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  results of FutureEverything Award 2010 are in!

Urban Farming Summit: Panel Discussion

Panel: February 19, 2010, The University of Michigan – Dearborn

Ashley Atkinson, The Greening of Detroit

Oran Hesterman, Fair Food Network

Susan Schmidt, The Henry Ford

Kami Pothukuchi, SEED Wayne

Malik Yakini, Detroit Black Community Food Security Network

Moderated by Bruce Pietrykowski, Professor of Economics, UM-Dearborn

Urban Farming Summit: Keynote Speaker Robert Kenner

Visit the Urban Farming agenda Feb 19 website here.

Next Event:
UM-Dearborn and Crain’s Detroit Business presents:
The Business of Urban Agriculture
April 7, 2010
7:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m.
Fairlane Center North

City of angelic eateries: Some prominent restaurants in metro Los Angeles are striving to become more "sustainable" — a term without a legal definition at this moment and all too often used as a meaningless marketing term — through all sorts of new programs. The relocated Grace, for example, will feature a garden that could supply 25% of the restaurant's irrigation by gray-water, and in-house composting for the garden. Other restaurants are writing menus on chalkboards (York), asking if take-out orders need utensils instead of automatically including them (Gingergrass), and converting their waste oil into soap for the restaurant (Comme Ca). The latter gets points for most creative: for patrons who order roast chicken, the restaurant assembles a to-go package containing the chicken carcass, an onion, carrot and bouquet garni to use to make stock. Municipalities and others are a key part of the effort, providing collection and composting of food waste, recycling services, and green certifications. (Los Angeles Times)

High on grass: "We live in the age of grass," writes Olivia Judson, a research fellow in biology at Imperial College London, on the New York Times' Opinionator blog. Indeed, some of the crops that helped make humans an agricultural creature and create our complex civilization are grasses: wheat, rice, sugar cane, and corn, to name a few. Over the course of two posts (on evolution and wind-pollination), Judson examines the natural history of these critically important plants, first arguing that the evolution of grasses drove the evolution of important animals and, eventually, humanity. In the second, on pollination of flowering plants, she notes how most plants are pollinated by insects and animals, but about 10 percent — including grasses — use the wind. (New York Times Opinionator)

(A quick little Friday afternoon note.)

Discussion of planetary boundaries is pretty surreal everywhere these days, but in the United States, the disconnect between reality and rhetoric has reached what I think are pretty stunning proportions. Nowhere can this be better seen than in the discussions about how to "fix" the suburbs.

Many still debate that anything about the American model of sprawl development needs fixing, but most understand that something has gone seriously wrong with the outer-ring suburbs that more than a quarter of American call home. It doesn't take a futurist to look at the conditions on the ground -- long commutes, auto dependence, the expected steep rise in oil prices, environmental problems, the bursting of a massive financial bubble (resulting in millions of abandoned homes and ruined families and a wave of bankrupted suburban local governments) -- to realize that they suburbs are in deep trouble, and that trouble is just going to get worse.

Many have started to realize that the foreclosure crisis isn't a crisis in the sense that it will come and go and everything will be fine again someday. For many places, this is the new normal; a permanent foreclosure. Any plan based on the idea we're going back to some modified form of what we had before is wishful thinking, especially in the sunbelt states where speculative sprawl was at its worst. (In fact, I think that we haven't seen anything like the bottom on this bust, with millions more foreclosures in the pipeline, and little money or political will to make the massive investments it'd take to keep many newer suburbs afloat.)

As people have realized how severe the problems facing outer-ring suburbs are, designs which attempt to solve those problems by turning sprawl into something else have seen a vogue. (Part of the reason I was prompted to fire off this note was that I got yet another call from a journalist working on a suburban solutions piece, and that got me thinking.)

Often, the thinking behind new suburban design provocations seems to go something like this: the problem with the outer ring is that it's too spread out; therefore, let's make that weakness a strength and use all that land between the buildings, say, for farms and wildlife habitat. On the surface, it might appear to make sense, but reality is far less forgiving.

