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Toys Tell the History of NYC, Up-cycling to Create a Minimalist Closet, and a New Collaboration Cart for Design Charrettes

The Museum of the City of New York has a new exhibit that shows the social his­tory of child­hood in NYC through toys. Do The Green Thing talks about Re-Consuming (we like the up-cycled min­i­mal­ist closet). Hes­ter Street Col­lab­o­ra­tive has made a Col­lab­o­ra­tion Cart to aid in Com­mu­nity Design Char­rettes.

Museum of the City of New York : On the Move: Trans­porta­tion ToysEmbrac­ing the past, present, and future of New York City and cel­e­brat­ing its cul­tural diver­sity, the Museum of the City of New York is Your City Museum! Explore the forces that shaped the city, inves­ti­gate the neigh­bor­hoods and cul­tures that invig­o­rate New York City, and join in shap­ing the future!

via Mcny

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do The Green Thing: A min­i­mal­ist wardrobe for the upcy­clerYou can use bot­tles to make just about any­thing; a green­house, a school even your own island. But this idea is a bit sim­pler and doesn’t require quite so much DIY skill. With just 6 big plas­tic bot­tles and a few screws you can build this clever space sav­ing wardrobe.

via Dothe­green­thing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

House’s col­lab­o­ra­tion cart puts com­mu­nity plan­ning on the streetGrist is proud to present the Change Gang — pro­files of peo­ple who are lead­ing change on the ground toward a more sus­tain­able soci­ety and a greener planet. Some we’ve writ­ten about before; some are new to our pages. Some you’ll have heard of; most you prob­a­bly won’t.

via Grist

Civic Pride T-Shirts, Crowdsourcing the Electoral Redistricting Process, and the Climate Crisis Blame Game

Think Progress asks “Is the Cli­mate Cri­sis Caused by the 7 Bil­lion or the 1 Per­cent?” The Pub­lic Map­ping Project is try­ing to bring more trans­parency to elec­toral redis­trict­ing in New York State.  Ready to shop for gifts already? City Fab­ric has made some great look­ing shirts with NYC maps on them.

Is the Cli­mate Cri­sis Caused by the 7 Bil­lion or the 1 Per­cent?As we reach 7 bil­lion peo­ple, Cli­mate Progress is fea­tur­ing a vari­ety of opin­ions on pop­u­la­tion. – by Ian Angus and Simon But­ler in a Grist repost The approach of [7 bil­lion] mile­stone pro­duced a wave of arti­cles and opin­ion pieces blam­ing the world’s envi­ron­men­tal crises on overpopulation.

via Thinkprogress

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pub­lic Map­ping ProjectThe Pub­lic Map­ping Project seeks to increase pub­lic par­tic­i­pa­tion and trans­parency in redis­trict­ing through the deploy­ment of on-line map­ping tools and edu­ca­tional information.

via Pub­licmap­ping

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

City­Fab­ric® – Wear You Live™ — Lower Man­hat­tan TeeMan­hat­tan is the most densely pop­u­lated region in the United States. The grid of the city was laid out to empha­size the Amer­i­can notion of democracy.

via City­fab­ric

Local Honey, Smart Parking, Urban Homesteading, Street Art Made By Erasing Dirt, and High Line Park Book

NYC DOT will be insti­tut­ing new high tech park­ing man­age­ment in 2012. In other tran­sit news, res­i­den­tial park­ing per­mits are being con­sid­ered. Think Progress rumi­nates on the pluses and minuses of urban home­steading. Moose Ben­jamin Cur­tis scrubs city dirt and grime to make street art. There’s a new book out the mak­ing of the High Line Park. Life­hacker gushes over local honey. Find out where to find a pro­ducer of local honey in your neigh­bor­hood.

Streets­blog New York City » NYC DOT to Roll Out Smart Park­ing Tech in 2012by Noah Kazis on Novem­ber 7, 2011 New York City is mov­ing for­ward with plans to use sen­sors to improve park­ing man­age­ment, along the lines of San Francisco’s pio­neer­ing SFPark sys­tem. The pro­gram will be unveiled next year, Trans­porta­tion Com­mis­sioner Janette Sadik-Khan announced at a con­fer­ence on trans­porta­tion and tech­nol­ogy held last Fri­day at Colum­bia University.

via Streets­blog

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reserved park­ingCity res­i­dents may soon get the exclu­sive right to park on the streets where they live. After years of false starts, state and city leg­is­la­tors are seri­ously look­ing at a plan to estab­lish res­i­den­tial park­ing per­mits in the Big Apple.

