Urban farming: It’s a growth business

Urban farming may sound like an oxymoron, but judging from the 375-person sell-out crowd at the first Urban Farm Summit in Washington, D.C., the idea is catching on like organics at Walmart. The recent one-day event called, Sowing Seeds Here and Now, was organized by Engaged Community Offshoots (ECO), a fledgling non-profit urban farm... [read more]

Foodprint Project

Sarah Rich and I co-founded the Foodprint Project as an exploration of the ways food and cities give shape to one another. As we told Urban Omnibus back in February, days before our first event, we wanted to see what you could learn if you used food as a lens to look at the city. [read more]

'Maximizing urban cores' vitality and infrastructure must be the basis for any definition of sustainability'

  There’s a terrific article on cnn.com titled “Green Buildings Won’t Save the Planet,” written by architects Joshua Prince-Ramus, Randolph Croxton, and Tuomas Toivonen.  It states in broad, manifesto-like strokes the same concept I was trying to illustrate in my post last week on “net zero” Prairie Ridge Estates in Illinois... [read more]

Acoustic Forestry

We saw David Benqué's Fabulous Fabbers project here on BLDGBLOG a few months ago, but his more recent work, Acoustic Botany, deserves similar attention. Acoustic Botany uses genetically modified plants to produce a "fantastical acoustic garden," where sounds literally grow on trees. "Desired traits such as volume, timbre and harmony are acquired through selective breeding techniques," the artist explains. [read more]

Urban Garden Plots in Russia

As urban gardening becomes more popular in the US, there seems to be a lot we can learn from the experience of other countries. Garden plots are among the things that stand out in Vladimir, the city in Russia where I'm currently living. The differences between city and country are blurred here. Bustling streets and high-rise buildings... [read more]

Greening the Grounds of the U.S. Mission in Geneva

Nine U.S. landscape architecture students will spend the first two weeks of August studying the grounds surrounding the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Geneva and drafting a sustainable landscape design that can be phased in over five years. The students will work alongside three Swiss landscape architecture students, and under... [read more]

Floating Habitat Islands

What started as an artists sketch four decades ago has now become a working product. In 1970 artist Robert Smithson, perhaps best known for his ‘Spiral Jetty’ earthwork, created a sketch showing a tugboat towing a vegetated island on a river and called it “Floating Island“. During his lifetime he was never able to see the idea realized... [read more]

Whitewashing Glaciers to Save Them

A Peruvian inventor, Eduardo Gold, has come up with an innovative approach for protecting disappearing Andean glaciers — painting exposed mountain rockfaces with whitewash. Just as painting roofs white helps increase the albedo effect and reflects heat back into the atmosphere, whitewashing rockfaces near glaciers may help... [read more]

3 Questions: Dawn Biehler on Urban Pests and Public Health

As part of our 3 Questions series, we're excited to talk with Dr. Dawn Biehler of the UMBC Department of Geography and Environmental Systems. Her research covers intersections between public health, environmental justice, historical geography, housing, interspecies interaction, and political ecology in urban environments. Dawn worked... [read more]

Draw your Landscape

A new GPS drawing project by Jeremy Wood (earlier on uT with the dog drawings and the dragon) has hit the online news. A contextual landscape map drawn by walking the landscape and tracing it with a GPS. Couldn't be more simple as engadget points out: "walk around in the defined area with a GPS unit and end up with a 1:1 scale map of... [read more]

Enzo Enea’s Tree Museum

Enzo Enea, a well-known Swiss landscape architect, will open the Tree Museum on the shore of Lake Zurich, in Rapperswil-Jona, Switzerland. The New York Times writes that the museum is a “meticulously curated outdoor display” set on 2.5 acres. Visitors will be able to see more than 20 varities of trees framed by... [read more]

'Agricultural urbanism' that actually is urban

Whether it's called 'agricultural urbanism,' 'urban farming,' or by the seriously awkward word 'rurbalization,' it's all the rage.  And, on his excellent blog Discovering Urbanism, Daniel Nairn proposes a model for a ‘garden city block’ that integrates agriculture into city fabric in a really nice way.  I’m especially happy to... [read more]