Poverty. WAG » The Good Life Social Ecology. WAG have continued to develop their sub/urban cohousing permaculture research, which was recently commended by Europan. The scheme has been developed through the use of Ecology Diagrams – drawings which aim to capture all of the material, energy, information and social flows acting upon a site. The design is aimed at meeting a growing niche demand in the housing market. The proposal is an opt-in community for individuals and families who want to take the next step in sustainable modern living. The Social Ecology is organised through the collective ownership and management of a community freehold, with private leaseholds for dwellings. More information: Press: For more information and press release material please contact info[at]wag-architecture.co.uk Technorati Tags: architecture, design, ecology, life, health, innovation, technology, homes, domestic, morphology, sustainability, living.
China's Zero-Carbon City Dongtan Delayed, But Not Necessarily Dead, Says Planner. Peter Head (photo courtesy of Arup) Last year, I wrote a post mourning the demise of one of the world's most exciting construction projects: an ecologically sustainable city for half a million people off the coast of Shanghai called Dongtan. The idea was ambitious: a city without a landfill or cars, producing its own renewable electricity and generating zero carbon emissions. Originally announced in 2005, the project was presented as a template for future urban design in China, and generated a significant buzz.
Over time, however, it began to appear as if a shifting political landscape would sink the project, and the criticism began, some of it intimating that Dongtan was never really meant to become reality. Not everyone, though, is convinced Dongtan is done for. Peter Head: The original aim of our client, the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation (SIIC), was to have the first phase of Dongtan's development completed ahead of the 2010 Shanghai Expo. » Building a greener city, one block at a time • Spacing Montreal. What would a green neighbourhood look like on the ground? For the past two years Éco-quartier Peter-McGill has been hard at work building a showcase project for what sustainable development on a small scale should look like.
The idea behind the project, dubbed Quartier 21, is to concentrate as many small scale green projects in one spot to serve as a showcase for how we can make our cities greener. This initiative has its origins in the Agenda 21, which was adopted at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992. This is a global action plan on sustainable development, and one of its key ideas is that environmental change has to come at all levels.
It has to come at the international level, with agreements such as the Kyoto Accord; but also at the local level with small-scale, everyday projects. The Éco-quartier chose to work in a specific downtown block, bordered by Sainte-Catherine, de Maisonneuve, Saint-Marc, and Saint-Mathieu. Photo credit: Karine Gagné. Design Trust for Public Space. Design Trust for Public Space. Initiatives | CABE. Pavement to Parks. » Imagining the Green City • Spacing Toronto • understanding the urban landscape. What would our city look like in a world that had gone beyond fossil fuels? It’s an important question, for if we can’t paint a picture of the future we want we’re not likely to get it.
Oddly enough, it’s not a question that many people have tried to answer. Most of the thinking on alternative energy has focused on the cool technology, rather than the urban spaces it would inhabit or the social relations that would underpin it. The debate on public space, on the other hand, has largely ignored where our energy will come from (as a case in point, this blog doesn’t even have a tag for it). But it is a question that we are going to have to answer if we are to avoid the darker futures of a world ravaged by climate change envisaged by some of my favourite authors. The Living Planet City is as an attempt to start answering that question, in a way that is (hopefully) more fun and accessible than the various technical reports I and other environmentalists have released over the years.
New Resource: The Living Planet City. “Welcome to the Living Planet. It’s clean, it’s efficient — and it’s doable. Today.” This blurb appears on the front page of WWF Canada’s new website, the Living Planet City, which launched on Tuesday. The Living Planet City’s bright animation of thriving urbanism (pictured right, in a screen shot) illustrates 20 big ideas to make any city more sustainable. In the “west end,” a combined heat and power plant uses “waste” heat energy to provide chilled water for a nearby supermarket. In the “east end,” a municipal waste station feeds into a biofuel plant, complete with solar, green roofs on top. At the waterfront, wave, tidal and wind energy power the city while a rapid transit station ferries people back and forth: all this with plenty of park space.
Clicking around brings up summaries of the technology and provides links to learn more. Good start! Maybe, maybe not. On the other hand, the Living Planet City could be bigger, bolder, and more beautiful. Well said, Christa. Posted by: T. Wovencity. Ever wonder what our modern-day cities could look like 100 years from now in a perfect world? Architect Luc Schuiten endeavors to find out with his Vegetal City installation, currently on display in Brussels. The entrance, made up of an archway with branches covered in blinking yellow lights, leads the exhibit’s visitors into a magical world of architectural drawings and models of cities where city residents live peacefully with nature. According to the 65 year-old architect, “You cannot feel good in light of all the environmental pollution and the grim perspectives for the future.”
Instead Schuiten, a self-proclaimed utopist, sketches alternatives. Among the cities of the future on display are the Lotus City, the Woven City, the Treehouse City, and the City of the Waves. Schuiten’s designs are fantastical, sure, but they offer an inspiring vision of what cities in harmony with their surroundings might look like. +Vegetal City Via Deutche Welle. Green infrastructure in smart growth, beautifully illustrated.
My NRDC colleague Rachel Sohmer has produced a wonderful slide show illustrating how low-impact-development techniques for reducing stormwater runoff (sometimes called "green infrastructure") can successfully be integrated into the kinds of smart, urban environments that we need to revive cities and enable walkable, transit-oriented transportation patterns. (Rachel last appeared on this site writing about a related topic, the importance of neighborhood streets that connect with each other.) The slide show is below, but first let me set the context. Sometimes well-intentioned bureaucrats do all the wrong things while trying to protect watersheds. As I've written before, the biggest mistake is to look at the problem on a site-by-site basis, on the assumption that reducing runoff on each site, generally by reducing on-site impervious surface, will collectively add up to reduced runoff in the watershed as a whole.
Link to original post. The 10 Greenest Cities in the U.S. : Sustainablog. Culture Published on June 29th, 2009 | by tomschueneman [social_buttons] The Mother Nature Network has just published their list of the ten greenest cities in the United States. There is as yet no official criteria set by the EPA for determining a city’s “greeness,” MNN considered key areas to measure the effectiveness of a municipality’s efforts at carbon footprint reduction, including air and water quality, efficient recylcling and management of waste, percentage of LEED certified buildings, acres of land devoted to green space, use of renewable energy, and easy access to green products and services.
And the MNN winners are: 10 – Austin, Texas: Austin Energy is the country’s largest provider of renewable energy. 9 – Chicago, Illinois: Chicago adopted a long-range plan for land sustainability as far back as 1909, when pioneering city planner Daniel Hudsen developed a land use plan for the lakefront that balanced urban growth and created a permenent greenbelt around the city.