Is Stockholm in Danger of Losing Its Waterfront?

It’s not easy to make a great urban waterfront and many cities have made numerous mistakes that they regret later. For example, adjacent land uses that are private versus public, the size and location of  roads limits pedestrian access to the water,  the design of the open spaces along the waterfront  provides few... [read more]

KaBOOM! What an impact!

Fifteen years ago, Darell Hammond, a 24-year-old college dropout who was raised in group home outside of Chicago, had an idea. He wanted to build playgrounds for kids who needed a place to play. He started with a playground in southeast Washington, D.C., raising money from the Home Depot Foundation and others to pay for the job, and assembling a group of volunteers to do the work. Then he built another. And another. [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]

Vertical Farms That Could Actually Get Built

ArchDaily featured a sensible vertical farming design by Tim Stephens, a New Zealand architect. In the midst of dense buldings in highly populated urban areas, urban residents could cultivate their own food in buildings that offer individualized plots set into compact terraces. The farms includes winding... [read more]

'Peace Gardens' bring needy communities together, 'saving our own neighborhood'

  This is a great story: grassroots-driven gardening in western North Carolina is bringing diverse, underserved communities together around the cause of local sustainability, enlivening neighborhoods in the process. I’m visiting family in my home town of Asheville, a small city where it seems everything has changed, yet everything... [read more]

What is 'The Future of Water'?

A new exhibit now underway at Krohn Conservatory highlights Project Groundwork, a $3.2 billion, multi-phased project by the Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati (MSD). "The Future of Water", jointly presented by MSD and the Cincinnati Park Board and on display through August 15, is designed to raise public awareness of the... [read more]

Restoring the Garden of Eden

A great feature from Spiegel Online covers the work of Azzam Alwash, a US/Iraqi hydraulic engineer aiming to restore what were once vibrant wetlands flourishing in the cradle of civilization through an organization called Nature Iraq. While most news coming from the region focuses on bricks and mortar rebuilding, it's important to note... [read more]

Cities and Permaculture

Permaculture is an approach to designing human settlements and agricultural systems that mimic the relationships found in natural ecologies. Permaculture is one of the activities that UN-HABITAT’s Cities and Climate Change Initiative is implementing in Esmeraldas, Ecuador, with support from Cuba’s Antonio Núñez Jiménez Foundation for... [read more]

City Lights and Urban Wildlife

City Lights Artificial lighting affects not only our ability to see the stars, but it affects a great many aspects of the ecology of wildlife. Light can impact wildlife directly by streetlights or lit buildings, or more indirectly with sky glow, the light from combined city lights. It can affect many difference facets in the lives of... [read more]

From whether you live to how you live

Science writer Fred Pearce has been taking up a worthy cause over the last year: persuading the environmental community away from a focus on population growth and toward a focus on managing consumption. There is his book on a stabilizing global population (which I haven't read) and then a column in Grist, for yesterday's World Population... [read more]