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. We are listening to them and giving them the opportunity to collectively craft a wish. A wish capable of igniting a massive collaborative project among the members of the global TED community, and indeed all who care about our planet’s future.

Individuals or organizations who wish to contribute their ideas to a TED Prize wish on behalf of The City 2.0 should write to tedprize@ted.com

The wish will be unveiled on February 29, 2012 at the TED Conference in Long Beach, California. On a Leap Year date, we have a chance, collectively, to take a giant leap forward.

http://www.tedprize.org/announcing-the-2012-ted-prize-winner/

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The International Cities, Town Centres & Communities Society Inc (ICTC), is an independent, not for profit association based in Queensland whose main aim is to assist cities, towns and communities to be as environmentally, socially & economically sustainable as possible.  Since incorporating in 2002, the Society has conducted annual conferences attracting 300-450 delegates in cities and towns from as far north as Yeppoon in Queensland to Fremantle in Western Australia.

The 2011 conference, “Cities with People in Mind“, is hosted by Hobart City Council and is being held in Hobart from 25-28 October and includes dedicated sessions on the following:-

• “Sustainable Cities & Towns”
• “Carbon Neutral Cities”
• “Green Building & Healthy Cities”
• “Transport & Urban Communities”
• “Housing Affordability”
• “Infrastructure Planning & Development”
• “Community Building & Consultation”
• “Managing Growth”
• “Regional Strategic Planning”
• “Place Making & Place Management”
• “Business Improvement Districts” as well as others.

25-28 October 2011

Hotel Grand Chancellor
Constitution Dock
Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

For more information visit www.ictcsociety.org

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50 Ideas For The New City, from Urban Omnibus

With this poster campaign, we want to turn the language of ubiquitous marketing — in which every bus, taxi or construction barrier is a canvas for advertising anything and everything — on its head by using a similar language to share examples of creativity and innovation in the urban realm. We want to spread these ideas to the whole city. And we want to hear your new ideas too. So starting next week, (now live!) at UrbanOmnibus.net/Ideas you will find 50 ideas for New York already explored on Urban Omnibus and a space for you to share one of your own. We hope, in some small way, we can help re-enchant the urban environment as a landscape of possibility, a realm of action and intention, and a place that represents — and deserves — a long and evolving history of creative ideas.

Read more about the posters and click through each image or blurb to find the essay that led to the idea.

The poster campaign was part of New York’s Festival of Ideas for the New City.

On May 4-8th, the Festival of Ideas for the New City brought artists, designers, politicians and community organizers to downtown Manhattan, infusing the city with a commitment to creativity and dedication to place. Through a string of lectures, panels, workshops, a street fair and over a hundred art installations and openings of cultural projects, the Festival brought to mind a sensibility which first made the neighborhood a forefront for the avant-garde. For four days, a dizzying array of visionary thinkers, makers and practitioners shared ideas and projects that might help articulate what kind of city we want, as well as some concrete examples of how to get there.

Read more about the Festival in this recap by Caitlin Blanchfield.

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Photo: South Ozone Park community enjoys the new playground at P.S. 108Q, which opened Spring 2010.

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Schoolyards are large, flat, centrally located open spaces with a mandate to serve the recreational needs of schoolchildren. Great schoolyards–the rare ones that have healthy grass, big trees, a playground, and sports equipment–seem a lot like parks. But they aren’t. For one thing, most have fences and locks. For another, they are closed to the general public. Schoolyards are parks for only a limited constituency. But they have terrific potential to be more than that. Even less-than-great schoolyards (those that are merely expanses of asphalt with few amenities) represent sizable opportunities in key locations. To many observers, schoolyards seem the best, most obvious source of park-like land to supplement the park systems of overcrowded cities. And they are–even if upgrading them into schoolyard parks is more difficult than it might seem.

“Schoolyard park” in this context means a space reserved for schoolchildren during school hours and used by the whole community at other times. In a few cities–New York, Chicago, and Phoenix–schoolyard parks are run cooperatively by the board of education and the parks department. In others, the parks department has no formal role at all.

Most schoolyards originally had grass and trees. But without proper design, construction, and maintenance, grass can’t survive daily trampling by hundreds of little feet. And small trees can’t handle that much swinging and climbing without becoming spindly skeletons. After a few years of frustration with dust, mud, and dead trees, school principals begin to think that laying down asphalt might be a superior solution (and barely any worse ecologically). It’s also a lot easier to sweep up broken glass from asphalt than from dirt and weeds. Then, this being America, the expanse of asphalt starts to attract automobiles; in no time the former school park has a set of parallel white lines and a row of oil stains. Keeping a schoolyard green, clean, car-free, and environmentally productive can be more difficult than operating a regular neighborhood park.[...]