The reality is that because of the way we build suburbs, the land left underneath has limited value either as farmland or as habitat; it has neither the benefits of proximity of truly urban gardening, nor the richness of undisturbed land farther out; while pulling out buldings and roads, mitigating toxics, re-shaping the flow of water over the land and restoring ecosystems essentially from scratch is such an expensive process that it will never make sense as long as really critical prime habitat remains endangered elsewhere (which will likely be the case for the foreseeable future). The "asset" of open land that outer ring suburbs have is not a very valuable one, in ecological terms.

Unfortunately, it's becoming less and less valuable in economic terms, as well. Most suburbs have extremely tough times ahead.

I expect that the wealthiest quarter of the suburbs may well thrive for some time. In many cases, they have strong tax bases and the political power to demand new state and national infrastructure investments. More importantly, what those suburbs sell is exclusion, not bargain living, so rising operational costs may not matter as much to them (the rich can afford high gas prices).

The rest are in for a rough ride. Most of the outer ring is not enclaves of high-status exclusivity. Most of it is strung together from developments marketed as offering big family homes in safe areas at a reasonable price. It's designed to be upper-middle class life, on the cheap.

But it's not cheap anymore (it was never as cheap as it looked, as one glance at the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index will show). Many homes that looked like good investments during the bubble are now underwater, and surrounded by communities that will never be finished or are already in decline. Rising fuel prices are about to make big cars, long commutes and poorly insulated homes even more expensive for middle class people. What's worse (from the perspective of the suburban homeowner) is that the cultural worm has turned, and more Americans now want to live in walkable neighborhoods and increasingly associate sprawl with poverty and crime. I expect much of the outer ring's economic value is gone, never to return.

The conventional answer to the problems moderate-income outer ring suburbs face would be redevelopment: bring in more housing, retail and commercial, and rescue them by making them more like the prosperous walkable neighborhoods that now command a premium on the market. But inner ring suburbs already possess a huge set of strategic advantages in moving to meet the demand for walkable communities: its not that hard to imagine adding lots of infill development and new transportation infrastructure to make livable, fairly walkable, much more sustainable communities. They have good bones, and they have location.

Imagining that kind of retrofit in the outer ring is a stretch. In the absence of an as-yet-unseen, brilliant solution, the outer ring suburbs, especially those recently built with funny loans at the far edges sunbelt cities, are probably just destined to become semi-rural slums. The idea that some solution has to emerge to their problems rejects both evidence and history, it seems to me; worse, it doesn't much help us think through how we might offer better outcomes to the people who've invested everything they have on the suburban fringe.

It may well be that the ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century's frontier. I fully expect to see some really interesting experiments cropping up in half-abandoned suburbs in coming decades. But it's worth remembering the decline of the inner city from the 1940s to the 1990s, and thinking about how long it was before new answers and possibilities took hold there, and how much of urban America is still suffering. If we're going to avoid that kind of disaster in the outer ring, we need big, bold thinking -- thinking that transcends farming and other small-scale solutions to reimagine what the macro-level possibilities might be for places the 21st century has left behind.

One of the things I'd like to explore in the next few years is what truly different models for suburban redevelopment might look like. As I find interesting ideas, I'll definitely be reporting back.

Images: Damon Duncan, CC; Frog's Dream: McMansions Turned into Biofilter Water Treatment Plants, by Calvin Chiu

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Urban Design and Planning at 2:55 PM)

E. Duchemin, F. Wegmuller, and A.-M. Legault
Institut des sciences de l’environnement, Université du Québec à Montréal, Succ. Centre-Ville, C.P. 8888, Montréal, Québec, Canada
2009

Abstract.

For over 30 years, different urban agriculture (UA) experiments have been undertaken in Montreal (Quebec, Canada). The Community Gardening Program, managed by the City, and 6 collective gardens, managed by community organizations, are discussed in this article. These experiments have different objectives, including food security, socialization and education. Although these have changed over time, they have also differed depending on geographic location (neighbourhood).

