Blogs & Ecology

It is hard to build in Washington DC; there is a lot of history and a lot of approvals required. Surprisingly, it is easier to build there than it is the Canadian wilderness; that is what philanthropist Joseph Hirshhorn found out when he tried to build a new town "planned towards happy living" north of Lake Huron, with Philip Johnson as his architect. Blake Gopnik writes in the Washington Post:

photo thebittenword.com @ flickr

Community Supported Agriculture is now widespread in many U.S. cities and towns- you can find the ones nearest you at the great resource Local Harvest - as a way for farmers to get the economic support they need to keep working producing local (and in many cases) organic fruits and veggies. Of course the other side of it is that eaters get to directly experience local, seasonal produce.

Instead of a CSA, a CSK

A group ride in Istanbul, Turkey. Photo via Bisikletliler Derneği.

Nope, this isn't it - it's a 400-meter-long Dubai advertisement for a real estate development called the Lagoons - not even a third the length of Adrac's billboard.

Vinyl is final, or at least we always used to think so. But advertising and marketing company Adrac, which is trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records for placing the world's longest billboard in the city of Dubai next spring, promises that its 1.5 kilometer long billboard will be environmentally friendly and made from biodegradable PVC plastic.

World's longest billboard will advertise...real estate

Goodmorning got an honorable mention for a bike share program it designed for Brookyn for the Forum for Urban Design.

In New York City only 1% of the city's commuter trips are estimated to be by bicycle. But overall ridership in NYC has increased 344% since 1980.

The still un-named Toronto cyclist who lost his leg last weekend when squeezed between the rear end of a taxi and a signpost (see Taxi Driver Severs Cyclists' Leg in Violent Hit-and-Run) finally was coherent enough to give his statement to the police. The result:

Sultan Ahmed, 38, of Maple, Ontario has been charged with:

1) Criminal negligence causing bodily harm,
2) Dangerous operation causing bodily harm,
3) Fail to stop at scene of accident bodily harm,
4) Attempt to obstruct justice,
5) Aggravated assault,
6) Assault with weapon.

James Russell, architecture critic for Bloomberg, should have been at the Re-Imagining Cities: Urban Design after the age of Oil conference last week, because he certainly has the right idea. He concurs with this writer that the solutions for building in a world with expensive oil won't be high tech but simple and logical, things we have known for centuries and have just ignored. He writes:

Danish Architect/Planner Jan Gehl and Janette Sadik-Khan of the NY DOT recently prepared a report for New York City called "World Class Streets" (PDF here). It suggests that "a vastly disproportionate amount of space is allocated to parking cars than to public seating spaces." For example, Main Street in Flushing squeezes twice as many pedestrians into one-third of the space....

Long-awaited in New York City is the "environmentally conscious" Greenhouse Nightclub on Varick Street in New York City's Soho neighborhood, which had a "soft" opening last week. Greenhouse comes right on the heels of GustOrganic, the first "100%" USDA certified organic bar.

There, but for the grace of God, go I- John Bradford

The late Tim Horton never let anyone push him around, and neither does his eponymous coffee chain. They just body-checked and high-sticked the City of Toronto into submission on its plans to reduce waste, so much of which comes from that one hugely successful chain.

The City calls it a "compromise".

"This allows industry and leaders like Tim Hortons to sit down with the city on how we are actually going to reduce the volume of garbage going into our garbage dumps," said committee chairman Glenn De Baeremaeker "How do we get 365 million coffee cups out of the garbage stream and into the recycling stream?"

Now that Montrealais have gotten a taste of bike sharing, they'll have to wait until next April for the bike share program (formerly Public Bike Sharing System or PBS) to officially roll out.

In the meantime, the program has been re-christened

photo ˜psychoactiveme˜@ flickr.

Look over your own bathroom shelves - you are sure to find more than a few bottles that never got used up, or have never even been used! Reducing that clutter was the goal during a one-week "clay only" challenge taken by this TreeHugger at the behest of Natural Spa Supplies, a UK-based distributor of Rhassoul (montmorillonite) clay. A gimmick on their part, yes, but also a good way to see whether one natural product can meet many needs.

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