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

DIY Video: How To Rock Your Own Seed Bombing Campaign

Seed bomb away!!!

I played a lot of Army when I was growing up. Start with a bunch of 10 year old boys, throw in some Maine woods, some plastic toy guns, and clumps of mud (or grenades as we thought of them) and you’d get a whole weekend of pure fun.

So seed bombing definitely appeals to the 10 year old in me. Seed bombing is the act of tossing balls of clay, dirt, and seeds into vacant lots and other urban areas in need of some green. After a good rain and some time in the sun the seeds sprout out and make that spot of urban blight just a little bit greener.

Check out this DIY video showing the best way of undertaking your own green guerrilla seed bomb campaign.

Via [FreshCut] & [The See3 Blog]

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