Posts Tagged ‘USA’
Small Smart Infill: Secondary Dwellings
Posted in Movements by Kate Archdeacon on September 13th, 2011
Via Sustainable Cities Collective
Photo by Pembleton via flickr CC
From “How garage & basement apartments help people, neighborhoods and the environment” by Kaid Benfield:
One of the best ways to accommodate growth (as we must) without either exacerbating sprawl or disturbing the character of existing communities is by using so-called “accessory units” – secondary dwellings attached to a main home, such as garage and basement apartments. Sometimes these are called “granny flats” or “in-law suites” because of their usefulness to house extended family members while giving them the privacy that comes with having their own, separate entarnces and homes. For the primary homeowner, it can also be an excellent source of income to help pay for the mortgage or other needs. For the neighborhood, it brings in a mixture of housing types and price points, adding variety and affordability while preserving architectural character. It also helps people “age in place” as their housing needs shrink without having to leave their neighborhoods. Municipal planners are taking note: Vancouver, for example, promotes “laneway housing” facing alleys as part of its “EcoDensity” program; Seattle encourages “backyard cottages.”
[...]
Read the full article by Kaid Benfield for more on this, a related article in USA Today, and info about a new book called In-Laws, Outlaws and Granny Flats.
—
Connecting Suburbs: A Walkable, Rideable Car-Free Bridge
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on August 31st, 2011
Source: Streetfilms via Going SolarTransport Newsletter
From “Breathtaking Bike Infrastructure: Minnesota’s Martin Olav Sabo Bridge” by Clarence Eckerson, Jr.:
In 2007, in order to route cyclists away from a challenging 7-lane crossing on busy Hiawatha Avenue, Minneapolis built the Martin Olav Sabo Bridge. The first cable-stayed bridge of any kind in the state, it’s breathtaking, even to the people who have been riding it for years. It provides a safe, continuous crossing and offers up a glorious view of the downtown skyline (especially at sunset!). The sleek Hiawatha light rail line runs beneath it, and there are benches to sit on and take everything in.
Used by an average of 2,500 riders a day, peak use can hit 5,000 to 6,000 per day on some gorgeous summer weekends, according to Shaun Murphy of the Minneapolis Department of Public Works. The bridge was named in honor of Minneapolis’ Martin Olav Sabo, a former U.S. Representative from the 5th District who helped secure much of the $5 million needed to build it.
Thanks to the Bikes Belong Foundation for enabling us to feature this majestic piece of bike architecture and to show that investing is cycling and walking is well worth every penny for our communities.
Watch the Streetfilm of the Martin Olav Sabo Bridge.
—
Urban Agriculture Potential: Report
Posted in Movements, Research by Kate Archdeacon on August 23rd, 2011
Source: The City Fix
Sembradores Urbanos in Mexico City, photo by K. Archdeacon
From “New Report: The Potential for Urban Agriculture” by Itir Sonuparlak:
A new report by the Urban Design Lab (UDL) of Columbia University’s Earth Institute explores the potential for urban agriculture in New York City. The report, “The Potential for Urban Agriculture in New York City,” complements the existing discussion on sustainable cities. Developing agricultural spaces within or near urban areas has a great potential to reduce food transportation costs and environmental effects, as well as provide opportunities for economic development and diminish the disparities in access to healthy foods. In order to become a viable option to food production for the masses, urban agriculture must overcome challenges of scalability, energy efficiency and labor costs.
To understand the capacity of New York City’s crop production, UDL’s report aims to answer how much land could be productively used for agriculture and how much crop could realistically be grown in the given land. When it comes to the benefits of urban agriculture in New York City, the study also considers factors like food security, storm water runoff and sewer overflow mitigation, urban heat island effect, energy consumption, waste reduction, as well as opportunities for composting for agricultural purposes.
The study highlights 12 key findings:
- Urban agriculture can play a critical role as productive green urban infrastructure.
- Urban agriculture can play an important role in community development.
- There is a substantial amount of land potentially available for urban agriculture in NYC.
- Intensive growing methods adapted to urban spaces can result in yields per acre which greatly exceed those of conventional production techniques.
- While urban agriculture cannot supply the entire city with all of its food needs, in certain neighborhoods it can significantly contribute to food security.
