Archive for Garden Cities
January 8, 2010 · Filed under Architecture, Density, Diversity, EcoCities, Garden Cities, Multi-Level Urbanism, Resilience, Urban Agriculture

Nature has been working forever, what challenges us now is finding how it will keep working forever. Intelligence as brought us to a point at which we have at hand an array of technical solutions that can either deprive or provide us with comfortable, culturally rich living conditions. The way we arrange such devices will ultimately make all the difference. In this project we aim at recognising how natural cycles work and replicate them; as a vast strategy, as a way to organise space, and as a model to technical solutions that are incorporated.
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Popularity: 23% [?]
June 8, 2009 · Filed under Artificial Landscapes, EcoCities, Garden Cities, Landscape, Multi-Level Urbanism, Urban Agriculture, Visualization

While imagining what it might be like to eat extremely local food, grown right there in your city – a line of 96th Street Honey, for instance, or, in light of Times Square’s recent (but unfortunately temporary) pedestrianization, perhaps a Times Square Tomato (why not agriculturalize parts of Times Square?) – we also need to ask how we might make such a vision come true.
How can a city like London be at least partially turned over to food production – so that London Fields might produce southeast England’s newest yields of meat, fruit, and vegetables?
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Popularity: 32% [?]
April 14, 2009 · Filed under Garden Cities, Nature, Urban Agriculture

So you’ve picked up a compact composting kit and are ready to start recycling your food scraps into nutrient-rich compost - the next step is to start a garden! For those with budding green thumbs, urban gardening can be an intimidating prospect. To clarify a sometimes-mysterious process, we’ve put together a very brief how-to guide on starting a flourishing container garden replete with herbs, veggies, and flowers.
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Popularity: 38% [?]
February 16, 2009 · Filed under EcoCities, Emergence, Families, Garden Cities, Nature, Public Life, Urban Agriculture

FRUIT takes up the challenge of elevating the ecological knowledge of consumers and encouraging a way of life that is friendly to the environment. We want consumers to be conscious of the entire life of a product, from production to utilization, and not just what they see in the stores. Consumers must be aware that every phase of a product’s life influences the environment and ourselves. While cities are often seen as set aside from nature, we aim to investigate the agriculture which feeds urban dwellers. For Beyond Green, Free Soil will use oranges as a vehicle to explore the complex relationships that make up the worlds Food Systems.
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Popularity: 35% [?]
February 3, 2009 · Filed under Density, EcoCities, Garden Cities, Multi-Level Urbanism, Nature, Urban Agriculture

About 15 years ago, I met an uncommon and fascinating man. His solid reputation as a scientist and researcher preceded him, a living encyclopedia on plants worldwide — growing in severe and difficult conditions, deprived of light in the shadows of tall trees (where, in contrast to the old saying, there is always something growing), or deprived of nutrients among rocks… Here was a man who was familiar with strolling the Amazon forests and riding under the canopy on a raft.
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Popularity: 28% [?]
February 3, 2009 · Filed under Garden Cities, Social Networks, Urban Agriculture

With allotment waiting lists massively over-subscribed and people right across the country keener than ever to grow their own fruit and veg, the aim for Landshare is to become a UK wide initiative to make British land more productive and fresh local produce more accessible to all.
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Popularity: 18% [?]
January 31, 2009 · Filed under Architecture, Cities from Scratch, EcoCities, Families, Garden Cities, Highways, Traffic, Transit, Urban Design, Visualization, Water

I have always loved those great Cities of the Future from the thirties even to the present; they always present some bucolic vision that is never quite achieved. Canon set up a vision at the CES show to showcase their high def cameras; Unpluggd said “Think Playmobil meets TV studio diorama.”
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Popularity: 80% [?]
January 30, 2009 · Filed under Garden Cities, Shrinking Cities
Most city maps tend to obfuscate the reality of geography, instead showing us a diagram of political boundaries, representations of streets, and the occasional prominent geographical feature. A cursory perusal of maps of southeast Chicago and northwest Indiana will reveal a disproportionate amount of space that is neither latticed with streets nor defined by geographical features such as bodies of water, the bodies of water themselves seemingly grotesquely disfigured by this undefined interstitial space. A satellite view of these areas can start to answer some questions or lead one to conclusions about what is happening (privately owned industry?), but this still leaves much to be revealed. In an attempt to better understand this region, I began exploring by bicycle, which generally allows more access than a vehicle, and which eventually led me to stumble upon the neighborhood of Marktown.
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Popularity: 31% [?]