Stackable Electric Paris City Cars Save Energy and Space

Small electric cars could transform the world’s big cities from pollution factories to clean, green, efficient metropolises. But one electric vehicle idea takes that concept even further, making a fleet of rental EVs stackable to eliminate the need for vast parking lots, increasing the availability of green space for urban residents.

Designer Taylor Manuilow created the City Car with Paris in mind, imagining an all-electric vehicle that would be available to rent in at all metro stations and other areas around the city.

From Ecofriend:

The cars will be stacked along with a kiosk, which will be used by the commuter to enter the details of his or her commute. New users will have to sign up for using the service initially after which all their commutes will be charged on their credit cards.

Once the details are entered in the kiosk, the system will allow the user to drive one car. On entering the car the user will have the option to change the colors of the interiors or the position of the seats according to his or her requirements. At the end of the commute the user will have to leave the car at the closest kiosk, where the car’s onboard batteries will automatically be recharged, gearing it up for the next user.

For most urban residents and visitors, this sort of transportation – in addition to walking, bicycling and public transportation – is all that is needed to get around. Imagine how much more pleasant cities would be if personal vehicles were limited and almost everyone used a system like this.  It would be like breathing in crisp, clean country air in comparison to the gritty, polluted air that we deal with now.

Link [Ecofriend]

Wind Turbines to Become Part of Paris’ Picturesque Skyline

The historic skyline of Paris will soon look a bit different after the addition of a few small wind turbines, which will be installed to take advantage of strong winds that pass through such high points as Montmartre.

From Reuters:

“We are not talking of big models like those we see in the countryside. We are in Paris and we musn’t disfigure the landscape,” Denis Baupin, a deputy mayor in charge of sustainable development, told Le Parisien newspaper.

The turbines in Paris will produce electricity which will be sold to the state-owned utility EDF or directly used in the buildings where they will be installed, Baupin said.

Baupin said the city’s authorities were also studying setting up water turbines under the capital’s bridges of the Seine river.

“The first tests will start in 2011 or 2012,” he said.

With Parisians so eager to preserve the beauty of their city, you can bet that this will end up a great example of how wind power can be implemented in a subtle way. If it works in Paris, it can work in virtually any other city in the world that gets a reasonable amount of wind – and that will be a great way to put a sock in the mouths of NIMBY complainers.

Link [Reuters]
Photo credit: Flickr user Rahims

Self-Sustainable City of Green Rings to be Built in South Korea

Gwanggyo, a new city to be built south of Seoul, South Korea, will get a futuristic, green city center designed by Dutch architecture group MVRDV. The town is planned to be self-sufficient, with 77,000 inhabitants, and the buildings in its center will be unlike any others in the world. MVRDV won a competition to design the city center.

From Meta Efficient:

The architects say that all the elements of the city center will be design as rings, and “by pushing these rings outwards, every part of the program receives a terrace for outdoor life.”

Box hedges will be planted on the terraces and roofs of the buildings. The intention is to improve ventilation, and reduce energy and water usage.

The shifting of the floors causes as a counter effect hollow cores that form large atriums. They serve as lobbies for the housing and offices, plazas for the shopping center and halls for the museum and leisure functions. In each tower a number of voids connect to the atrium providing for light and ventilation and creating semi-public spaces.

 

Interesting concept… with the rings of greenery and large glass walls, you feel a connection with the outdoors no matter what floor you’re on. Such a design would practically eliminate the claustrophobic feeling one can get when surrounded by concrete and steel in city environments. Details on exactly how the city would be self-sustainable are thin, but it will be interesting to see how this concept will translate to real life once it’s completed in 2011.

Link [Meta Efficient]

Segway and GM Debut 2-Wheeled ‘PUMA’ Vehicle

General Motors is under a lot of pressure to come up with green transportation solutions, and they’ve apparently decided that the way of the future is the Segway. Well, sort of. GM and Segway debuted a prototype of a 2-wheeled, 2-seat electric vehicle that’s like a sitting version of the traditional Segway design. It’s called the Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility (PUMA) project, and it’s part of a larger plan that could revolutionize urban transportation.