The UA initiatives in Montreal have resulted in the development of a centre with a signi?cant vegetable production and a socialization and education environment that fosters individual and collective social development in districts with a signi?cant economically disadvantaged population. The various approaches attain the established objectives and these are multi-dimensional tools used for the social development of disadvantaged populations.

Conclusions

Although there is less surface area of agricultural land available in the city, and although it would be difficult to feed the entire population of a city like Montreal with the available land, a multi-approach implementation of gardening in urban environments, such as land agriculture, container gardening on balconies and roofs and a vertical integration of elements, would certainly contribute to the social development of disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Although not exclusive, the data presented here reveal that the initiatives are socially inclusive, that is, they encourage diversity in the gardens and therefore avoid excluding or stigmatizing certain groups of people. Moreover, this diversity fosters social support.

Studies done on UA, which have mainly been carried out in developing countries, generally examine the issue of economic integration through a segment of the urban population (often women) whereas in this study, we also examined socialization and educational issues that were certainly present in these projects. Here, only one garden (La Croisée) takes action on issues of economic integration. It does so through professional training and through the sale of baskets of organic vegetables. However, in various North American cities such as Toronto and New York, the sale of vegetables and processed products (canned foods, jams, etc.) becomes a tool for the economic development of vulnerable populations.

In conclusion, it appears that a cross-analysis of initiatives taken in industrialized and developing countries would greatly bene?t both, but especially industrialized countries, where UA is still in its initial phases of development.

Read the complete report here.

I put together this infographic for a Good magazine transparency contest, you can currently see it here:

www.good.is/post/design-an-infographic-about-neighborhood…

Images courtesy Skylab Architecture and Method Homes 

Skylab Architecture has established itself as one of Portland’s most admired design firms with projects like Doug Fir, the 12th + Alder mixed use project (winner of the top local AIA design award in 2007, the Honor Award), the upcoming Weave building on Burnside, NAU retail stores (also an AIA award winner) the Hoke Residence (made famous as a key location the first “Twilight” movie), and the Departure Lounge atop the Nines Hotel.

Now, the firm headed by Jeff Kovel has become involved with designing…manufactured homes?

FEMA trailer, not by Skylab or Method 

Granted these aren’t the trailer-park eyesores of yesteryear or the banal manufactured-home style prevalent today. My brother-in-law in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania selling modular and manufactured homes doesn’t offer anything like what Skylab and partner Method Homes of Seattle have in mind: the HOMB.

Kovel, speaking recently over coffee, said the intent with HOMB is to create well designed single family homes that in the past only the wealthy could afford, “to create an avenue that doesn’t exist right now: to bring architecture to a broader market.”

The modular design of the HOMB, which can be customized and configured in numerous different layouts and design, is based on and built using a series of 100 square foot triangles. Skylab experimented with a variety of different patterns that could be alternatives to the simple box construction of a traditional manufactured home. By erecting the homes on site from these triangular structural pieces, there are countless ways for each client to determine a proper size, layout, and budget. And because these are more than just boxes, there is the chance to embrace more design choices such as double-height living rooms.

“You set your budget, and you build only what you need,” Kovel adds. “Single family home project delivery is flawed, because budgets vary until it’s built. That doesn’t happen with this plan. You’ve eliminated 60 percent of the potential (cost) problem, and you still have this kit of parts to play with. We’re creating a system rather than a single piece that’s designed.”

To keep budgets down (HOMBs sell for approximately $160 per square foot), Kovel and Method worked to reduce what is ordinarily a 16-month building process down to six months. The design-construction partners have also embraced digital production capabilities to construct the chassis of each house, basically creating assembly process instead of measure-and-cut. This allows for greater cost control with fixed building, delivery, and installation expenses. It also affords developers the opportunity to build as they go, reducing risk, and potentially trading a one-size-fits-all for custom building for clients.

