for two days of dynamic conversation on the issues at the forefront of sustainable thought. On the first day, the Forum will explore macro trends in energy and the environment, including discussions on both national and global policy and sustainable business.  The following day, the event will examine green intelligence through the framework of sustainable cities. Expert panels will engage in key dialogue on topics including energy infrastructure, green building, and clean transportation

Detroit: rejuvenation through urban farms, sustainable living and innovation | Guardian Sustainable Business

By Leon Kaye

After visiting Detroit for the first time in 17 years, my first jarring impression of the city was the silence. Wide boulevards approaching downtown Detroit were bereft of cars. Once stately neighbourhoods laden with enormous houses emitted no sounds except for my footsteps. What was once the roaring Motor City, it seemed to me, had been reduced to a mumble.

But that initial snapshot belies what is occurring at the grassroots as Detroit's people work hard not only to survive, but to revive their city and even thrive. The hurdles are enormous. Automakers will always be part Detroit's fabric, but not as the reliable economic and jobs engine that they had been for a century. And for a city that has lost more than one million residents since 1950, the leadership has decided that demolition and deconstruction are behind the city's survival. To that end, 10,000 homes are to be torn down in the coming years.

Nevertheless, there is more than just demolition in Detroit. Families who have lived there for generations, as well as recent transplants, are taking back their city with their own hands. Old Detroit still offers a stunning collection of art deco architecture, a museum with a billion-dollar art collection, and a solid manufacturing infrastructure.

Now, all of it will be embedded in an environment that offers both the urban and the rural. And it is the rural, built with those determined hands, that could change our conceptions of what a city is. Detroit will be model for ageing cities and towns looking for a redefinition. READ MORE >>

via www.guardian.co.uk

Designing Cities for a Sustainable Future | Harvard Business School

By Garry Emmons

On a June day in Manhattan with temperatures heading into the 90s, a straphanger named Mike is taking his customary subway ride to work. People are grumbling about the heat, but hey, it's summer, it's supposed to be hot, and besides, "Whaddya gonna do?" New Yorkers have their opinions: mention the heat index, or the greenhouse effect, or global warming, and you'll likely get an earful. But Mike is a little different. From his vantage point in what's been called the second-toughest job in America, he really knows about those issues, and he knows there are things that can be done about them.

For not only is he the mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg (HBS MBA '66) is also the chairman of the C40, a group of fellow mayors from the world's 40 largest cities who have banded together to fight climate change. Bloomberg has recently returned from a C40 meeting in São Paulo, Brazil, only to hear the International Energy Agency's chief economist announce that 2010 saw the largest annual rise in carbon emissions in history. So just how hot is it? Climate change, Bloomberg says, is "the greatest challenge that humanity has ever created for itself."

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One useful way to think about cities is to divide them into three fluid (and sometime overlapping) categories: global hubs of wealth and talent (e.g., New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong); megacities and population magnets (e.g., São Paulo, Lagos, Mumbai, Jakarta); and "up-and-comers," cities of 150,000 to 10 million people, aspiring to international stature (e.g., Cape Town, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur). Much of the world's population growth in the coming decades will be in this last group.

Amid the challenges of protecting the environment and halting its decline in urban areas and elsewhere, there is a consensus that sustainability will drive business during the coming years and that the transition to a low-carbon economy will bring significant investment opportunities. Cities, the C40 says, offer three principal areas for such investment activity: increasing infrastructure energy efficiency, namely in buildings, lighting, and transportation systems; using resources more effectively, for example, through advanced waste management; and producing clean energy at the district level as well as sourcing clean energy from large-scale suppliers. For cities and businesses, millions of dollars saved is equal to millions of dollars earned, and that can readily be achieved through greater efficiencies. While clean tech and green tech—glamorous alternative energy sources and state-of-the-art systems, machinery, and products—often come to mind, the most dramatic inroads may be made in much more prosaic ways, especially in the urban setting. READ MORE >>

via hbswk.hbs.edu