From The Huffington Post:

The Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility, or PUMA, project also would involve a vast communications network that would allow vehicles to interact with each other, regulate the flow of traffic and prevent crashes from happening.

The 300-pound prototype runs on a lithium-ion battery and uses Segway’s characteristic two-wheel balancing technology, along with dual electric motors. It’s designed to reach speeds of up to 35 miles-per-hour and can run 35 miles on a single charge.

Ideally, the vehicles would also be part of a communications network that through the use of transponder and GPS technology would allow them to drive themselves. The vehicles would automatically avoid obstacles such as pedestrians and other cars and therefore never crash, Burns said.

A projected cost hasn’t been released, but the companies said it would likely be between one-fourth and one-third the cost of the average traditional vehicle. There’s no time line for production and GM concedes that it would take a while to get that kind of communications infrastructure in place, but it hopes that they can start out in places like college campuses.

Hopefully they’ll make a few changes to the design – there needs to be at least a little room for groceries or luggage, and it should be enclosed or offer that option. This kind of vehicle would dramatically change how traffic works in urban environments – can you imagine how much cleaner and more efficient it would be? And it would probably appeal to people who aren’t normally into riding bicycles for safety and comfort reasons.

It’s a good start, but perhaps GM should also work on technology that could apply to the entire nation, not just urban areas – and create vehicles that A) have a hope of selling within the near future and B) aren’t as expensive as the Chevy Volt.

Link [The Huffington Post]

It’s Official: Urbanites Produce Less CO2 than Rural Residents

You’ve got a small home in the country surrounded by organic farmland or gardens, producing much of your own food and even supplementing your electricity with renewable power. You’ve gone green in as many ways as you can – so why is your carbon footprint still bigger than that of your city-dwelling cousin? Much of it comes down to land use and transportation.

A new report by the International Institute for Environment and Development has confirmed that urbanites generate significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions than those who live in rural and suburban areas.

From Yale 360:

While the high concentration of population and businesses found in cities are often seen as a pollution “problem,” researchers found that “high densities and large population concentrations can also bring a variety of advantages for … environmental management.” For instance, while New York City emitted 58.3 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2005, the per capita average of 7.1 tons was about a third of the national average of 23.92 tons per capita in 2004, according to the study. The density of buildings and high use of public transportation in New York contributes to the lower individualemissions, according to the report. Likewise, the 2006 per capita emissions average in London was about 6.18 tons – about 55 percent of the UK’s 2004 average of 11.19 tons.

It makes sense. After all, people who live in suburban and rural areas have to drive pretty much everywhere, and that has a huge impact on carbon footprint. While rural residents who need to run to the market for a forgotten dinner ingredient will have to get in their car and travel for miles, urbanites can simply walk down the street in many cases. Plus, urban dwellings tend to be vertical, taking up less land.

We’ll always have people living in rural areas, and that’s okay – but urban living is more eco-friendly in so many ways. The green cities of the future will revolve around public transportation, walkability and vertical housing and as more people move from the suburbs to the cities, it’s quite  likely that we’ll see a big decrease in overall carbon emissions.

Link [Yale 360]

Los Angeles Switching to LED Street Lights

The street lights in L.A. will get a little brighter – and greener – this summer, when the city plans to switch to LEDs. It’s being billed as the largest effort by a U.S. city to reduce pollution by retrofitting incandescent street lights to be more energy-efficient.  The city will begin the replacement process this July, and it will continue over a 5-year period.

Former President Bill Clinton was on hand as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa unveiled the plan on Monday, calling it “a great day in Los Angeles”.

From MSNBC:

The project is expected to reduce carbon emissions by 40,500 tons and save $10 million annually.

“This is the best place in the world — in the U.S. at least — to lead this,” Clinton said, citing the city’s ongoing environmental efforts. “This is like taking 6,000 cars off the road.

“If every major city followed your lead, we could eliminate 2 1/2 coal-fired power plants.”

