Nov 22, 09
Density, Suite Density
by Roger Valdez Vancouver allows more density in multiunit buildings. There are many reasons to love Vancouver, BC. It is a great international city with tremendous cultural diversity. Some of us truly see Vancouver as a bold leader in accommodating growth in sustainable compact communities. Personally, I like the fact that the Queen is on their money and they call the Mayor, “Your Worship.” Now there is one more reason to admire Vancouver—especially all you density devotees out...
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
I thought I knew William Kamkwamba’s story. I was in the audience at the TED Global conference in Arusha, Tanzania when William took the stage to introduce himself and the remarkable windmill he’d built at his family’s house in rural Malawi. Like dozens of others in the audience, I was moved first to laughter, and then to tears by William’s explanation of how he turned some PVC pipe, a broken bicycle and some long wooden poles into a machine capable of generating...
Bike-frastructure 101: Sharrows, Street Parking, Superhighways and More
Increasing the number of bikes on the road is becoming a serious goal for forward-thinking leaders. As Elisabeth Rosenthal recently wrote in the New York Times, there will soon be only two kinds of city leaders: those who are implementing bike amenities and bike-sharing programs, and those who plan to do so soon. But it's about more than just announcing a mission, or even making bikes available for free. A lack of bike infrastructure plagues many cities, causing would-be cyclists to shy...
Use Your Body and Your Brain Will Thank You
by Sarah Goodyear We talk a lot on this blog about abstractions -- theories of urban development, economic hypotheses, planning paradigms. But in the end, it all has to play out in the real world. And the real world of transportation is about one simple thing: moving your body from one place to another place. So today we're going to look at some of the things people on the Streetsblog Network have been thinking about bodies -- how we use them to get around, and the price we pay when...
The Solar Forest: Charging Station And Shady Spot For Electric Cars
by Christa Morris The approaching age of electric vehicles presents us with a secondary, albeit significant, challenge: building accessible recharging stations with renewable energy. While we’re at it, can our parking lots be shady, please? One solution may already have arrived. In Neville Mars’s dreamy design, appropriately dubbed the Solar Forest, large, leaf-shaped photovoltaic panels on branching “trees” will provide both shade and power-up plugs for electric cars relaxing...
Future Melbourne
We're big fans of open government efforts. Future Melbourne is a pretty amazing project, an attempt to harness the power of open government and collaboration to tackle the kinds of foresight and planning efforts even most big cities find themselves unable to take on. Their agenda is pretty ambitious: Future Melbourne has a vision for the municipality to be a bold, inspirational and sustainable city in 2020. To realise this vision, six high level goals have been set: to build a city for...
Green Platform at Strozzina in Florence
I've spent the past few days highlighting some of the works exhibited but i still had to write a proper review of Green Platform. The exhibition, dedicated to art, ecology and sustainability, closes on July 19 at Strozzina (aka CCCS) in Florence. It is a good show. Definitely less spectacular but gutsier than Radical Nature which i had visited a few days before. It's also much darker. Although there are projects that lead the way to sustainable and achievable strategies, many others leave...
SolSource 3-in-1: An Alternative Energy Solution
In rural regions of the Himalayas, a new lightweight, low cost, portable solar cooker called the SolSource 3-in-1 is poised to transform the health and prosperity of entire villages. The device, which can replace the hazardous traditional biomass-burning stove as a means for cooking and heating the home, can also use its own waste thermal energy to generate enough electricity to light a home at night, charge cell phones and power other small devices. And because the cooker's unique design...
Swine Flu In Perspective
150 deaths is just another day on the highway. Not to belittle anyone's anxiety about the swine flu, but I'm feeling a little peevish this morning. Today's newspaper headlines are screaming that the global death toll appears to have surpassed 150, including the first death outside of Mexico. As a consequence, countries are banning imports, setting up travel restrictions, and scrambling public health resources. Everyone's going code-red. But 150 deaths -- the swine flu grand...
The Green FDR: Obama’s First 100 Days Make — And May Remake — History
The media just keeps missing -- or messing up -- the story of the century. Future historians will inevitably judge all 21st-century presidents on just two issues: global warming and the clean energy transition. If the world doesn't stop catastrophic climate change -- Hell and High Water -- then all Presidents, indeed, all of us, will be seen as failures and rightfully so. How else could future generations judge us if the U.S. and the world stay anywhere near our current emissions path,...
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