via Nypost

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Urban Home­steading is a Pop­u­lar Trend, but It’s also Ruf­fling Some Feath­ersby Cole Mellino Urban home­steading, in which house­holds grow their own food and often raise ani­mals for food in an urban envi­ron­ment, is becom­ing more and more pop­u­lar as peo­ple decide to opt out of our glob­al­ized, indus­tri­al­ized agri­cul­tural sys­tem. Con­cerned about the state of agri­cul­ture and the impact our farm­ing meth­ods are hav­ing on […]

via Thinkprogress

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. Dirt: Street artist scrubs images into the urban land­scapePhoto: c/o MooseS­treet artist Moose Ben­jamin Cur­tis was hav­ing some dif­fi­culty with the police. The offi­cers had just arrested him for cre­at­ing designs on a wall in South Lon­don. But it was com­pli­cated — as things often are when Moose is involved.

via Grist

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alexan­dra Lange: Lessons from the High Line: Observers Room: Design Observer

via Desig­nob­server

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Buy Local Honey to Make Sure You’re Really Get­ting Honey, and Sup­port Local Bee­keep­ersA report by Food Safety News ear­lier this week claims that the major­ity of the honey avail­able in most gro­cery and depart­ment stores in the United States doesn’t legally meet the def­i­n­i­tion of “honey.” It’s been “ultra-filtered,” in order to pro­duce a super-clear prod­uct that won’t crystallize.

via Life­hacker

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Local Honey – Local­Har­vestBees are social insects, cousins of wasps and ants. Bees are very use­ful in nature as flower pol­li­na­tors, and as a side job, they pro­duce lots of good prod­ucts for us, like honey, beeswax, pollen, and royal jelly. Honey has been found to have med­i­c­i­nal qual­i­ties, par­tic­u­larly when applied top­i­cally to burns, wounds, and ulcers.

via Local­har­vest

All along Broadway citizens, artists, community groups and scientists collaborate on ideas for the urban ecosystem

 

 

Broad­way: 1000 Steps

ONGOING thru 2013

Twenty “hubs” dis­persed along the length of Broad­way will serve as sites for col­lab­o­ra­tion between MMStu­dio, research sci­en­tists and other experts, munic­i­pal pol­icy mak­ers, and local com­mu­nity groups. Instal­la­tions that are small in scale but which aggre­gate to reveal the vast net­work of sys­tems vital to a sus­tain­able city, are designed to make sus­tain­abil­ity tan­gi­ble to cit­i­zens at street level and cat­alyze future projects by artists and envi­ron­men­tal design­ers. The sense of incre­men­tal transformation—of many indi­vid­ual instances work­ing together to cre­ate a pow­er­ful cumu­la­tive effect—is the over­ar­ch­ing idea for the project and the basis of its title “1000 Steps”. The cen­tral mes­sage to be com­mu­ni­cated – gen­er­ated out of a year-long col­lab­o­ra­tion with a pres­ti­gious sci­en­tific and com­mu­nity advi­sory board – is that nature is every­where and in action at all times, that the city is an urban ecosys­tem, that an innu­mer­able num­ber of small deci­sions over time have shaped the envi­ron­ment to be the one we inhabit today, and that our deci­sions (behav­ioral choices) impact the future of all of nature.

To ensure the qual­ity of infor­ma­tion being com­mu­ni­cated, Mary Miss Stu­dio has formed part­ner­ships with senior per­son­nel at NASA God­dard Insti­tute for Space Sci­ence, Cen­ter for Research on Envi­ron­men­tal Deci­sions at the Earth Insti­tute of Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity, The Insti­tute for Sus­tain­able Cities at CUNY, the Waller­stein Col­lab­o­ra­tive for Envi­ron­men­tal Edu­ca­tion at NYU, and with the writer Tony Hiss. The part­ners have met monthly to develop learn­ing goals, shape the infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing frame­work that informs the deploy­ment of art mark­ings, and curate the spe­cific infor­ma­tion that will be included at each hub. In order to secure munic­i­pal part­ner­ships, per­mits, and per­mis­sions, there is an ongo­ing dia­logue with the Depart­ment of Plan­ning, Depart­ment of Parks and Recre­ation, Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion, Depart­ment of Build­ings, Depart­ment of Cul­tural Affairs, and the Mayor’s Office of Long Term Plan­ning and Sustainability.

Read about the First Houses, the LES housing complex where public housing began.

Life In A Land­mark: Pio­neer­ing Pub­lic Hous­ing Site Shows Its Age – City Lim­its Mag­a­zine – CityLim​its​.orgMcQueen thinks only of try­ing to make it up the stairs as he slowly shuf­fles to his fourth floor apart­ment. There are no ele­va­tors here and he con­cen­trates as he swings his legs on step after step, cradling his crutches in one hand and the rail­ing in the next, slightly wheezing.

via Citylim­its