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A rare bastion for a true “first nature” park in the Bronx

Nat­ural water and the “old growth” for­est make the New York Botan­i­cal Gar­den one of the city’s last untouched places of nat­ural beauty. (Photo Credit: DNAinfo)

A few weeks back, we pub­lished a piece on first and sec­ond nature ele­ments within the city, focus­ing on parks as unnat­ural, but green ele­ments within the urban frame­work. The cen­tral the­sis was that parks, although they embody the qual­i­ties of nature, are the prod­ucts of human design and inge­nu­ity, and were delib­er­ately placed within the city, as opposed to being rem­nants of the city’s untouched nat­ural state. To reit­er­ate some of the key terms from that arti­cle, “first nature” refers to the orig­i­nal nat­ural ele­ments of a space, and “sec­ond nature” refers to both human inser­tions into, and manip­u­la­tions of said nat­ural space. Con­tin­u­ing on the that theme is this piece, a spot­light on the New York Botan­i­cal Gar­den (NYBG) in the Bronx.

In addi­tion to hold­ing some of the world’s top research facil­i­ties for botanists and what is basi­cally an exten­sive museum of plants, the NYBG is also home to some­thing truly unique in New York, or really any city. 50 of the garden’s 250 acres of land are com­prised of “old-growth” foresta­tion. This means that 20% of the NYBG’s space is full of trees, green­ery and poten­tially wildlife that have been left untouched by defor­esta­tion and urban devel­op­ment. These trees, arguably the thick­est in the five bor­oughs, were here when Henry Hud­son first explored what would become New Ams­ter­dam. Last year, the NYBG staff com­pleted an exhaus­tive sur­vey of plant and wildlife diver­sity in the for­est, and the area was for­mally ded­i­cated as the Thain Fam­ily Forest.

The Botan­i­cal Garden’s green­house and lab­o­ra­tory facil­ity (Photo Credit: CityPro​file​.com)

While the sec­ond­hand effects of urbanization—acid rain, air pol­lu­tion, etc.—have cer­tainly impacted the for­est, and it also faces prob­lems with inva­sive species of plant life, it remains one of the city’s few extant first nature ele­ments. Obvi­ously, the for­est can­not take care of itself, and the Botan­i­cal Gar­den requires yearly man­i­cur­ing to main­tain the orig­i­nal for­est. The Gar­dens are staffed with some of the world’s fore­most botan­i­cal experts, and pro­tect­ing this seg­ment of the gar­den is cer­tainly a pri­or­ity for the NYBG.

The NYBG itself is on the U.S. Reg­is­ter of His­toric Places and is a National His­toric Land­mark, but draws only 800,000 vis­i­tors annu­ally, com­pared to 900,000 at the Brook­lyn Botanic Gar­den, and a whop­ping 35 mil­lion for Cen­tral Park in its entirety. While both the BBG and Cen­tral Park are cer­tainly prod­ucts of human-altered “sec­ond nature,” the “first nature” ele­ments within the NYBG and the untouched nat­ural beauty of the old growth for­est make it a one-of-a-kind nat­ural space.

Even the old growth for­est, how­ever, has suf­fered from a com­bi­na­tion of age and the afore­men­tioned second-hand envi­ron­men­tal effects of urban­iza­tion. All in all, though, the forest’s thick leafy trees have sur­vived urban­iza­tion, envi­ron­men­tal pol­lu­tion, extreme weather pat­terns, inva­sive species, and phy­topatho­log­i­cal dis­ease within the NYBG. The old growth shows what the city used to be, and its nat­ural beauty acts as a win­dow to the Bronx’s past. It is impor­tant to note how­ever, that the city’s old­est plants and wildlife, this orig­i­nal foresta­tion, are pro­vided for and pro­tected by the NYBG.