- There is a need for cost/benefit analyses that reflect the full complexity of the city’s social and environmental challenges.
- NYC’s rooftops are a vast, underused resource that could be transformed for food production.
- Bureaucratic challenges are a major barrier to the expansion of urban farming.
- Existing infrastructure has the potential to support the expansion of urban agriculture.
- Urban farmers are establishing viable businesses by taking advantage of multiple revenue streams.
- Urban agriculture is part of a broader horticultural approach to urban greening that encompasses more than fruits and vegetables.
- Urban agriculture functions as a catalyst for larger food system transformations.
Read the full article by Itir Sonuparlak for a summary of the above points, or download the report.
—
Bike Repair Station & Spare Parts Vending Machine
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on August 19th, 2011
From “Self-Service Bicycle Repair Station” by Joop de Boer:
Bike Fixtation is a DIY bicycle repair station recently launched to serve stranded bicycle riders in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area. The smart initiative offers self-service kiosks on an extended-hours basis for bicyclists. The place offers all equipment needed to get unlucky bicycle riders back on the track. You can buy a tube or patch kit, pump your tires for free, and make simple adjustments using supplied tools. Bike Fixtation is open for 365 days a year from six in the morning to midnight. The first shop has opened doors inside the uptown transit station in Minneapolis, a second shop is to be opened soon.
Read the full article by Joop de Boer.
—
Zipcar share cars in Baltimore mean less cars
Posted in Models, Movements, Research by Rob Eales on August 15th, 2011
Source: Clean Technica found here, Fast Company.
Photos: spike55151 on flickr Licence: Creative Commons
A study about the usage of Zip share cars in Baltimore has shown that Zipsters (Zipcar members) use cars less and other forms of transport more.
“Urban transport is changing in any number of innovative ways as cities around the US look to alleviate traffic congestion, reduce air pollution and make their cities more “livable.”
One year on, the driving habits of Zipcar members in Baltimore have changed substantially, and that’s having several beneficial effect on the city’s “transportation landscape,” according to one-year anniversary survey results released by the City of Baltimore and the Parking Authority of Baltimore City.
“Zipsters,” as they are referred to, own fewer cars, drive less and use public transportation more often than they did prior to joining, according to a press release“
Read the full article by Andrew Burger
—
These examples which are at the intersection of collaborative consumption (sharing things) and the reduction of the consumption of things provide real pointers to ways of living that cause less impact in the here and now. (Rob Eales)
—
Local Harvest: Metasite for organic & local food
Posted in Models, Tools by Kate Archdeacon on July 26th, 2011
From the LocalHarvest website:
LocalHarvest is America’s #1 organic and local food website. We maintain a definitive and reliable “living” public nationwide directory of small farms, farmers markets, and other local food sources. Our search engine helps people find products from family farms, local sources of sustainably grown food, and encourages them to establish direct contact with small farms in their local area. Our online store helps small farms develop markets for some of their products beyond their local area.
The richness, variety, and flavor of our communities, food systems, and diets is in jeopardy. The exclusive focus on economic efficiency has brought us low prices and convenience through large supermarkets chains, agribusiness and factory farms, while taking away many other aspects of our food lives, like our personal relation with our food and with the people who produce it. More and more people are realizing this and actively working to turn the tide and to preserve a food industry based on family-owned, small scale businesses. They are our best guarantee against a world of styrofoam-like long-shelf-life tomatoes and diets dictated from corporate boardrooms. The Buy Local movement is quickly taking us beyond the promise of environmental responsibility that the organic movement delivered, and awakening the US to the importance of community, variety, humane treatment of farm animals, and social and environmental responsibility in regards to our food economy.
LocalHarvest was founded in 1998, and is now the number one informational resource for the Buy Local movement and the top place on the Internet where people find information on direct marketing family farms. We now have more than 20000 members, and are growing by about 20 new members every day. Through our servers, our website and those of our partners serve about three and a half million page views per month to the public interested in buying food from family farms. LocalHarvest is located in Santa Cruz, California, and was founded by Guillermo Payet, a software engineer and activist dedicated to generating positive social change through the Internet.
www.localharvest.org
—
Ethical Consumer is setting up a similar resource in Melbourne, Australia, and is seeking local involvement. KA
—
One Revolution: Bike Delivery Service
Posted in Movements by Kate Archdeacon on July 15th, 2011
One Revolution LLC is a member owned bike delivery service located in Burlington, Vermont. One Revolution’s mission is to provide expedient bicycle pick-up, delivery, marketing, and promotional services for individuals, local businesses, and organizations. We provide a delivery and promotional model for our partners whom share a common vision of sustainable, environmentally friendly, delivery of Vermont products while exerting a positive influence on the well being of our community. We provide bike delivery services to include catering delivery, wholesale and retail delivery, grocery delivery, CSA (community-supported agriculture) shares, compost and recycling, document delivery and publication distribution.
