Sanitation!

The competition is on! Make Sanitation Sexy.
The Search for the Obvious is a great site acknowledging our built environment.

"We believe in the power of creativity to better the world. Instead of seeing problems, a creative mind sees obvious solutions. Look around you and you'll find all sorts of solutions to problems that once seemed impossible. Now Acumen Fund needs YOU to help change how the world is addressing poverty by showing that there's a better way."

Collaborative Consumption

Book: What's Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption
Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in swapping, sharing, bartering, trading and renting being reinvented in ways relevant to the Facebook age.

Underdome

Underdome:  a project that identifies a range of positions on energy and public life and assigns to each a corresponding architectural icon.

"The guide’s taxonomy covers the political, spatial, and cultural dimensions of energy, and revolves around four main topics: “Power” asks how governments, corporations, organizations and individuals have the potential to restructure energy performance. “Territory” asks how energy transforms and is transformed by the changing networks of today’s metropolis. “Lifestyle” asks what kind of norms and behavior energy performance schemes imagine. And lastly, “Risk,” as a kind of meta-category that cuts across these other fields, asks how we weigh priorities among a diverse set of interests and contingencies."

interview here

Mapping your path

In celebration of the 106th birthday of New York Cities subway system, The New York Times posted a great interactive website that asks people to create their own maps of how they get around using the Subway system. Above, Milton Glaser's own "mental map" of NYC.

Resilient City Design Competition

http://www.resilientcity.org/

"ResilientCity.org is a not-for-profit network of architects, urban planners and designers, engineers, and landscape architects focused on developing creative, practical, and implementable planning and building design strategies that help address one of our century's most important challenges: namely, dealing with the significant future problems that will be associated with the impacts of climate change and energy transition in the context of human settlement"

Small-House Utopia

The Home for the New Economy was announced at the International Builders’ Show. So interesting to see the building climate change in what seems like a blink of an eye.

Nice write up about it all by Andrew Rice here

Suburbia Reborn

And the results are in: "Build a Better Suburb"
read more about it here

Pushing Green in the Heartland

There were some really important points that came up in the recent article in the New York Times by Leslie Kaufman. The tools and techniques that we use to adjust peoples perceptions and behaviors of the environment and the impact our built environment can have on it are not "one fits all."

Coming from this part of the world myself, one can only image that using Al Gore, Climate Change Science and environmentalism isn't a way to get people to listen... instead

"Ms. Jackson settled on a three-pronged strategy. Invoking the notion of thrift, she set out to persuade towns to compete with one another to become more energy-efficient. She worked with civic leaders to embrace green jobs as a way of shoring up or rescuing their communities. And she spoke with local ministers about “creation care,” the obligation of Christians to act as stewards of the world that God gave them, even creating a sermon bank with talking points they could download."

...brilliant

read whole article here

Smart Mobility

Transportation for America has recently posted some interesting case studies on transportation. What is of interest is their look at excess capacity and the rubric they use in exploring it: increased efficiency, travel options, better information, pricing and payments and trip reduction. How can we learn from their industry and apply these tools for other industries/infrastructures in need of rethinking, redesign...?

Tektonomastics

Tektonomastics:  “tekto-” — Greek for “building” — with “onomastics” — the study of the history and origin of proper names.

Great project in New York that is identifying residential buildings bringing to light a forgotten landscape, a new digital historical record and simply as a means of getting to know your hood.

Urban Omnibus article link