The idea is that an entire neighborhood could be constructed of HOMBs, and yet there would not be that stereotypical Levittown ubiquity of house after house that’s alike. Houses could be built to different scales in a HOMB neighborhood, but the houses would fit together despite varying sizes out of shared stylistic cues. It’s endless variety born from very simple initial building forms. “It’s won the battle against the spatial lmits of a traditional approach,” the architect says. “But we also didn’t want you to feel trapped in a triangle.”

HOMBs will also utilize a spectrum of sustainable design and construction, such as FSC-certified wood, choices of high-efficiency radiant or heat-pump heating and cooling. But the most sustainable thing about a HOMB, Kovel says, is the efficiency of the process. “You could build a LEED rated stick-built house and it’s still not very sustainable because of the waste,” he added.

“I’m not naïve about how challenging this is. But I think this could have a broad impact.”

The 26-person Oregon bike advocacy team stormed Capitol Hill on Thursday, armed with cycling stats, stories, and a strong sense of purpose. It was lobbying day at the National Bike Summit and Team Oregon joined 700 bike advocates from all over the country to flood the Senate and House office buildings to make every Congressional representative aware that the bike movement is a force to be reckoned with.

The day started off with an inspirational pep rally that featured Minnesota Congressman Jim Oberstar. Oberstar said this will be a “a critical year” and reminded advocates that big things are possible and that, “It happens one member [of Congress] at a time!”

After the inspiring speech by Oberstar — who in many ways is the architect of the modern bike movement — the Oregon contingent made their way to a Congressional panel presentation.

Organized by Scott Bricker and Earl Blumenauer’s legislative aide Tyler Frisbee, the purpose of the panel was for Congressional staffers to learn how Portland got on the road to being a world-class biking city. Panelists included PBOT bike coordinator Roger Geller, Veronica Rinard from Travel Portland, Bike Gallery owner Jay Graves, Community Cycling Center executive director Alison Graves, and myself. Busy schedules on the Hill meant there wasn’t quite the turnout we’d hoped for, but the discussion was helpful nonetheless. Zack Fields, a legislative assistant for Virgina House Rep. Gerald Connolly, said the presentation by Roger Geller could help him inspire and motivate traffic engineers in Northern Virginia to be more bike-oriented.

After the presentation, the Oregon contingent split up into two teams and held a total of seven meetings with Oregon’s congressional representatives. The day started off with a bang when Senator Ron Wyden (D) spent over 20 minutes discussing bike legislation and other issues. Travel Oregon’s Scott West, a veteran of lobbying on Capitol Hill, said this amount of face-time with Sen. Wyden was unprecedented in his experience. West reported that Wyden spoke about the value of bicycle recreation and the economic impact of bicycle tourism. He also said he would take the Active Community Transportation and the Complete Streets acts into consideration.

Another highlight was a meeting with House Rep. David Wu (D) that took place on the steps of the Capitol. Wu was on his way to work on the health care bill, but stopped and talked at length with the group and seemed to enjoy the casual environment.

Rep. Greg Walden (R), Oregon’s only member of Congress not currently signed on in support of key bike legislation, wasn’t able to be at the meeting (he flew back to Oregon for Ben Westlund’s memorial service). Advocates instead had a discussion with his able assistant, Nathan Rae. Rae shared that he loves to ride and he listened and took notes about all the bills presented to him. Cycle Oregon manager Jerry Norquist led the meeting and was able to tell Rae that 2,000-plus Cycle Oregon participants will be rolling through Pendleton this fall. Pendleton is in Walden’s district and it’s home to the famous Pendleton Round-Up rodeo. Cycle Oregon has purchased 2,000 tickets to the rodeo’s 100th anniversary festivities this year.

The biggest advocacy breakthrough of the day came during a meeting with Senator Jeff Merkley (D). Merkley told the group he would introduce a companion bill to Rep. Earl Blumenauer’s Active Community Transportation Act and he also said he’d join the Congressional Bike Caucus (full story here).

After a fitting conclusion to the official National Bike Summit’s official agenda that included US Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood jumping up on a table and shouting a thank-filled speech, the Oregon advocacy team hosted a dinner for Congressman Blumenauer.