Villaraigosa hailed the effort, saying it would help make Los Angeles the “cleanest, greenest big city in the U.S. We are building a bridge to a sustainable future.”

Of course, Los Angeles has a long way to go to be the ‘greenest big city in the U.S.’, especially considering its smog problems and lack of decent public transportation. But, this effort is definitely commendable. Imagine if more cities did this – the impact would be tremendous. Keep it up, LA!

Link [MSNBC]
Photo credit: Flickr user jondoeforty1

Green Blog of the Week: WebUrbanist

If you’ve never visited WebUrbanist before, prepare to spend a lot of time there. It’s got the kind of fascinating material that pulls you in and before you know it, hours have passed while you sat there drooling over Creative Steampunk Art, Design and Fashion and 20 Examples of Hilariously Geeky Art and Graffiti: From Mr. Spock to Stephen Colbert. WebUrbanist features the best urban design, culture, travel, architecture and alternative art on the web with eye-catching photos and snappy, succinct writing.

Better yet, WebUrbanist regularly features green art, design and technology, covering topics ranging from 7 Modern Wonders of Green Technology and Great Green Roofs to Strange Green Vehicles and Creative Green Arbosculpture. It’s all the coolest green stuff, distilled down to display the best of the best.

From WebUrbanist:

We scour the net to find neat new stuff then boil that information down and pack it into an article with relevant images and links, as exhaustive as we can manage on a single subject area. Our team is comprised of web designers, bloggers, architects and other curious urbanists.

WebUrbanist has multiple articles per week. The emphasis is on quality, well-researched and fully sourced articles on whatever the subject is. This is not a blog in the traditional sense (of many smaller posts on a daily basis). It is, rather, a collective online urban magazine which we hope you will enjoy every time you open your inbox or feed reader or visit our site.

Don’t take our word for it – get lost in the addictive posts yourself. Sign up to receive the site’s email updates so you don’t miss out (on the home page).

Link [WebUrbanist]

Vertical Farms are Beautiful and Productive

Imagine walking along a city street, looking up at the tall buildings around you and seeing beautiful hues of green, red, purple and other vibrant colors through glass windowpanes instead of just concrete and steel. Vertical farms wouldn’t just be a super smart way to grow local food in urban environments – they’re pretty, too. And, they’re well on their way to becoming reality.

From ecofriend:

Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, hopes to make these zucchini-in-the-sky visions a reality. Dr. Despommier’s pet project is the “vertical farm,” a concept he created in 1999 with graduate students in his class on medical ecology, the study of how the environment and human health interact. The idea, which has captured the imagination of several architects in the United States and Europe in the past several years, just caught the eye of another big city dreamer: Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president.

Stringer’s office is “sketching out what it would take to pilot a vertical farm,” and plans to pitch a feasibility study to the mayor’s office within the next couple of months, he said. While many believe that the potential concept is being given outlandish shape and form which is both unrealistic and not probable, I’m willing for now to go ahead with the concept of all this. After seeing what I have seen take shape in Dubai, improbable structures no longer exist in my vision and I’m willing to believe that very soon I will pick my apple from the 16th floor-West Block!

These artist renderings show some of the incredible ideas being developed. Design is getting greener and smarter!

Link [ecofriend]

The Slow Death of a City Block in St. Louis

“At any given time, there are about 6,000 abandoned buildings in St. Louis.”

BuiltStLouis.net laments the deterioration of what was once a city bustling with life, full of people and activity, but is now full of desolate urban landscapes punctuated by plywood boards over windows and piles of jagged bricks from demolitions. The worst part is the northern half of the city, which shows the most evidence of decay. BuiltStLouis.net has documented the fall of the 1900 block of Montgomery Street with painstaking detail, complete with drawings of how the area originally looked back in 1875 and how it looks now.

From BuiltStLouis.net:

The 1900 block of Montgomery Street is a textbook case, an ordinary residential block in the St. Louis Place neighborhood. At upper left, you see how it looked in 1875, its formative years, as captured in Compton and Dry’s perspective atlas of the city. It is a burgeoning urban environment: dense, walkable, human-scaled, full of sturdy red brick buildings. The block was alive, the buildings continuous from one corner to the other.

