Green ArchiTEXT

Infrastructure for All: Transforming transportation systems into multi-use infrastructure

Infrastructure for All from ASLA on Vimeo.

Mithun's Bert Gregory: A Sustainable Master Plan for State Center in Baltimore

Resilient Cities: Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change

Great presentation by architect/planner Peter Calthorpe on "Visualizing Our Ecological Footprint":

On Milan's Green Island Project

On the occasion of the Sustainable Mondays, evenings held once a month dedicated to green spaces and socialising, the cultural organization aMAZElab Art&Cultures will host a meeting dedicated to collective gardens and urban vegetable hortus. In particular, the debate will focus on how the GREEN ISLAND project has developed within the Isola neighbourhood, now at its ninth edition with a broad local and international network, and for over 10 years committed to the valorisation of public space, paying particular attention to key themes such as biodiversity, urban green areas, territory and sustainability.

The meeting will then examine a number of urban experiences such as the creation of a pomegranate orchard in a former factory yard of the Milanese Bovisa neighbourhood, and the analysis of the means to be adopted for landscape educational purposes. The evening will be brought to life with stories told through photos, music, tastings of tisanes and organic foods.

via www.abitare.it

City Center or Suburb? The Fight for the new New Urbanism

A little over two months ago, some two dozen influential architects, urban planners, and academics from around the country gathered at a New Orleans cottage to spend a long weekend discussing strategy. The house belonged to 61-year-old Andres Duany, a leader in the movement known as New Urbanism, which originated in the late 1970s and has enjoyed decades as the dominant force in American city planning, urging Americans to reject suburban subdivisions in favor of denser, more diverse neighborhoods.

The purpose of the summit was to talk about an enemy. A rival faction of urban theorists had begun to publicly challenge them, and declare their approach to city-making obsolete. Calling themselves landscape urbanists, these upstarts were promoting themselves as environmentally conscious, ecologically sophisticated, and uniquely suited to bring sustainability to America’s suburbs. Instead of talking about buildings, street grids, and parks, they spoke seductively about “living processes,” “flows,” and the importance of respecting “ecological infrastructure.” Their ideas were being embraced in the architecture world as radical and new. Most disconcertingly, they were rising to power at one of the most influential architecture academies in the country: the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. READ MORE >>

via www.boston.com

Sustainable places: where the healing can begin

PHOTO: The Challenge Series

By Kaid Benfield

Can an urban place be located and designed so that it nourishes and heals?  Mark Holland, one of the key principals involved in the planning and certification of the highest-rated development in the LEED-ND pilot program, thinks so. 

(The project, by the way, is Vancouver’s Southeast False Creek, which served as the athletes’ village for the most recent Winter Olympic Games, and now has become known as Millennium Water.  But that isn't today's subject.)

Holland is one of the founders of the Healing Cities Working Group, whose foundation statement explicitly connects human health and well-being with physical place:

“The healing process in the human body is the ability to rebuild, repair and regenerate cells, tissues and organs. Regeneration draws upon the body’s innate intelligence to heal itself.

“What would it then mean for a city to be ‘healed,’ and eventually to reciprocate and be healing and heal itself, its inhabitants and visitors?  Furthermore, what methods and processes would support cities to facilitate healing in the context of sustainability planning?  How might the built form and natural spaces of the city nurture and develop its residents' holistic health – to include addressing physical, emotional, mental, social and spiritual needs?”

READ MORE >>

via switchboard.nrdc.org

Ellen Dunham-Jones: Retrofitting suburbia

New TED video: Dying malls reborn, empty "big box" stores re-inhabited, parking lots turned into wetlands.

Changing the World One Block at a Time

By Jay Walljasper

The neighborhood is the basic building block of human society, and successful efforts to make the world a better place often start right there.

This might strike you as archaic, a throwback to the time when men wore fedoras and everyone walked to church on Sunday mornings. Yet the age of globalization actually makes neighborhoods more important than ever. After spending all day connecting with Facebook friends in Madrid, Manila and Maquoketa, even the most zealous virtual globetrotters are eager for face-to-face contact in a real place, like a local coffee shop, pub or park.

Neighborhoods - whether in cities, suburbs or small towns - are the level of social organization at which people interact most regularly and naturally, providing a ready-made forum for tackling serious issues. Even if the neighbors abhor our political views or artistic tastes, we nonetheless share a bond. When a crisis occurs (a rash of burglaries) or opportunities arise (plans to revitalize the park), these are the people who stand beside us to make improvements for the future. READ MORE >>

via www.planetizen.com

Problematic Surfaces and Collateral Urbanism: Reading Into the Owens Lake Parable

[Note: This post is part of the Infrastructural City blogiscussion - Chapter 1: Owens Lake: Reconstructing the Void]

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Should Owens Lake’s problematic surface be read as urban, or as rural urban effect? An urban byproduct? An off-site or collateral urbanism? What about similar byproducts – such as mines? The denatured soils and genetically modified mono-cultural expanses of industrial farming? How do we place these productive/consumptive effects that urban conditions generate? Expanding notions of urban could redefine what we mean by an urban census. Perhaps that’s the next step in the infrastructural study of L.A. – assembling an alternative urban census centered around production and consumption; formulating different questions about lifestyles and urban ‘occupation’.

Or, approached from a different angle, dispersed infrastructural connections such as Owens lake and Los Angeles beg for more refined criteria to define regions. As an area of inquiry and exploration, regionalism seems to have been largely forgotten in much of contemporary design (except by the new urbanists). Examining the city via its extended web of infrastructures could provide a new grounding for a more useful, operational regionalism. READ MORE >>

via freeassociationdesign.wordpress.com

Toward a 'Read/Write' Urbanism

In his blog, Speedbird, Adam Greenfield asks "what we might gain if we begin to conceive of cities, for some limited purposes anyway, as software under active development"?

What if we imagined that the citizen-responsiveness system we’ve designed lives in a dense mesh of active, communicating public objects? Then the framework we’ve already deployed becomes something very different. To use another metaphor from the world of information technology, it begins to look a whole lot like an operating system for cities.

Provided that, we can treat the things we encounter in urban environments as system resources, rather than a mute collection of disarticulated buildings, vehicles, sewers and sidewalks. One prospect that seems fairly straightforward is letting these resources report on their own status. Information about failures would propagate not merely to other objects on the network but reach you and me as well, in terms we can relate to, via the provisions we’ve made for issue-tracking.

And because our own human senses are still so much better at spotting emergent situations than their machinic counterparts, and will probably be for quite some time yet to come, there’s no reason to leave this all up to automation. The interface would have to be thoughtfully and carefully designed to account for the inevitable bored teenagers, drunks, and randomly questing fingers of four-year-olds, but what I have in mind is something like, “Tap here to report a problem with this bus shelter.” READ MORE >>

via speedbird.wordpress.com