While the trees them­selves might be a part of “first nature”, their very pres­ence, preser­va­tion, and threats to said pres­ence are thanks to “sec­ond nature” human devel­op­ments. There are very few places left in the five bor­oughs that are as untouched, organic, and nat­ural as the old-growth for­est in the Bronx, but it is impor­tant to remem­ber that the future preser­va­tion of “first nature” ele­ments goes beyond tak­ing a hands-off approach to nat­ural beauty. The pol­lut­ing effects and second-hand dam­age pro­duced by cities place an imper­a­tive on envi­ron­men­tal­ists to actively pro­tect and pre­serve those remain­ing “first nature” ele­ments in New York and other cities worldwide.

Nature-culture conference about Central Park

New York has many land­marks that char­ac­ter­ize the city, cap­tur­ing its essence as an envi­ron­ment at the inter­sec­tion of nature and cul­ture. Cen­tral Park is chief among them, for its size, its cen­tral­ity, and its rec­og­niz­abil­ity to tourists. Ubiq­ui­tous in numer­ous clas­sic movies, the park serves as an enor­mous lung for the city, pro­vid­ing fresh air and green views in an oth­er­wise con­crete jun­gle. Its his­tory is deeply inter­est­ing. Per­haps the most inter­est­ing fact about it is that, despite the com­mon con­cep­tion of most parks, Cen­tral Park is actu­ally not nat­ural and its con­struc­tion likely demanded even more time and resources than most New York­ers imag­ine, given that the land used to be an irreg­u­lar area full of swamps, cliffs, and rocky outcroppings.

The Cen­tral Park Con­ser­vancy is tak­ing advan­tage of this com­pli­cated his­tory by offer­ing a con­fer­ence on Fri­day, Octo­ber 5th focused on the park’s wood­lands, design, man­age­ment, and stew­ard­ship.  The six hour con­fer­ence will be held at the Museum of the City of New York and many archi­tects will have the oppor­tu­nity to attend and learn how to bridge the gap between nature and culture.

Photo: The Cul­tural Land­scape Foundation

Storefront’s post-Olympic city

Cor­re­spond­ing to the advent of the Olympic Games in Lon­don, the Store­front for Art and Archi­tec­ture has cre­ated  a “Post-Olympic city” exhi­bi­tion dis­play­ing the work of pho­tog­ra­pher Jon Pack and film­maker Gary Hus­twit. Pack and Hus­twit are work­ing to doc­u­ment the legacy of the Olympic Games in a vari­ety of host cities, using pho­tog­ra­phy, video, and mem­o­ra­bilia. So far, the duo has doc­u­mented the Games in Athens, Barcelona, Mex­ico City, Los Ange­les, Mon­treal, Lake Placid, Rome, and Sara­jevo; and they plan on vis­it­ing Bei­jing, Moscow, Berlin, and Lon­don. They are cur­rently com­pil­ing their work in a book that will be avail­able in the spring of 2013. On August 14th , the Store­front hosted an event where the artists and a group of knowl­edge­able pan­elists dis­cussed the effects of the Olympics on host cities once the Clos­ing Cer­e­mony is over. 

The pan­elists and the audi­ence dis­cussed the cases where host cities were able to cre­ate sus­tain­able infra­struc­ture— and the cases where cities spent bil­lions just to dis­man­tle every­thing they had spent bil­lions to build. Mex­ico City is an exam­ple of a city that ben­e­fited from the ’68 Olympics, tripling in size and, sig­nif­i­cantly, con­tin­ues to use the sta­di­ums it con­structed. It’s uni­ver­sally con­sid­ered an honor to host Olympics, but that is not the only rea­son cities bid for the Olympics. They often receive fed­eral money and spon­sor­ship to help build infra­struc­ture, such as sub­way sys­tems and parks. Addi­tion­ally, the tourism helps local busi­nesses immensely. The con­ver­sa­tion took an inter­est­ing turn when Gary Hus­twit asked the ques­tion, “What cities need this devel­op­ment?” He pointed out that Los Ange­les hosted the Olympics in 1984, and did not need to build any­thing new— so the city made a lot of money off of the Games. He said, “Now you can­not tell that it ever hosted the Olympics, but maybe that is the sign of suc­cess.” Lon­don, on the other hand, plans to keep only 6 out of the 22 venues that were just built.