Today, 130 years later, only the shaded ones remain.

The devastation is so widespread that it’s hard to grasp how much has been lost. You visit 1900 Montgomery today, and you see 6 buildings, with spacious grass lots between them. You accept it and move on, thinking no further of it. And when another one succumbs to fire or wind or gravity or the bulldozer, you shrug. “It’s just one building,” they always say. Yes, one building…. one after another, and another, and another, and another, and another… thousands of anothers.

BuiltStLouis.net calls this story of decay ‘a disintegration of the urban fabric’. What was once a ‘series of connected outdoor rooms’ in a densely populated urban space is now practically devoid of life. The city is no longer walkable – retailers have long since moved. St. Louis certainly isn’t alone in this situation – so many other urban centers across America have seen the same thing happen. Perhaps there’s hope, though – as people begin to move toward walkable urban communities again, perhaps areas like these will be revitalized.

Check out BuiltStLouis.net for more details and photos.

Link [BuiltStLouis.net]

Tough Old Lady Wouldn’t Move Despite Encroaching Development

All Edith Macefield wanted was to live – and die – in peace in her tiny cottage in Ballard, just outside Seattle, Washington. Edith saw her residential neighborhood turn into an industrial area around her over the decades, and refused to move when developers tried to buy her out. She had been offered nearly a million dollars to move and allow her home to be bulldozed, but she didn’t want it. In her mid-eighties, Edith didn’t want to be forced out of her home to live out her remaining days in a foreign place.

When an area reporter wrote about her story in the paper in 2006, Edith received letters and flowers from all over the world.

From The Seattle Times:

“I’m no hero,” she said. “I meant it. I just want to be left alone.”

Edith died Sunday, at 86. She died in the tiny cottage she had refused to leave, not for a million bucks.

“She got what she wanted,” said Charlie Peck, a longtime friend. “She wanted to die at home, in the same house, on the same couch, where her mother had died. That’s what she was so stubborn about.”

He said she was never trying to stick it to The Man. Or to make any larger statement against development or money or anything else.

Yet to look at her house today, it’s hard not to be impressed by her iron will, no matter her motivation.

Today it sits walled in on three sides by what will be a five-story health club and a Trader Joe’s.

Edith has no known relatives, and it’s believed that she left the property to the senior construction superintendent for Ledcor, the company that’s been building up around her house. He had been taking care of her. It’s unknown what will happen to the house now – friends would like to see it preserved as a reminder of Edith and ‘Old Ballard’, the way it was when the home was surrounded by other homes and not 5-story concrete complexes.

What a cool story. That is definitely some iron will – to stay in the house despite construction going on literally right outside your windows.

Link [The Seattle Times]
Photo credit: ALAN BERNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES

‘New Urbanism’ Taking Over the Suburban American Dream

Livin’ in the suburbs ain’t what it used to be. Where once there was an endless parade of ‘little boxes on the hillside’ – with their flawless emerald carpets of grass, shiny SUVs in each driveway and children riding their bicycles along the sidewalks – now has become dotted with abandoned buildings, overgrown grass, graffiti and caution tape. American suburbs are starting to look like the alt-timeline version of Marty’s hometown in Back to the Future: desolate and crime-ridden.

The suburban American dream is dying, helped in no small part by the subprime mortgage crisis and perhaps set to be finished by ever-rising energy costs. While some may mourn this picturesque model of American living and all of the Norman Rockwell nostalgia that goes along with it, others are seeing a better future in urban living. What many people are finding is that urban life is the sustainable model of living that will help us cut back on pollution and preserve what’s left of our untouched land.

CNN has more:

This change can be witnessed in places like Atlanta, Georgia, Detroit, Michigan, and Dallas, Texas, said Leinberger, where once rundown downtowns are being revitalized by well-educated, young professionals who have no desire to live in a detached single family home typical of a suburbia where life is often centered around long commutes and cars.