New York City has taken the concept the furthest. There, with the blessing of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, The Trust for Public Land (TPL) entered into a partnership with the Department of Education, the Department of Parks and Recreation and private funders (including MetLife, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation) to convert scores of decrepit and uninviting schoolyards into showcase parks.[...]

“This program is community-run,” says Mary Alice Lee, director of TPL’s New York City Playground Program. While all properties are fenced and have locks, in some places it’s the school custodial staff that has the only key, while in others it’s held by the neighborhood sponsoring organization or a block association. A few of the parks are left permanently unlocked. Also, each community sets its own hours. Most common is a schedule of 8 a.m. to dusk seven days a week except when school is in session. In some tougher neighborhoods the community wants the park closed earlier; the most restrictive schedule is 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays, and closed on Sundays.

Designing the space itself is a delicate balancing act that can take up to three months. The children themselves are the lead designers, responding to a set of questions and opportunities posed by TPL, but of course there are a bevy of realities that also affect decisions, including liability, equipment breakability, horticultural survivability, cost, and life lessons from previous play-parks. The children learn how to innovate, compromise, and reach a consensus when their initial ideas turn out to be too expensive or require too much space. “Because of the kids,” says Lee, “we’ve created murals and mosaics, a hair-braiding area, a jump-rope zone, planting gardens, performance stages, outdoor classrooms, rain gardens, and bowling lanes–as well as the usual soccer fields, running tracks, basketball and tennis courts, and play equipment.” [...]

Read the full article by Peter Harnik on City Parks Blog or on Sustainable Cities Collective.

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© Food From The Sky

From  “The supermarket growing food on its roof” by Laura Barnett:

Of all the things you might reasonably expect to be doing on a blustery March day, standing on the roof of a supermarket and dragging a rake through a bag of decaying vegetables is probably not one of them. I am on top of Thornton’s Budgens supermarket in Crouch End, north London, which volunteers have transformed from a flat expanse of concrete into a flourishing potted garden and vegetable patch.

The project, called Food from the Sky, is an unusual exercise in the principles of permaculture and sustainable gardening, and is the brainchild of former silversmith and art consultant Azul-Valerie Thome. It opened last May, when a crane lifted 10 tonnes of compost and 300 green recycling boxes donated by Haringey Council on to the roof. Now the garden is producing enough vegetables to sell in the aisles downstairs every Friday, and has just won a community prize at the Co-operative’s annual People and Environment Achievement Awards.

On a quick tour of the garden, Thome and several volunteers show me an impressive array of vegetables – from peas and potatoes to kale and purple sprouting broccoli – alongside flowers, tiny strawberry and raspberry plants, and a composting area. Here, fruit and vegetables left unsold each day in Budgens are mulched, along with woody branches and soil, by the 20 local people who volunteer in the garden.

Volunteer Peter Budge tells me the conditions are perfect for the plants: the warmth from the supermarket’s heating and lighting systems comes up through the roof, sparing the seeds the worst of the frosts – and there are no slugs or snails, while marauding pigeons are deterred by CDs hanging from the perimeter fence. “It might seem mad that we’re growing things up here,” Budge says, “and it is. But it really works.”

[...]

Read the full article by Laura Barnett on The Guardian.

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Image: Ian W Scott via flickr CC

From “Revisiting urban resilience: Echoes from ancient Constantinople can inspire visions for modern green urbanism:

You may love it or loath it, but the contrasts of Istanbul are impossible to ignore. It is a city where history meets modernity, where palaces, mosques and cathedrals lie next to chaotic bazaars, steaming hamam baths and small shops selling things you never need. It is a city that, despite plague, war and economic regression for more than 2000 years has always stood up against the test of time. Today, it is one of the 25 largest cities in the world and the bridge (literally) between Europe and Asia.

2000 years and still relevant
In a new book on urbanism and environmental dynamics, centre researchers Stephan Barthel and Sverker Sörlin have looked at how Constantinople has succeeded to persist and develop despite regularly occurring disturbances. Their findings demonstrate that in the quest for more ecologically sound urbanisation, urban planners of today have a lot to learn from this ancient city. “Our message from having revisited the resilience history of Constantinople during more than three millennia is that the keeping of green space for tacit co-production and community-based relationships to land and water have been essential properties for long-term survival and success”, Barthel and Sörlin say.