One mem­ber of the audi­ence brought up the fact that often cities try to improve their image by clean­ing up shanty towns and dis­plac­ing peo­ple with­out hav­ing a sus­tain­able plan for relo­ca­tion. The fact that so much is done with­out includ­ing cit­i­zens in the dis­cus­sion can cre­ate eth­i­cal prob­lems. The artists’ work con­tributes to the exist­ing inter­est­ing debate about the pos­i­tive, as well as neg­a­tive, lega­cies of the Olympic Games.

Unfor­tu­nately, the exhibit has closed, but click here if you want to see what the Store­front for Art and Archi­tec­ture has com­ing up. Have thoughts on an Olympic Legacy, whether good or bad? Tweet at us @cityatlas.

The renewable resources of Don Quixote // El Quijote y los recursos renovables

A wind­mill is a machine that con­verts the energy of wind into rota­tional energy by means of vanes called sails or blades. Or giants… depend­ing on your source. Along with solar power and tidal power, wind­mills are con­sid­ered one of the best sources of renew­able energy. Europe has been a leader in har­ness­ing wind power, and in the United States use of wind is grow­ing rapidly — and  Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­tic sen­a­tors alike recently joined forces to pre­serve the incen­tives that are help­ing wind power to develop.

The major­ity of the wind­mills are located in Texas and Ore­gon, but New York has its own wind­mills, too, and New York City is already reap­ing the ben­e­fits of this kind of energy. Accord­ing to a CUNY study,  ”New York City’s largest com­mer­cial con­struc­tion firms say that energy effi­cient and sus­tain­ably designed con­struc­tion is firmly in place, and not a trend wait­ing to hap­pen at some time in the future. It is being dri­ven both by cus­tomer pref­er­ence and lead­er­ship from the pub­lic sec­tor, through reg­u­la­tion and role modeling.”

It would not be fea­si­ble to build gigan­tic wind­mills in the crowded Man­hat­tan, but it’s impor­tant for cit­i­zens to be mind­ful of where their energy comes from, and opt for both greener energy providers and local green energy solu­tions.  My home­town in New Jer­sey has installed street­light posts that are pow­ered by solar pan­els. It’s more than an eco­log­i­cal mea­sure— although costly up front, these solar pan­els will save the city and cit­i­zens money through oper­a­tion sav­ings and green ini­tia­tives. NYC is the per­fect place to exper­i­ment with new tech­nolo­gies for high den­sity locales.

It is impor­tant to spread good sus­tain­able ideas, but also to put such ideas into prac­tice. I’ve already opted for another greener energy pro­ducer com­pany, and I encour­age oth­ers to explore more sus­tain­able energy options. The US Depart­ment of Energy pro­vides a com­pre­hen­sive list of green power sup­pli­ers across the US; Con Ed also has an infor­ma­tional site.

Research what your energy provider is doing to become greener. The impact that we have on the envi­ron­ment is not a mat­ter of affect­ing oth­ers in some dis­tant future, but a mat­ter of imme­di­ate effects on the planet and on each of us, right now. It’s time to be smart about where we get our energy. The tech­nol­ogy is here, but now it’s a mat­ter of will. Now we just need to stop fight­ing windmills.

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Sabes que es un Molino de Viento? Un Molino de Viento, según Wikipedia “es una máquina que con­vierte la energía del viento en energía rota­cional a través de hélices lla­madas velas o cuchillas”. Los mis­mos moli­nos de viento que Don Qui­jote imag­in­aba como gigantes con los que debía batallar.

Junto con la energía solar y la energía de mar­eas, los moli­nos de viento han sido con­sid­er­a­dos como una de las mejores fuentes de energía ren­ov­able en el mundo. Y Europa ha sido uno de los países que mejor uso ha hecho de este tipo de energía.  Sin embargo, como muchos otros países con­scientes de los prob­le­mas ecológi­cos, Esta­dos Unidos se ha unido al grupo en un esfuerzo con­junto por ser más amable con el planeta.

