The Road to Biglow.

More information about the Biglow Wind Farm.

Participants were invited to submit innovative designs demonstrating how higher-density courtyard housing can serve as an attractive option for families with children, while also contributing to environmental sustainability, providing an affordable housing option, and responding to neighborhood context. The competition is part of city efforts to foster design excellence and the creation of new family-friendly housing in Portland's neighborhoods. During the announcement event, the winning designs will be on display and competition jurors will be on hand to comment on the competition and their choices. Following this event, the public will be invited to choose their favorite designs as part of "People's Choice" balloting to take place later in November and in December.

Capping a tumultuous past month that was filled with tragedy, memorial rides, anger, frustration, meetings and press conferences, hundreds of people — including Police Chief Rosie Sizer — gathered under the Hawthorne Bridge Saturday for the “We Are ALL Traffic” rally.

Ghost bike image from GhostBike.org.

The Oregonion's Eric Mortenson writes:

Measure 37 gave property owners the right to seek compensation or a waiver from land-use rules if regulations imposed after they bought their land reduced its value and restricted its use. A flood of 7,500 claims, many for large subdivisions on farm and forest land, alarmed conservationists, farm groups and Democratic legislators.

That ultimately resulted in the backlash of Measure 49, which allows claimants to build a few homes but prohibits commercial and industrial development and large subdivisions.

With the land-use planning system in a state of confusion, disarray, and increasingly subject to the whims of ballot measures which are often little or misunderstood by voters, pressure is mounting to revive the The Oregon Task Force on Land Use Planning (also known as the Big Look Task Force), which was "charged with conducting a comprehensive review of the Oregon Statewide Planning Program and make recommendations for any needed changes to land-use policy to the 2009 Legislature."

I was recently shopping for a wood stove and I met a man who had grown up in Southeast Portland before the trolleys were destroyed. As a child, he would take the trolley into town without his parents - before he could drive a car. When the decision was made to tear up the trolleys, he asked his mom why they did it and she told him that people are stupid.

People are stupid.

It really is stupid when you think that we are already lamenting the loss of a comprehensive system which was so recently destroyed. Unfortunately, it is clear that the capital and labor expenditure to put these rail lines back in is now exorbitant. Perhaps it is that the highways are now running us dry? This morning on my ride to work I saw a backup of cars on SE Clinton St. This is a small local bike boulevard street. I wished some of the people who call Portland the most sustainable city in the US could have seen this!

Any way about it, I feel lucky at least to live in a town that is trying to replace the rail network which it once had. Perhaps my children will be so lucky as to ride light rail downtown.

We at Worldchanging/Portland recommend lights, a helmet, some reflective tape, a bell, and some good rain gear. Additional bonuses are a rack and a pannier, which make carrying larger items simple.

If you aren't up for assembling all the gear yourself, Clever Cycles has some amazing bikes which incorporate many of these features into the bike itself.

Remember - the rain is no reason to stop riding. All you need is the right gear and you're good to go. I actually prefer winter riding because the trails and bridges are so empty. I suppose if everyone follows my advice, this will cease to be the case, but for now I'm not worried!

Biking the Hawthorne Bridge

The Streetcar

The MAX

And my favorite... Ladds Addition.

The group will be discussing The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, by James Howard Kunstler.

Lake Oswego's Environmental Book Group meets on the 4th Tuesday of every month, from 7 - 8:30pm at the library, 706 Fourth Street Lake Oswego. Call Reference Librarian Jane Carr (503) 534-5665 for more information.

And in other library news, the Deschutes Public Library and the Central Oregon Environmental Center are working together to offer a four-session course on global warming prepared by the Northwest Earth Institute. The course will be held Thursdays, 5:30-6:30 pm, starting August 2nd and running through August 23rd. All four sessions will be held at the Sisters Public Library. To register, please call Lisa McGean at (541) 312-1034.

From a sustainability standpoint, the simple yet effective principles behind a well-placed fan win easily in the mostly manageable summers of the Pacific Northwest, where super-high temperatures are fairly rare. Buck up. You can get by.

They also recommend augmenting the fan with traditional passive cooling strategies:

Natural, or passive, cooling employs some common-sense approaches that take advantage of the local climate... Even on the hottest days, temperatures tend to drop dramatically in the evening. Keep windows open in the morning to allow cool air into the house, then close them before the mercury rises and keep curtains and blinds drawn during the day to repel direct sunlight.

With so much talk of transportation efficiency, it is important to remember that urban amenities, insomuch as they bring that which is desired into the city, are über-efficient. While Ski Dubai may seem extravagant - is it more extravagant than traveling half way across the world to ski on real snow on a real mountain?

Keller Fountain is our Ski Dubai. It is our mountain stream right in the city.

A new generation of architects and designers in Portland and beyond is attempting to help Tryon Life Community Farm’s efforts to explore, evaluate, and foster alternatives to current building code practices in a safe, systematic, and publicly endorsable manner. (Note: Tryon has recently converted their website to a Drupal-based dynamic site, so much of the ReCode information has dropped off).

While energy use is but one facet of design considerations, it is a telling measure of the challenge before us. According to Ed Mazria of Architecture 2030, built structures account for roughly 50% of all energy use in the United States.

All too often, when discussing a new or innovative way to address this issue, designers and architects are confronted with an inflexible, unresponsive code which - while designed with the best intentions - is not be able to cope with the broad challenges of the 21st century: resource reuse, reurbanization, growth management, alternative transportation, zero-energy development, and shifting demographic patterns (to name a few).

Currently, restrictive codes deny experimentation - even when all parties involved recognize the risk/reward involved. What would have become of the lonely Etruscan who discovered the arch, had he lived in modern times? He would have most likely been red tagged and forced to build with post and lintel. The time has come to formalize a process of experimentation in order to harness the energy of a thousand creative minds working safely and systematically towards a better future.

Tryon Life Community Farm is uniquely positioned to be instrumental in developing a framework for reimagining the role of building codes in our society. Most importantly, they can be at the forefront of developing alternative, performative codes which - rather than specifying a prescriptive action - lay out a performative benchmark which can be attained in a myriad of ways. The next step would be to determine how to acertain that these benchmarks have been met.

"Alternative" is defined in the UBC (Unified Building Code) as "of equal or better quality". TLC will focus on the better half of the equation.

Thanks Robbi Babba for the image!

This, of course is the value of competitions - allowing creative minds the freedom to experiment while still providing enough incentive to encourage completeness of thought and vision. Find a high bandwidth connection and download these boards while you can!