Strategic location and smart food production
Constantinople is a city whose origin can be traced back to the establishment of Greek cities and colonies in early antiquity. Eventually it became the capital of the East Roman Empire and since then its role in the region has never really diminished. One answer to this long-term resilience is the city’s capacity to produce significant amounts of food within the urban settlement itself rather than having to rely on others. The productivity of gardening, livestock keeping and fishing proved essential to how well the city could cope in times of stress. Even in periods with population peaks such as the early 6th and 12th centuries, Constantinople was resilient in terms of food and water when trade was cut off. “The rulers of the city invested not only in military infrastructure but also in systems for supplying and storing food and water. And when sieges were efficient and supplies ran dry, there were still possibilities to cultivate food within the city walls and catch fish in the Golden Horn. Hence Constantinople had a variety of options to sustain the city with food.”

Social memory is king
Knowledge and values on how to cope with crises were also kept in multiple groups of the society. This memory of past crises consequently led to new and innovative ways of providing food to the inhabitants. “This shows that another complementary diversifying aspect in sustaining resilience is the ability to store, and possibly transform, insights over time and use them under new circumstances”, Barthel continues. In similar work, Barthel and colleagues have shown how urban gardens can serve as pockets for social-ecological memory.

The missing thing in resilience theory
Barthel and Sörlin’s study not only offers city planners and urban developers an inspirational perspective on how to turn urban areas greener, it also puts urban resilience theory itself under a critical microscope. “What is largely still missing in social-ecological resilience theory is a treatment of cities and urban areas. This includes the historical lessons that can be drawn from distant urban pasts in regard to sustaining ecosystem services during times of hardship and crisis”, Barthel argues. Another futile approach identified in their work is to strive for urban resilience in isolation without taking into account the environmental burdens of cities on the biosphere. There is a lot to learn from ancient history in this regard, not the least to create a fresh critique to research that assumes cities to be floating in an ecological vacuum. “The urban environmental histories of cities like Constantinople are not templates for future planning, but as resources of ideas, wisdom and indeed also grave mistakes. Schools of innovation, architecture, construction and urban planning must be further ‘ecologised’ if sustainable development is to have any iota of meaning”, Barthel and his colleagues conclude.

Source: Stephan Barthel, Sverker Sörlin and John Ljungkvist. 2011. Innovative Memory and Resilient Cities: Echoes from Ancient Constantinople. In Paul Sinclair, Frands Herschend, Christian Isendahl and Gullög Nordquist. (Eds). The Urban Mind, cultural and environmental dynamics, Studies in Global Archaeology 15. Sweden, Uppsala University Press.

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Image: fsse8info via flickr CC

From “How to make a city flow” by Matt Kaplan & Anna Simpson:

Cities never really sleep. Even in the small hours, before commuters surge from their homes onto the roads, the things they need for the day ahead are travelling to and fro: groceries from the countryside; water down the pipes; electrons through cables; news down the wire.

In many cities, all this ebb and flow is like a relay race without proper teams: there’s no real coordination, and so the baton keeps falling between the runners. The people responsible for public transport don’t speak to the ones distributing the food; the energy providers don’t communicate with the information experts. Delivery vans make a one-way trip and come back empty; leftovers from the canteen travel, at best, to composting sites, and at worst, to landfill – while fresh and processed food is brought in from far away.

The daily frustrations of city dwellers asides, this failure to think and plan across different sectors means we waste everything from energy, food and water, to money, time and space – all critical resources that no city with a burgeoning population has to spare. By 2040, two in every three people on the planet will be living in urban areas, and providing them all with the bare necessities – never mind a seat on the bus – will be a huge challenge.

It may seem a way off yet, but less than 30 years isn’t much time in which to make major changes to infrastructure that – in some of the bigger cities – has been around for centuries. Where do we start, and whose job is it anyway? In an effort to help get things started, Forum for the Future has launched ‘Megacities on the Move‘, a new initiative in partnership with the FIA Foundation, Vodafone and EMBARQ (the sustainable transport centre). It’s set out six key priorities for action to ensure the smoothest flow of people and resources.

[...]

Read the rest of the article by Matt Kaplan & Anna Simpson – the section reproduced here is less than a quarter of it!

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Photo of Teotihuacan © K Archdeacon

From “Were ancient cities sustainable?” by Michael E. Smith:

As an archaeologist, I have a very different view of sustainability than most scholars who study the contemporary world. For sustainability today, one of the standard definitions is that of Gro Harlem Bruntland: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” There is much debate and discussion about this definition and its usefulness, but the dual components of current practices and potential future outcomes are fundamental for most writers.

