Image by buiversonian via flickr under this Creative Commons license (the description of this image on flickr is great)

Two reports about Sustainable Cities in Australia (not so recent but still interesting). The interesting thing about these reports is the context in which they were researched and the organisations that commissioned them. One is through the Australian Conservation Foundation and the other was undertaken by KPMG on behalf of Built Environment Meets Parliament, the lobbying arm of a collection of planners and developers. The context of the reports was “…that if we want an understanding of how sustainable we are as a nation, we need to look to our cities.”

The article includes,

The ACF report measured publicly available information across 15 separate parameters. Predictably, for an organisation originally established to protect Australian flora and fauna, the ACF examined such measures as amount of land given over to parks, and ecological footprint – the theoretical amount of land required to create the goods and services used each day by a city’s citizens.

…

What is most interesting, however, is that the ACF also included measures of economic prosperity. They looked at debt levels for households and employment data. The inclusion of these measures, according to Matthew Trigg, report co-ordinator from the ACF, was because even the greenest city is not sustainable if its economy is not.

“Sustainability is not just about the environment. Economic issues become environmental issues and environmental issues are wrapped up in economic issues. The two are intertwined.”

and

Meanwhile, KMPG, which does not have a reputation for being a firm overrun with dreadlocked hippies, included many measures of environmental sustainability in its report. Taking its cues from COAG, KPMG reviewed cities’ plans for “social inclusion, productivity and global competitiveness, climate change mitigation and adaptation, health, liveability, community wellbeing, housing affordability and matters of national environmental significance.”

Read the rest

It is still current and thought provoking, with the local participants providing a broad range of technical, historical and cultural viewpoints from across the region.

http://www.abc.net.au/ra/podcast/cities/podcast.xml

Image via Parsons by Martin Seck

Living Concrete/Carrot City is an exhibition of creative and research projects that demonstrate the possibilities of urban agriculture. The exhibition links sociologist Thomas Lyson’s coinage “civic agriculture” to Joseph Beuys’s influential formulation of social transformation and individual creativity, “social sculpture.” It argues that everyday practices of food production and distribution in cities, the actions of ordinary people in local neighborhoods, register as quiet but persistent challenges to the agro-industrial complex.

Living Concrete is a cross-institutional dialogue with Carrot City: Designing for Urban Agriculture, an initiative of the Department of Architectural Sciences at Ryerson University in Toronto curated by Mark Gorgolewski, June Komisar and Joe Nasr. Carrot City demonstrates how increasing public interest in agriculture, food supply, and food security is influencing urban design and how design can facilitate a more robust urban food system. This wide-ranging survey of Canadian and American cases examines projects at multiple scales – the city, community and knowledge-building, home and rooftop projects, and a range of products.

Read the full release from Parsons

LIVING CONCRETE/CARROT CITY
October 1–December 15, 2010
Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center
2 West 13th Street, New York

Image by Brendan Sullivan for Star Tribune

Composting and bikes combine in new business model being trialled in the US.  A composting service for people who want to reduce waste but don’t use compost or don’t have worm farms has started hoping to provide low carbon and sensible service to deal with and reuse useful waste.

Composting is catching on nationwide as more cities provide services to residents for collecting food, landscape clippings and other compostable separate from recylables and landfill waste. But to test out if the St. Paul, Minn.’s Macalester-Groveland neighborhood is ready for such a program, Sonya Ewert is hopping on a 27-gear bike with a custom-made trailer and going door to door to collect compostables from residents. The bike-powered composting service is part of an experiment — if enough residents like having their food waste collected, the city may move forward in providing the service on a large scale through their waste and recycling collection services. For Ewert, helping to get the new component added to the sanitation service is truly a (smelly) labor of love.

The Star Tribune writes that the project is a three-month long experiment to see if the residents are keen to compost, and if so, Eureka Recycling may take on collecting food waste separately as part of their service. For the area, food waste represents about 12% of the waste stream, and food-contaminated paper another 10%, so the potential for waste diversion from landfills is huge.

Read the full story by Jaymi Heimbuch on Treehugger

© Living City Block

“By the summer of 2012, Living City Block Lo Do Denver will have reduced its aggregate energy use by 50%. By the summer of 2014, LCB will become a Net Zero energy bloc, and by 2016 it will be creating more resources than it consumes. But concurrently, LCB will be working to develop a thriving urban community, one in which people of all ages and types choose to live, work and play.”

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By the year 2050, eighty percent of the world’s population will live in cities. In addition, the Urban Land Institute predicts that eighty percent of current building stock will still be in use in the year 2050. As America and the world work to build a new, sustainable foundation for the 21st century, we need new models of what our urban spaces and places can become. Living City Block will be just such a model.

Starting with a block and a half of Denver’s historic Lower Downtown (LoDo) district, Living City Block will create a demonstration of a regenerative urban center. LCB will draw on selected partners from around Denver, the U.S. and the world to develop and implement a working model of how one block within an existing city can be transformed into a paradigm for the new urban landscape.

This pilot project is taking the area of 15th to 16th, Wynkoop to Wazee and east across Wazee and transforming it into a sustainable community. First, Living City Block will work to significantly reduce the energy consumption and environmental impact on these blocks. By the summer of 2012, Living City Block Lo Do Denver will have reduced its aggregate energy use by 50%. By the summer of 2014, LCB will become a Net Zero energy bloc, and by 2016 it will be creating more resources than it consumes. But concurrently, LCB will be working to develop a thriving urban community, one in which people of all ages and types choose to live, work and play. Right retail will evolve, better and more sustainable jobs will be created and kept, and the block will take its place as a part of the economic engine that drives the city and the region.