- CSA and Farm Produce Bike Delivery
Have your CSA share delivered to your door by bicycle. We work with Burlington area CSA farms to make farm fresh produce easily accessible to everyone. One Revolution will deliver your weekly share by bike to your home or office every week allowing you more time to create amazing meals. - Catering Delivery
Local restaurants have partnered with One Revolution to offer bike delivery of catered meals. View menus from these great Vermont Businesses, place your order, and let them know you’d like it delivered by bike! - Revolution Compost (Pilot Program)
Weekly food waste pick-up (and finished compost product return) by bicycle. This is your chance to not only reduce the amount of waste being trucked to landfill, but to reduce the amount of fossil fuels that would otherwise be used to truck this waste to landfill or industrialized compost facilities. Revolution Compost uses bicycles to provide this year-round service and recycles your kitchen scraps into rich organic compost.
www.onevt.com
—
50 Ideas For The New City: Poster Campaign
Posted in Tools, Visions by Kate Archdeacon on June 20th, 2011
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.
—
Keeping Stormwater Out of the Sewer System: Green Roofs
Posted in Models, Research by Kate Archdeacon on June 6th, 2011
Source: Environmental Research Web
From “Columbia researchers find green roof is a cost-effective way to keep water out of sewers“:
Green roofs like the one atop a Con Edison building in Long Island City, Queens can be a cost-effective way to keep water from running into sewer systems and causing overflows, Columbia University researchers have found. The Con Edison Green Roof, which is home to 21,000 plants on a quarter acre of The Learning Center, retains 30 percent of the rainwater that falls on it. The plants then release the water as vapor, the researchers said in the study (http://www.coned.com/greenroofcolumbia).
If New York City’s 1 billion square feet of roofs were transformed into green roofs, it would be possible to keep more than 10 billion gallons of water a year out of the city sewer system, according to the study led by Stuart Gaffin, research scientist at Columbia’s Center for Climate Systems Research. New York City, like other older urban centers, has a combined sewer system that carries storm water and wastewater. The system often reaches capacity during rains and must discharge a mix of storm water and sewage into New York Harbor, the Hudson River, the East River and other waterways. Con Edison built the green roof and formed its research partnership with Columbia in 2008. The partners saw the green roof and an adjoining white roof as an outdoor laboratory for environmental research. Gaffin’s team found last year that the green roof and white roof save energy and reduce urban air temperatures. Under its “cool roofs” program, Con Edison has turned many roofs on company facilities white to save energy and protect the environment.
“The information we are collecting from Con Edison’s roofs is invaluable in helping us determine the costs and benefits of green infrastructure projects,” Gaffin said. “Without solid data from experiments like this, it is impossible for us to know which projects are the best options for protecting the environment.” “When we built our green roof we were confident that researchers from Columbia would gain important knowledge about protecting the environment,” said Saddie Smith, vice president for Facilities for Con Edison. “Three years later, it’s clear that our project has helped us understand how roofs can save energy, cool the atmosphere and prevent storm water runoff.”
The researchers used instrumentation to measure sunlight, and other forms of energy entering and leaving the green roof. That data allowed them to calculate the amount of energy leaving the roof in the form of water vapor. The study concluded that based on the cost of building and maintaining a green roof it costs as little as 2 cents a year to capture each gallon of water.
This article is from Columbia University via Environmental Research Web.
—
Sharing Schoolyards With The Neighbours: Some Examples
Posted in Models, Movements by Kate Archdeacon on May 27th, 2011
Via Sustainable Cities Collective
Photo: South Ozone Park community enjoys the new playground at P.S. 108Q, which opened Spring 2010.
-
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.
—