What: The Cultural Landscape Foundation and the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society are hosting Civic Horticulture When: Friday, May 17th, 2013 at 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Where: University of the Arts, Gershman Hall, Levitt Auditorium: 401 South Broad Street (corner of Broad & Pine St) in Philadelphia, PA For Whom: This should be of interest to […]
Tag Archives: environment
Madrid Shows a Grand Vision by Reclaiming Its River Front
Oftentimes, massive transportation projects like bridges and highways can do more harm to a city than good. While they may bring efficiencies in the movement of people and resources, they can also end up marring a city permanently, dividing neighborhoods and bringing few quality of life improvements for residents. In contrast, some projects, like New York […]
What’s next for urban planners?
As discussed in two recent blogposts, Fringe Planning and Community, the planning profession is at a distinct crossroads. Our short history of little more than 150 years has resulted in only a couple of major paradigm shifts: the grand City Beautiful designs, Modernism’s clean-slate, and oft-reactionary Participatory movement. Mired in politicization and NIMBYism, sustainability and resiliency planning […]
Edward Burtynsky and his photographs
Edward Burtynsky, the renowned Canadian photographer has been taking pictures of man-made landscapes for more than 30 years. His photographs are massive prints of 40×50 inches, capturing the large-scale of human foot print left by industrial activity of past hundred years. Burtynsky is an artist whose work displays majestic beauty with technical sophistication. He is often described as an environmental photographer but his office in […]
Green Metropolis by David Owen
http://www.davidowen.net/ Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability. That one sentence says it all. In 2004, David Owen wrote an article for The New Yorker called “Green Manhattan”. His 2009 book, The Green Metropolis expands on that idea and shows how cities like New York with high population densities […]
Creative Little Garden – East Village, NY
Recently I was in the East Village and stumbled upon this beautiful little garden, tucked away between two five story buildings on East 6th Street (530 East 6 Street). This little slice of paradise is aptly named Creative Little Garden. The garden is planted with ornamental trees and shrubs with several small alcoves where people were sitting […]
What the Federal Government is doing about Climate Change (surprise, it’s not nothing!)
On the current national political scene, climate change is either a punchline or a footnote. However, behind the rhetoric over the economic impact of curbing greenhouse gas emissions and hidden by the debate over the causes and implications of this year’s record temperatures, climate change adaptation planning is actually happening, even at the federal level. […]
Harvard Graduates Mapping Public Toilets in Mumbai Slums.
In a recent NY Times, article, Mapping Toilets in a Mumbai Slums Yields Unexpected Results (India Talk – July22, 2012), Samuel Lowenberg reported about a class of Harvard graduates in public health, mapping public toilets in a Mumbai slum called Cheetah camp. I suspect this isn’t exactly what our young overachievers had in mind when they selected […]
EVENT: Wild Urban Plants, Wed. 7/18, 7:00pm
The Gowanus Canal Conservancy has been hosting a Wednesday Night Lecture Series over the last couple of months. Tonight’s event, and the final of the series, is entitled Wild Urban Plants. The lecture will be given at the 61 Local mezzanine, at 61 Bergen Street, Brooklyn. Admission is $5 or free if you renew or […]
Green House Gas vs. Carbon Footprint and why the difference matters
Global warming caused by environmental degradation is the bane of our times. It will be a paramount concern of our societies for generations to come. There are two ways to measure the impact of our activity on this planet: one is the inventory of Green House Gas (GHG) emissions in a country and the other is the Carbon Footprint (CF) of a […]