The LoDo project is a model that will be replicated across the Western Hemisphere though our Sister Cites and Sister Neighborhood programs. The LCB Team is pursuing relationships with other neighborhoods within Denver, other cities within the US and the Western Hemisphere to establish their own Living City Blocks. The LCB Team will begin by creating “virtual” city blocks with these partners that will over time become their own actual Living City Blocks. The lessons learned and the methodologies created through our initial LoDo Denver LCB will become the model for developing many other LCB’s, and for doing so at scale and in the near future.

Read more on Living City Block.

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From “Company to Begin ‘Rental Goat’ Weeding Service“

Mikuni Construction Co. in Kitakyusyu City, southern Japan, announced in August 2009, that it would be launching a new service to rent goats for weeding grass starting in April 2010. This unique weeding method does not require any machinery, and is drawing attention as an environmentally friendly technique.

Having first heard about weeding with goats from his business associate, Katsuhiko Sera, the president of the company, has been investigating the approach for three years in an effort to devise a viable business model. He bought five goats in May 2009, and by tethering the goats with a cable, about 500 square meters of grass can be grazed over the course of a week. A trial “rent-a-goat” began in August 2009, but will be fully launched in March 2010.

Goats eat various types of weed. They eat all aboveground stems and leaves, and prefer to graze on slops, which people often find it difficult to weed. Furthermore, weeded material does not require disposal when using this method and the goat dung produced simply decomposes and is returned to the soil.

In addition to renting goats, the company plans to provide its own weeding service by increasing the number of goats, and to manufacture cheese and other products from goat milk. Mr. Sera hopes that his rental goat service will serve not only as a new tool to maintain urban green spaces, but will also assist the comfort of local residents.

From “Company to Begin ‘Rental Goat’ Weeding Service“

From “Vancouver industrial hub transformed into sustainable neighbourhood” by  Jean Sorensen

Southeast False Creek (SEFC), a City of Vancouver reclamation project, is being designed to set a new urban sustainability standard in community development. The 80-acre site housing 16,000 people will become a neighbourhood of parks, market and subsidised housing, marine areas, community garden, shops, schools, and a community centre, growing out of what was once the industrial hub of the city. Sawmills, manufacturers, metal shops and marine-related shops once rimmed False Creek.  Subsurface investigation was made into soil and groundwater quality at SEFC to complete human health and risk assessment as part of a remedial action plan. In areas where contamination was severe, soils were removed and in areas of lesser contamination, the material was covered over and the land designated recreational use.

“I am told that this is the largest residential development in North America,” said Robin Petri, Vancouver’s Manager of Engineering for the SEFC & Olympic Village.  One of the unique features of the development, Petri points out, is that the roads are sloped so that rainwater drains into natural bioswales on each side of the village, negating the need to treat runoff water, while providing habitat for birds, animals, and marine life.  Buildings also capture and use water, with approximately 50 per cent having green roofs and 50 per cent directing the water into irrigation and functions such as toilet flushing. A neighborhood energy utility is the first in North America to gather heat directly from a raw sewage line, consolidate the heat and use it in a thermal system that loops pipe to various buildings and back to the utility building.

One of the challenges of the cleanup was that False Creek had been filled in along the shoreline over the years.   Much of the earlier materials used for fill were poor quality and these had to be removed and replaced.  To compensate for shoreline that was removed, an island was created in an inter-tidal zone allowing children to wade to it at low tide to examine marine life that has been returning to a once-derelict area. In February a project manager noticed white frothy bubbles around the island. It turned out to be herring roe – the first time it has been seen there in 50 years.

Read the full article by Jean Sorensen.

Image: Congress Avenue Bridge, by jessicareeder via flickr CC

University of Virgina professor Timothy Beatly premiered his new film, The Nature of Cities, at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden’s Gillette Forum on October 29th. The film is an interesting overview of various ways in which nature and sustainable architecture are being incorporated into European and American cities. Geared towards people outside the design and science community, it’s a great introduction to the concept of urban nature.  The film has several interesting vignettes, like a car-free development that is so eerily quiet you can follow the sound of waves to find a nearby beach. Or a week-long bio-blitz of a canyon in San Diego that allows kids who were previously warned about the ‘danger’ of the local canyon to explore it and identify the native plants and insects.

The most striking story in the film features the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas, famous for its bat colony. The city has gone from trying to torch the bats under the bridge to setting up a protected area where crowds of people assemble to watch 1.5 million bats emerge in the evenings. Now, new bridges in Texas are being specifically designed to house bat colonies. Imagine if more of our buidings and infrastructure were built this way! It’s fascinating to see the shift in construction from environmentally harmful, to environmentally neutral, to environmentaly positive.

Source: How It Grows

Assume uncontrolled emissions growth and they face growing impact from a less hospitable and more volatile climate.

Either way – big changes are on the way. Few cities’ leaders grasp the scale of the challenge, especially in developing countries, where towns and cities will have an additional 1.5bn residents to cope with by 2030.

This new think piece has been prepared as part of the British Council’s Climate and Cities programme working with Global Dashboard . Download the pdf (which has full references).