Archive for Urban Agriculture
May 31, 2010 · Filed under Landscape, Revitalization, Traffic, Urban Agriculture
Welcome to one of the busiest roads in London. I’m standing beside three lanes of heavy traffic and the cars are hurtling past – but that’s tremendous, because it means the drivers are too busy to notice me.
A fluorescent yellow jacket is not everybody’s idea of a disguise, but I’m wearing my bright cycling top so that if anybody notices me they might think I’m a contractor working for the local authority. After all, surely only somebody working for the council would dig a hole beside a busy road and plant an apple tree. That’s what I’m doing, in my ongoing attempt to turn the town into the country.
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Popularity: 52% [?]
March 17, 2010 · Filed under Artificial Landscapes, Cities from Scratch, Climate Change, Ecosystems, Multi-Level Urbanism, Urban Agriculture, Urban Design, Visualization, Waterfronts
Australia circa 2050, population 35 million, climate change induced rising sea levels have flooded the Gold Coast resort region, apartment blocks are now used to grow food and people commute in monorail pods above the sea.
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Popularity: 57% [?]
March 16, 2010 · Filed under Density, Diversity, EcoCities, Emergence, Health, Infrastructure, Investment, Parks, Resilience, Urban Agriculture
“Our beds are empty two-thirds of the time.
Our living rooms are empty seven-eighths of the time.
Our office buildings are empty one-half of the time.
It’s time we gave this some thought.”
— R. Buckminster Fuller
That quote is 40 years old, but I continue to be amazed by the extent to which we haven’t begun to address the problem Fuller highlighted. There’s a staggering glut of empty space around the country right now, unused space that’s not doing anyone much good. That in itself isn’t new; what is unprecedented is our ability to visualize that data in an entirely new ways.
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Popularity: 54% [?]
March 16, 2010 · Filed under EcoCities, Master Planning, Resilience, Urban Agriculture, Urban Design
A “pop up” city farm is to be created on the site of Erick van Egeraat’s multi-billion-pound masterplan to regenerate east London’s Canning Town and Custom House, which starts in 2012
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Popularity: 34% [?]
February 5, 2010 · Filed under Children, EcoCities, Urban Agriculture
With its startling lack of parks, community gardens, or farmers’ markets, the Gravesend neighborhood of southern Brooklyn is currently one of the least green sections of New York’s most populous borough. That is set to change this fall, however, when a neighborhood public school—P.S. 216—launches the first East Coast incarnation of the Edible Schoolyard, a program developed in 1995 by Alice Waters and the Chez Panisse Foundation to teach schoolchildren about food, farming, and nutrition.
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Popularity: 19% [?]
February 4, 2010 · Filed under EcoCities, Landscape, Multi-Level Urbanism, Urban Agriculture, Urban Design
Andrew Maynard Architects, a young Melbourne firm in their Urban Orchard 2 concept have veered away slightly from the purely conceptual and have proposed a more actionable concept inspired by the community markets of Cuba. Cuban Market Gardens first arose as a community response to a lack of food security after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Collectively they are able to produce 90% of its citizens fruits and vegetables without the use of transport, simultaneously creating urban green areas and neighborhood integration.
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Popularity: 27% [?]
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: 34% [?]
November 19, 2009 · Filed under Food Deserts, Health, Urban Agriculture
America should increase its regional food consumption. Each metropolitan area, the researchers say, should obtain most of its nutrition from its own “foodshed,” a term akin to “watershed” meaning the area that naturally supplies its kitchens. Moreover, in a novel suggestion, the MIT and Columbia team says these local efforts should form a larger “Integrated Regional Foodshed” system, intended to lower the price and caloric content of food by lowering distances food must travel, from the farm to the dinner table.
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Popularity: 43% [?]
November 17, 2009 · Filed under Health, Planning, Urban Agriculture
One common lament about local food is that there simply isn’t enough of it. The best part about it — that it’s different in every foodshed, location to location — also means that the supply can have a hard time keeping up with demand. That’s especially true when it comes to larger, more dense urban centers, where locavores greatly outnumber farms and farmers.
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Popularity: 35% [?]
November 11, 2009 · Filed under Creative Cities, Density, Economics, Infrastructure, Investment, Real Estate, Revitalization, Shrinking Cities, Urban Agriculture
The troubles of Detroit are well-publicized. Its economy is in free fall, people are streaming for the exits, it has the worst racial polarization and city-suburb divide in America, its government is feckless and corrupt (though I should hasten to add that new Mayor Bing seems like a basically good guy and we ought to give him a chance), and its civic boosters, even ones that are extremely knowledgeable, refuse to acknowledge the depth of the problems, instead ginning up stats and anecdotes to prove all is not so bad.
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Popularity: 44% [?]
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