Football digression to, um, kick off today's post: Congratulations to the very impressive New Orleans Saints for a big win over the Colts in last night's Super Bowl. I was rooting for Indy, but it's hard not to feel good for the Saints' fans, especially the residents of the Crescent City, who have long deserved something new to celebrate. As for the Colts, at least we can make a connection to urbanism: I love the stadium on the edge of downtown Indianapolis where the team plays home games, in part because it looks like an actual, if enormous, building (the Saints, who have to play in this monstrosity, may be winners on the field but are not so fortunate in architecture). Now to your regularly scheduled blog post.   About three miles or so from the Colts’ stadium is Indy’s designated smart growth revitalization district, a distressed area with many vacant properties, including a largely abandoned industrial corridor along a rail line, but also good bones for renewal including a resilient population, a good street grid, some stable residential blocks, and prospects for a new... read more >>
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Most buildings have a long lifespan, and in this age of environmental uncertainty it is more important than ever that the buildings we design are sustainable. However, many believe this change isn’t happening quickly enough. Enter Free Green, an American sustainable housing design firm, with an innovative solution which could speed up the transition to sustainable residential architecture. Whilst many consider the role of the architect to be key in building design becoming more sustainable, the reality is that only 5% of homes have an architect involved in their design. But with 30% of homes built coming from stock plans, many of which are years old, Free Green believe that for housing design to become more sustainable, newer, greener stock plans will have a more positive impact than architects ever could. In order to reach the biggest audience possible... read more >>
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Bamboo sidewalk shed, Hong Kong A sidewalk shed is the scaffolding erected above the sidewalk during a construction project. Several NYC institutions - the NYC Department of Buildings, American Institute of Architects New York Chapter, the Alliance for Downtown New York, the New York Building Congress, the Illuminating Engineering Society of New York, the Association for a Better New York Foundation, the Structural Engineers Association of New York, the NYC Department of City Planning, and the NYC Department of Transportation - hosted the urbanSHED International Design Competition to generate alternatives to standard sidewalk sheds which "hide the beauty of New York City’s architecture." Three finalists were selected and their proposals can be viewed at the AIA NYC gallery on Laguardia Place in Greenwich Village. The three winning proposals are Tripod MOD(ule) (XChange Architects with Ex Nihilo Studio, Rider Levett Bucknall, and Weidlinger Associates) 
urbanCLOUD (KNEstudio with Arup) 
and Urban Umbrella (Young Hwan Choi, University of Pennsylvania student, with Agencie Group). 
Two of the entries - not among the finalists - incorporated vegetation as an element of ... read more >>
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I've lost count of the number of times I've heard people who are passionate about improving their communities complain about how quickly officials take their eye off the ball. Here's another example: the regional centre of excellence for regeneration in northwest England, Renew Northwest, ran an 'examplar learning programme' to highlight what works and what doesn't in regeneration. The centres of excellence were set up as a result of the Urban Task Force report in 1999. They were a bit slow getting off the ground, but by the mid-noughties most English regions had them. In 2006 I was one of the judges for Renew Northwest's examplar learning programme ... read more >>
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Maple Ridge Wind Farm, upstate New York – the largest wind farm east of the Mississippi. Photo by Jon R. Vermilye, Lakshoreimages. New York State ranks 8th in the U.S. for installed and operational power generation from the wind. 1,274 megawatts. This is enough to power over 500,000 households. Or a region the size of, say, Rochester. Good, but a long, long way from really good. For a bit of perspective, there are 19.5 million people in New York State – about 8 million households. This means that about 6% of the state’s households are powered by the state’s wind farms. Obviously we have to build renewable energy sources at a very different scale and rate in order to become truly sustainable and secure as quickly as it is clearly necessary. So it came as a bit of an unhappy surprise to read an article this week in the local paper. It turns out that residents of counties and towns in the region around Rochester... read more >>
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The Sierra Club and American Electric Power, the nation’s largest coal-burning utility, don’t agree on much, but there is this: Money does grow on trees. Along with other big environmental groups and such businesses as Duke Energy and El Paso Corp., they are part of a coalition that wants to use markets to protect the world’s forests and curb climate change. The coalition—called Avoided Deforestation Partners, a name that will never win a branding contest... read more >>
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Most people believe that sustaining the planet is a good idea, given the impacts that human civilization is having. Business has played a big role in creating those impacts, and has been playing a big role in trying to address them. The problem is that sustainability only looks at half of what needs to be taken into account when thinking about whole living systems. Sustainability primarily addresses reducing impacts and increasing efficiencies. Corporate sustainability programs are wrapped almost entirely around these goals. But every experienced business person knows you can’t make a healthy business by only reducing inefficiencies. The experience of running a successful business teaches that it’s the ability of a business to generate value that is the real source of its vitality and viability. You can only make a healthy business by figuring out what you want to grow, how to grow it effectively, and then defining inefficiency as anything that doesn’t produce what you are trying to grow. What is true of business is also true of the planet. One of the most unfortunate consequences of the sustainability movement’s emphasis on... read more >>
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 “The biggest fight I think we’ll see in the next ten years is the fight between people in cities who are trying to transform them into ‘bright green’ cities and those economic interests in the [outer-ring] suburbs who see that as a threat to their livelihoods, and in some cases just despise it on ideological grounds.” So says “bright green” advocate Alex Steffen, executive editor of WorldChanging, in an interview with Grist’s Jonathan Hiskes. Steffen believes that mainstream environmentalists’ concentration on stemming global warming through national and international carbon caps has failed and will continue to have little chance of meaningful success but finds hope in other, more localized strategies, including reforming land use. In an earlier article by Hiskes on Grist, Steffen points to “people working and volunteering in... read more >>
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In 85 days, the 2010 World Expo opens in Shanghai, China. For the next 10 days, I’ll be featuring some of the more interesting pavilions under construction, and their green features. First up: Switzerland’s “Rural-Urban Interaction” Pavilion  Rendering of the Swiss Pavilion  Facade with solar cells and LEDs  Vegetated Roof and Chair Lift The 43,000 sf pavilion is designed by Buchner Bründler Architects and Element GmbH of Germany. According to the official Swiss Pavilion site it is a “hybrid construct of technology and nature that combines town and country in a perfect balance.” The Expo organizers have named it Nature’s Playground. The façade is an aluminum mesh with attached solar cells that power flashing LEDs. Most of the façade components will be recycled at the close of the expo, and the solor cells will be reused or resold. The lights flash in a cause and effect relationship: LED’s light up for different amounts of time based on the amount of light or wind detected by sensors and the amount of stored energy. When one cell lights up, neighboring cells respond and light up as well. The Pavilion is organized... read more >>
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This has been in the works for a long time, and the announcement finally came yesterday at the New Partners for Smart Growth Conference in Seattle. From the press release: WASHINGTON, D.C. – During a sustainability forum at Portland State University and a speech to the New Partners for Smart Growth Conference in Seattle, U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan today announced the launch of HUD’s new Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities (OSHC). The office will be overseen by HUD Deputy Secretary Ron Sims who won national recognition for turning King County, Washington into a model for sustainable communities. OSHC is designed to help build stronger, more sustainable communities by connecting housing to jobs, fostering local innovation and building a clean energy economy. Funded by Congress for the first time in HUD’s 2010 Budget...
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