Archaeology deals with human society over long time spans—centuries and even millennia. For me, a sustainable society is one that lasts for a long time. In central Mexico, Teotihuacan society flourished for five centuries or more, while many of the societies that came later were only around for a couple of centuries before collapsing. Teotihuacan was far more sustainable. People sometimes wonder why Classic Maya civilization collapsed, assuming that their society and practices must have been defective. But the Maya cities lasted even longer than Teotihuacan. My own society in the USA has lasted less than half as long as the Classic Maya, so perhaps the Maya had a more sustainable society than we have today.

[...]

Read the rest of this article by Michael E. Smith.

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Image of Mumbai by Abhisek Sarda via flickr CC

As unfashionable as it might sound, what if we thought less about the benefits of urban density and more about the many possibilities for proliferating more human-scaled urban centers; what if healthy growth turns out to be best achieved through dispersion, not concentration?

Foreign Policy article Urban Legends: Why suburbs, not cities, are the answer by Joel Kotkin:

The human world is fast becoming an urban world — and according to many, the faster that happens and the bigger the cities get, the better off we all will be. The old suburban model, with families enjoying their own space in detached houses, is increasingly behind us; we’re heading toward heavier reliance on public transit, greater density, and far less personal space. Global cities, even colossal ones like Mumbai and Mexico City, represent our cosmopolitan future, we’re now told; they will be nerve centers of international commerce and technological innovation just like the great metropolises of the past — only with the Internet and smart phones.

It’s far less clear whether the extreme centralization and concentration advocated by these new urban utopians is inevitable — and it’s not at all clear that it’s desirable.

Not all Global Cities are created equal. We can hope the developing-world metropolises of the future will look a lot like the developed-world cities of today, just much, much larger — but that’s not likely to be the case. Today’s Third World megacities face basic challenges in feeding their people, getting them to and from work, and maintaining a minimum level of health. In some, like Mumbai, life expectancy is now at least seven years less than the country as a whole. And many of the world’s largest advanced cities are nestled in relatively declining economies — London, Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo. All suffer growing income inequality and outward migration of middle-class families. Even in the best of circumstances, the new age of the megacity might well be an era of unparalleled human congestion and gross inequality.

Perhaps we need to consider another approach. As unfashionable as it might sound, what if we thought less about the benefits of urban density and more about the many possibilities for proliferating more human-scaled urban centers; what if healthy growth turns out to be best achieved through dispersion, not concentration? Instead of overcrowded cities rimmed by hellish new slums, imagine a world filled with vibrant smaller cities, suburbs, and towns: Which do you think is likelier to produce a higher quality of life, a cleaner environment, and a lifestyle conducive to creative thinking?

So how do we get there? First, we need to dismantle some common urban legends.

[...]

Read the rest of this article by Joel Kotkin on the Foreign Policy site for some interesting points about future suburbs (clusters of services in the places people live) and some eye-candy (if you like cities, which I do).

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Article via ICLEI:

Mayors from around the world have signed an agreement to address climate change at the World Mayors Summit on Climate, hosted by the Government of Mexico City and Marcelo Ebrard, mayor of Mexico City and chair of the World Mayors Council on Climate Change. During the summit, representatives from 135 global cities signed the Mexico City Pact, which establishes a monitoring and verification mechanism for cities to address climate change. The Mexico City Pact will be presented to the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) when it meets later this month in Cancun, Mexico.

“With more than half the world’s population today living in cities for the first time in human history, mayors and urban leaders are on the frontline of the planet’s fight against a changing climate. Today, the cities meeting here are taking action to reduce harmful greenhouse emissions through their commitment to the Mexico City Pact,” said Marcelo Ebrard.

In partnership with United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, and the World Mayors Council on Climate Change (WMCCC), the Government of Mexico City organized the summit to provide a forum for the signing of an agreement that commits cities to action and urges national governments to advance a binding global treaty.

“Cities have great capacities to address climate change, even in the absence of a binding global treaty among nations, which is why we are here today. We are demonstrating the leadership of mayors and cities around the world to take action,” said Martha Delgado, Mexico City’s secretary of the environment and ICLEI vice president.

The Mexico City Pact calls for cities to develop and implement climate action plans that promote local laws and initiatives to reduce GHG reductions. To establish and follow up on cities’ commitments, the signers will establish their climate actions in the Carbon Cities Climate Registry (CCCR) at the Bonn Centre for Local Climate Action and Reporting (carbonn).

Visit the website for more information about the pact and the summit, or download the pact (also available in Spanish & French).

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