Instead, they are looking for what Leinberger calls “walkable urbanism” — both small communities and big cities characterized by efficient mass transit systems and high density developments enabling residents to walk virtually everywhere for everything — from home to work to restaurants to movie theaters.

The so-called New Urbanism movement emerged in the mid-90s and has been steadily gaining momentum, especially with rising energy costs, environmental concerns and health problems associated with what Leinberger calls “drivable suburbanism” — a low-density built environment plan that emerged around the end of the World War II and has been the dominant design in the U.S. ever since.

Experts are anticipating a major structural change in the way we live, driven by the desire for walkable communities that keep us close to everything we need to live our daily lives – public transportation, employment, shopping and recreation. It’ll take a while for the country to catch up, since governmental regulations and zoning laws will have to be adjusted to allow for high-density developments, but after a while it’s expected that all of those suburban McMansions will get divided up into multi-family housing for the poor.

Many people will see this as gentrification of our urban centers, and fear that the spirit of many of our cities will be compromised. It generally does happen that as downtown real estate is purchased by developers to turn into condos or other high-end spaces, the colorful small businesses that once flourished are forced out. Hopefully, cities will make an effort to retain diversity in urban areas so that in the process of ‘new urbanism’, our cities don’t turn into gleaming re-arranged versions of the stereotypical homogenized suburban neighborhood.

Link [CNN]
Photo credit: Jim Zarroli/NPR

Namba Parks: Awesome Green Architecture in Japan

Does this look like the future, or what? One of the major drawbacks to living in an urban area, in my opinion, is the lack of sufficient green space. I find all the concrete and asphalt depressing – I need nature. Architecture that incorporates green space into the design can be a big draw to get people into urban centers and putting a stop to suburban sprawl. I would love to see more buildings like this worldwide.

The details from MetaEfficient:

In a city with few green spaces, Namba Parks is a welcome swath of green for the inhabitants of Osaka. Check out this full size photo of this amazing piece of architecture. The complex stands where Osaka’s baseball stadium used to be until 2003, and consists of a 30-floor skyscraper, Parks Tower, and a shopping mall with eight floors of terraced gardens. The sloping park connects to the street, welcoming passers-by to enjoy its groves of trees, clusters of rocks, cliffs, lawn, streams, waterfalls, ponds and outdoor terraces.

Link [MetaEfficient]
Photo credit: Flickr user A Posh Sentinel

Billy Knows a Tree When He Googles One: The Soccer Mom Syndrome

The big ass Chevy Suburban that just cut you off is not dangerous because of the cell phone-jabbing, 5′2″ super housewife behind the wheel. The real danger lives behind those tinted rear windows, in the murky back seat region, where billions of microchips and processors compete for the attention of the one little whiny occupant who reigns supreme. Fumbling from Gameboy to iPod to DVD remote control, it’s a wonder little Billy even finds the time to allow a finger to break free and troll after those boogers that are just dying to get out. Our little friend has driven through the forest a billion times, but has yet to so much as touch a tree.

In his discussion at the Aspen Environment Forum, EO Wilson (Pellegrino Research Professor in Entomology at Harvard) blamed the group that he lovingly referred to as “soccer moms” for the declining interest in nature and the environment amongst children.

DiscoverMagazine.com reports:

Wilson filled more than an hour of questions and answers with witty remarks and barbs. And to be sure, his tone was playful. Yet, there was a seriousness behind his “soccer mom” remarks that struck a cord with many people in the audience: Have children been largely cut off from nature because of technology?

Many people agreed that they have, with video games, the Internet and structured play times replacing — as comedian George Carlin commented in a recent skit — sitting outside in a yard with a stick wondering how to entertain themselves.

If Wilson is right, little urban zombies like Billy will one day rule the world, able to leap tall logarithmic search engines in a single bound, but stupidly worthless when it comes to differentiating between an acorn and a pine cone. These are tomorrow’s Republican Senators and Governors.

Links [Discover Magazine] & [The Aspen Environment Forum]

Photo credit: Flickr user MonkeyLeo13