Y aún cuando la may­oría de los moli­nos de viento están en Texas, Port­land y otros esta­dos (dado que dichos moli­nos requieren grandes can­ti­dades de acres vír­genes), N.Y.C ya esta reci­bi­endo los ben­efi­cios de dicha energía ren­ov­able, y el mismo estado de Nueva York tiene ya sus pro­pios moli­nos de viento. Sí, y los mis­mos Neoy­orki­nos, tienen la posi­bil­i­dad de escoger la com­pañía de energía que más les guste a la hora de pagar por este servicio.

Según un estu­dio real­izado por  CUNY,  ”las fir­mas con­struc­toras más grande de la ciu­dad de Nueva York afir­man que la ener­gia efi­ciente y la con­struc­ción dis­eñada sostenible­mente es algo real, y no una moda esperando a suceder en un futuro cer­cano. Es un hecho que esta haciendo desar­rol­lado tanto por con­sum­i­dores como por el sec­tor pub­lico, a través de mod­e­los de regulación”.

Y aunque sería poco  factible con­struir estos moli­nos de viento gigantes en esta ciu­dad repleta de edi­fi­cios, es impor­tante que seamos lo sufi­cien­te­mente recep­tivos a todo tipo de ideas ecológ­i­cas ven­gan de donde ven­gan, si lo que quer­e­mos es hacer de N.Y.C una ciu­dad mejor y más res­pirable.  Por lo menos, la ciu­dad donde yo vivo en NJ, la may­oría de los postes de luz en las calles fun­cio­nan con energía solar. Algo que no es sim­ple­mente una medida eco­log­ica, sino un ahorro para la ciu­dad y los mis­mos ciudadanos.

Sin embargo, como no soy una experta en el tema de la energía ren­ov­able y las políti­cas sobre elec­t­ri­ci­dad que exis­ten en cada ciu­dad, esto, es mas bien  un lla­mado no a ser opti­mis­tas, sino a ser cre­ati­va­mente real­is­tas. Yo creo que  N.Y.C  es el lugar per­fecto para ser recur­sivo, dado el grado de mul­ti­cul­tur­al­i­dad y la cri­sis económica que aún se esta viviendo.

Es impor­tante dis­em­i­nar bue­nas ideas de sosteni­bil­i­dad, pero sobre todo, pon­er­las en prác­tica. Per­sonal­mente, yo ya opte por cam­biarme a una com­pañía energética más com­pro­metida con el medio ambi­ente  y espero qeu esto le sirva no sólo a la ciu­dad, sino al plan­eta entero. Tal vez es tiempo para que cada uno de nosotros empiece a pen­sar que com­pro­m­e­terse con el medio ambi­ente no es más una cosa de otros y del futuro, sino de cada uno de nosotros ahora.

US Depart­ment of Energy Guide

New York’s hidden green secret

Two weeks ago, MTA Direc­tor of Sus­tain­abil­ity Pro­j­jal Dutta enlight­ened atten­dees at the Green Fes­ti­val by pulling back the cur­tain on some­thing we thought we all knew: the MTA.

New York­ers rely on the trains and buses to get us where we need to be, when we need to be there. Almost as inher­ent to MTA city travel as the sound of screech­ing brakes is the grip­ing and groan­ing we do while on board. Why isn’t the train here faster? Why does it stop in the mid­dle of the tun­nel? Why don’t they run more crosstown buses? We’re really good at being crit­i­cal of the sys­tem, some with vocal indig­na­tion and oth­ers with more mild res­ig­na­tion, and few of us has prob­a­bly ever really stopped to think crit­i­cally about this sys­tem we love to hate.

I spent my first 5 years in NYC in a love/hate rela­tion­ship with the MTA. I loved when the M15 Lim­ited got me from 14th to 96th in 15 min­utes, but I hated when the 6 was so packed I had to let three trains go by and be late to work. I rec­og­nized and appre­ci­ated that the MTA let me never need or want a car and allowed me to be expo­nen­tially greener than my sub­ur­ban coun­ter­parts, but I came to aban­don my petty griev­ances and love the MTA whole­heart­edly after read­ing Projjal’s inter­view for City Atlas where he explains the basic struc­ture of the sys­tem and how the MTA is in fact doing a whole lot to be greener.

