Landscape of Energy

Landscapes of Energy 

Edited by Rania Ghosn.

Energy infrastructures deploy space at a large scale, yet they remain invisible because the creation of value in the oil regime has long externalized spatial costs, sliding them out of sight and away from design's agency. Contemporary environmental, political, and financial crises have brought energy once again to the forefront of design concerns. Rarely, however, do practices of sustainable design-efficient building skins, islands of self-sufficiency, positive-energy machines-address the spatiality of energy systems. Instead, they tend to emphasize a renewable/nonrenewable binary that associates environmental costs exclusively with the infrastructure of oil and overlooks the geographic imperative of all forms of energy.

Volume 2 of New Geographies proposes to historicize and materialize the relations of energy and space, and map some of the physical, social, and representational geographies of oil, in particular. By making visible this infrastructure, Landscapes of Energy is an invitation to articulate design's environmental agency and its appropriate scales of intervention.

Shrinking City

Article: New York Times by David Streitfeld

"a model for a different era". From expansion with development to developing with shrinkage. Flint, Michigan talk about using land banks to covert abandoned, foreclosed properties into natural landscape, saving money, condesing the town and ultimately rethinking the American city.

“If it’s going to look abandoned, let it be clean and green,” he said. “Create the new Flint forest — something people will choose to live near, rather than something that symbolizes failure.”

land banks: (taken from this U. of Michigan site by Jessica de Wit) A land bank is a public authority created to efficiently hold, manage and develop tax-foreclosed property.(1) Land banks act as a legal and financial mechanism to transform vacant, abandoned and tax-foreclosed property back to productive use. Generally, land banks are funded by local governments' budgets or the management and disposition of tax-foreclosed property.(2) In addition, a land bank is a powerful locational incentive, which encourages redevelopment in older communities that generally have little available land and neighborhoods that have been blighted by an out-migration of residents and businesses.(3) While a land bank provides short-term fiscal benefits, it can also act as a tool for planning long-term community development. Successful land bank programs revitalize blighted neighborhoods and direct reinvestment back into these neighborhoods to support their long-term community vision.

Related:
Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective Program, University of California, Berkeley

USA Today Article

Mini-Gulf Courses for a City in Recession

Queens:

Miniaturized Entertainment? Whats going on with all the putt-putt courses?
Downsized Golf...manageable landscapes?
















Governors Island:














Brooklyn:

Food Traceability

Farm 776: Linking object with landscape...connecting food with its source.

Forging a Hot Link

"Beginning this month, customers who buy its all-purpose whole wheat flour ... can go to findthefarmer .com, enter the lot code printed on the side of the bag, and visit with the company’s farmers and even ask them questions."

other sources:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/04/do_you_know_whe.php

Toy... - Land

http://www.toyotawhynot.com/#/home

(Built) Environment and Landscape used as representation of values, image and business strategy.

I love how they say it all begins with you.

bigger citys, bigger forests

New Jungles Prompt a Debate on Rain Forests
New York Times Article by Elisabeth Rosenthal

With over half of the world's population now living in cities, will the jungles be saved?
This interesting article discusses the issue of how farmers are leaving their deforested agricultural plots and heading to the cities, allowing the jungles to return.

Rosenthal states: "By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster."

Building Landscapes

Academy of Sciences Museum in San Francisco, CA
The rooftop mimics surrounding hills, while planted with native plants
Mounds reflect the planetarium and rain forest exhibits within.

Seed Project

David Cohen's The Seed Project

This "art" project asks people to plant organic basil seeds anywhere and everywhere. Its invites one to take the element of nature and imposes it upon the more "unnatural" environments within our everyday lives.

In regards to our urban environment, existing visual cues of "natural" have become so urbane that many fail to even recognize it as plant life. This project shakes up your daily commutes, questioning place, location and purpose of plant life in our built environments.










In a time of extreme greenwashing, what are the new visual cues of true environmental action?
What locations, programs, buildings, forms of employment within a concrete jungle of a city can programmed for understanding basic living processes?
What new forms of urban gardening can harvest not only moments of contemplation, but todays lunch?

Similar movements:
Guerrilla Gardners

Mapping "Real" America

image link

In this time of heightened political commentary, I never expected it to enter into a blog concerned with urban design. But as we have all come to understand, all things are political. So, it is of great interest to me hearing the Republican vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin's comments regarding a "real America." And, daring to take it seriously, ask, what is and where is this "real America"


















here is one patch of it


In scouring the internet, I could find no "list" of Palin's speaking engagements, in seeking a literal "road map" of her "real america." The attached images are mostly cartoon satires, but, help to illustrate my inquiry.

What is this conceptual landscape of "real America?" Who or what makes up this identification? Is it based on location? urban form? density? can it be defined architecturally? Or is it census based: education, ethnicity, age, economic tier, religion...?

What images come up for us with the comment of "real America?" With red and blue states, how deep is our identification of the (new?) political landscape of the USA?

Is this "real America" an imaginary (virtual) reality?















image link