The dinner, funded by Cycle Oregon, was held in a stately, private banquet room just steps from the Capitol. The night was an opportunity to thank Mr. Blumenauer for his hard work on behalf of bicycling. Prior to eating, we enjoyed a candid Q and A session where Blumenauer spoke candidly about the state of transportation politics (I took only a few notes out of respect the evening’s informal nature). He remarked at one point that the presence of bike advocates had lifted spirits on the Capitol. “You might not have signed everyone up,” he said, “But no one is negative about the bike issue.” He also offered some sage advice for advocates: “In Washington, you create your own reality.”

As conversation continued among attendees after dinner, Blumenauer walked around to each of us, wanting to hear our questions and taking time to offer answers. It was a very special evening, and it will stand in my mind as something of a coming-of-age moment for the bike movement in Oregon. Thanks in large part to the leadership of veteran advocates like Jerry Norquist and Jay Graves, we have assembled and trained-up an impressive standing army of advocates ready to make the Oregon bike dream into a reality.

Bike Summit coverage sponsored by Planet Bike. More stories on ">our special coverage page.

If you were not already convinced by the blossoming trees, this week’s job listings are another sign that Spring is here and Summer is near.

If you know your way around a bike repair stand, one of these opportunities as a bike mechanic may be for you. Good luck!

For detailed information including duties and how to apply, here are the links:

• Bicycle Mechanic — Lakeside Bicycles, Lake Oswego
• Bicycle Mechanic — The Bike Gallery
For a complete list of available jobs, click here. If you’d like more information about the BikePortland Job Listings, contact us, or visit the Job Listings page.

You can sign up for the all the latest job listings via RSS, email, or by following us on Twitter.

These are paid listings, so when you apply, please remember to tell them you saw the ad on BikePortland.

Tired of an old, clunky printer destroying more paper than it prints? Instructables user laxap helps along a printer aspiring to be a shredder by gutting it and installing an actual shredder. Almost as fun as smashing the thing to bits, like in Office Space.

1. Out Now! The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Issue #7
2. Journal of Aesthetics & Protest #7 Will Be So Post-Money
3. Artists Strike Back! The New York Street Advertising Takeover (NYSAT)/Municipal Landscape Control Committee

Pages 179–187 by Joe Alterio
Q-CITY: An Investigation by Front Studio/Yen Ha, Michi Yanagishita, and Joshua Cummings
MAP 002 QUARANTINE by David Garcia Studio
Did We Build The Frontier To Keep It Closed? by Scott Geiger
Field Notes from Quarantine, Katie Holten
Hotel III, Camp II, Lab IV, and Cell V by Mimi Lien
Cordon Sanitaire by Kevin Slavin
Context/Shift, Brian Slocum
Containing Uncertainty, Smudge Studio/Jamie Kruse & Elizabeth Ellsworth
NYCQ by Amanda Spielman & Jordan Spielman
Quick by Richard Mosse
Thermal Scanner and Body Temperature Alert System by Daniel Perlin
Precious Isolation: A Pair of Invasive Species by Thomas Pollman

Ganhamos Medalha de Bronze na categoria Online Breaking News com o info do Võo 447 da Airfrance.
Com este trabalho somamos três conquistas e isso me deixa feliz, pois ver o esforço recompensado e reconhecido é o maior prêmio.
Parabéns a todos os profissionais envolvidos.
Link: Infográfico Acidente do Vôo 447

Carly Waito paints minerals. Simple and nice like that.

found at but does it float

More about Wes Jackson (courtesy of wikipedia): Jackson founded a non-profit organization, The Land Institute, in 1976. He is still head of The Land Institute, which currently describes its main goal as the development of Natural Systems Agriculture; it also publishes The Land Report, a newsletter about American sustainable agriculture and agrarianism.