In his pre­sen­ta­tion at Green Fes­ti­val (Tak­ing the Car out of Car­bon) he out­lined just how much credit the MTA deserves for reduc­ing car­bon emis­sions. The MTA’s 2012 Earth Day Report on Sus­tain­abil­ity found that every sub­way or bus trip pre­vents 10.4 pounds of car­bon from being released, for a whop­ping 17 mil­lion met­ric tons col­lec­tively. The scale of the sys­tem allows it to be green in a way that has an instant and sig­nif­i­cant impact, a way that recy­cling your kom­bucha bot­tle sim­ply doesn’t.

The scale of the sys­tem is an asset but also a lia­bil­ity. Mr. Dutta explained that because most of the under­ground infra­struc­ture of the exten­sive sys­tem was built in the early 1900s, sim­ply main­tain­ing it for 24/365 use is the full time job of many. For all Projjal’s pres­ti­gious cred­its, among them cer­ti­fi­ca­tion as a LEED A.P. and MIT grad­u­ate, he has a knack for illus­trat­ing con­cepts in palat­able ways. When an audi­ence mem­ber at Green Fes­ti­val com­plained about the con­stant route changes for con­struc­tion and asked why they didn’t “just fix things right and upgrade them the first time so they wouldn’t have to con­tin­u­ously make repairs,” he didn’t gloss over the ques­tion with a boiler plate response one might expect of a city employee; he smiled and offered the fol­low­ing anal­ogy: “how many things do you have that belonged to your grand­par­ents? How many of them to you still use? How many of them do you use all day long every day of the year? How many of them do you share with mil­lions of friends?” Obvi­ously we can’t shut down the entire sys­tem for a year to take it out and replace it with an entirely new one, so the MTA is charged with com­ing up with cre­ative ways to repair a sys­tem that is con­stantly in use.

In his pre­sen­ta­tion, Pro­j­jal used many graph­ics to illus­trate how car­bon emis­sions from dri­ving are indis­putably the most mas­sive fac­tor in green­ing our lives and the planet. He boldly stated that recy­cling, organic food, and plant based mate­ri­als mean noth­ing if you’re dri­ving to get them. He argues that cli­mate change is in large part a result of the emis­sions from dri­ving. In a fas­ci­nat­ing micro-history of Eisen­hower and Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, Pro­j­jal explained how a shift in land use and pop­u­la­tion den­sity result­ing in response to the cre­ation of the U.S. inter­state sys­tem cre­ated a nation of dri­vers and car­bon emit­ters. He offers the impor­tant dis­tinc­tion that cars them­selves aren’t what pol­lute the planet and make us fat, dri­ving them is. When you cre­ate a sys­tem of tran­sit that fos­ters pop­u­la­tion den­sity and prac­ti­cal land use, you cre­ate a sys­tem that does good things for the envi­ron­ment and bet­ter things for people.

Mr. Dutta also addressed how the MTA spends bil­lions of dol­lars for­ti­fy­ing itself against flood­ing and other prob­lems result­ing from cli­mate change, a prob­lem to which the MTA sys­tem itself con­tributes next to noth­ing. He asked lis­ten­ers to con­sider that the rea­son they don’t see more new trains and tech­nol­ogy is because funds often have to be diverted to imme­di­ate prob­lem solv­ing for cir­cum­stances (often weather related) beyond their con­trol; in these sit­u­a­tions the MTA receives no extra funds for mak­ing these sys­tem amend­ments, con­se­quently leav­ing them with less cap­i­tal for the kinds of vis­i­ble and meaningful-to-rider improve­ments (like count­down clocks and new trains with LED strips) that many rid­ers lament the lack of.