The Land Institute explored alternatives in appropriate technology, environmental ethics, and education, but a research program in sustainable agriculture eventually became central to its work. In 1978 Jackson proposed the development of a perennial polyculture. He sought to have fields planted in polycultures, more than one plant in a field, as in nature. Jackson also wanted to use perennials, which would not need to be replanted every year - that would leave the soil more intact, preventing erosion, and allowing important relationships between soil and plant to continue. The Land Institute attempts to breed plants not presently used in agriculture into effective producers of perennial grains in intercropping conditions. Jackson argued that this version of agriculture used "nature as model", and to pursue that end The Land Institute has studied prairie ecology.

Entering its third decade, The Land Institute is beginning to demonstrate progress in developing the perennial crops called for in the Natural Systems Agriculture model. Programs in wheat, sorghum, and sunflower are generating crop lines displaying both perenniality and agriculturally-significant seed yield. Research on integrating these new plants into polycultures also continues. The Land Institute is not itself developing machinery suitable for one-pass harvesting of grain polycultures. It instead takes the position that integration of existing materials separation technology into harvesters is a straight-forward task, and will be accomplished by public and private agricultural engineers when the demand arrives.

Wes Jackson is the author of several books and is recognized as a leader in the international sustainable agriculture movement. In 1971, Wes Jackson's first efforts to address growing environmental concerns, react to social concerns growing from the Civil Rights movement andopposition to the Vietnam War, and answer student requests for more relevant materials resulted in the environmental reader, Man and the Environment.[1][2] After leaving academia and establishing the Land Institute, Jackson published the book New Roots for Agriculture about looking to natural ecosystems, such as the prairie, to help solve the problem of soil erosion.

• Transition PDX

(((Interesting device. I hope I don’t end up making a lot of use of this.)))

The EyeWriter has won the first FutureEverything Award.

The EyeWriter has been chosen as the winner of the inaugural FutureEverything Award following an online vote by a world-wide community of FutureEverything artists and participants from the past 15 years.

http://futureeverything.org/awards

The EyeWriter is a pair of low-cost eye-tracking glasses that allow artists and graffiti writers with paralysis to draw using only their eyes. Inspired by Tony Quan, a graffiti writer, social activist and publisher who was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (AML) in 2003, The EyeWriter is the result of a collaboration with five other artists and a production company. It is an ongoing project to empower people suffering from degenerative neuromuscular diseases with creative technologies.

Tony Quan comments: “Art is a tool of empowerment and social change, and I consider myself blessed to be able to create and use my work to promote health reform, bring awareness about ALS and help others.”

The EyeWriter beat two other shortlisted projects: Open_Sailing, an international community trying to develop the International_Ocean_Station as an open-source project, developing hardware and software to enable intelligent human activities at sea; and Amphibious Architecture, a visual interface floating on the water’s surface, creating a looking glass into the aquatic ecosystem.

Drew Hemment, Director of FutureEverything comments: “We were delighted with the high calibre and diversity of submissions for the debut FutureEverything Award, which was launched to celebrate outstanding innovation in art, society and technology. This yearís winner demonstrates extraordinary creativity, imagination and ingenuity.”

The winning candidate will receive a £10,000 cash prize and the FutureEverything Trophy, presented at the Awards Ceremony, a Gala event staged during the FutureEverything festival from 12 to 15 May.

EyeWriter website http://www.eyewriter.org

Southeast Portland-based apparel company Retro, has inked a licensing deal with The New Yorker to release two cycling jerseys based on the magazine’s iconic cover art. It’s just the latest licensing deal for Retro, a company that has found success by designing and marketing bike jerseys to a global market.

Retro, formerly known as Retro Image Apparel, says the jerseys will be available June 1st as part of The New Yorker’s 85th anniversary celebration. The two designs are based on art by American artist Theodore G. Haupt and Spanish artist Ana Juan. Check out the designs below:

Retro set up shop in Portland in early 2009, after moving here from Seattle Washington. CEO Roger Mallette started the company in 2002 and has grown it from a home-based operation to a major concern. Retro has secured licensing deals with many microbreweries (including Portland’s Lucky Lab) and other brands including Whole Foods, Urban Outfitters, JetBlue Airways, and more. Their jerseys are available in 450 stores across the country.

Check them out at RetroImageApparel.com.