Recon­cep­tu­al­iz­ing the MTA and just tak­ing time to pause on the plat­form to con­sider just how many hur­dles that 2 train has to over­come to make it to the sta­tion may be tough, but it’s pos­si­ble. Per­haps the most help­ful grain of infor­ma­tion for bet­ter under­stand­ing why the MTA works the way it does is to con­sider where the money comes from. The MTA is not a city agency; it’s a state one. Fund­ing for the city’s buses and trains comes from Albany, not City Hall. When the pol­icy mak­ers all drove on state roads to get to their tran­sit bud­get meet­ing, well, they just tend to put those roads before new sig­nal switches for the BDFM and the mil­lions who rely on the MTA annually.

[Note: Mr. Dutta is an advi­sor to City Atlas.]

(Cross­posted from the Exam­iner)

Top image of newly built 34th Street 7 Sta­tion, cour­tesy of the MTA.

Mayor questions the role of social media in urban planning


A story in the New York Times on Mayor Bloomberg’s speech in Sin­ga­pore, where he was accept­ing an award for urban sus­tain­abil­ity, noted that the mayor also com­mented on the prob­lems of gov­ern­ing in an era of social media. The arti­cle focuses on this passage:

“Social media is going to make it even more dif­fi­cult to make long-term invest­ments. We are basi­cally hav­ing a ref­er­en­dum on every sin­gle thing that we do every day, and it’s very hard for peo­ple to stand up to that and say, ‘No, no, this is what we’re going to do,’ when there’s con­stant crit­i­cism, and an elec­tion process that you have to look for­ward to and face periodically.”

It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing com­ment from New York’s most high tech mayor. Dif­fer­ent view­points may be expressed at the upcom­ing panel dis­cus­sion on social media and urban plan­ning, held at Stu­dio X on Tues­day, March 27th.

More con­tent from the mayor’s speech is avail­able at his own web­site, but not the sec­tion crit­i­cal of social media. His speech does high­light spe­cific suc­cesses in the city’s plan­ning, like the High Line, which trig­gered $2 bil­lion of pri­vate invest­ment in the sur­round­ing neigh­bor­hood. The tran­script avail­able is worth read­ing for a recap of the city’s recent inno­va­tions, long term vision, and inter­na­tional posi­tion, as framed by City Hall.

[Photo: AP]

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

Break through on Second Avenue Subway

Work­ers com­pleted tun­nel­ing for the first phase of the Sec­ond Avenue Sub­way on Sept. 22, 2011, when the project’s tun­nel bor­ing machine reached the Lex­ing­ton Av-63 St sta­tion, break­ing into the exist­ing sub­way sys­tem. The 485-ton, 450-foot-long machine used a 22-foot diam­e­ter cut­ter­head to mine 7,789 lin­ear feet in two tun­nels, aver­ag­ing approx­i­mately 60 lin­ear feet a day. Photo by Met­ro­pol­i­tan Trans­porta­tion Author­ity / Patrick Cashin.

Uprooting the Old, Familiar Parking Meter — NYTimes​.com

Uproot­ing the Old, Famil­iar Park­ing Meter

Motorists’ bane, mag­net for thieves, and memo­ri­al­ized in the Bea­t­les’ “Lovely Rita,” the diminu­tive park­ing meter has led an out­size life. But its days in New York City are about to expire. The city will remove its last decom­mis­sioned single-space park­ing meter in Man­hat­tan on Mon­day, trans­porta­tion offi­cials said, the start of a year­long process that will even­tu­ally elim­i­nate all the steel-and-sludge-hued meters in the city.

 via Nytimes

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.

Visit the NYBG’s Greenmarket for affordable, locally grown produce!

NYBG | Green Mar­ket 2011

2011 Sea­son (Tenth Season)Wednesdays, June 15-November 23, 9 a.m.-3 p.m. The New York Botan­i­cal Garden’s Green­mar­ket pro­vides afford­able, locally grown pro­duce along with fresh and nutri­tious baked goods and other spe­cialty items. Talk to the farm­ers to learn more about the nutri­tional and health ben­e­fits of gar­den­ing and eat­ing locally.

via Nybg

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