-
“Where Do Cities Come From?” (Richard Florida – Creative Class)
Florida points to an article that smacks down cities (it claims that historically they’ve been “death traps”) and asks for reader feedback. I left a long comment. (PS: this one is going to generate its own blog post on my blog, in response to rebuttals by someone who lives in Victoria.)
-
“Half of park, street trees at end of cycle” by Bill Cleverley (Times-Colonist)
City of Victoria has a couple of parks master plan workshops coming up this month, January 09 (tomorrow & on 1/24) to figure out how to manage continuation and replacement of current “urban forest.” (See city website for “Urban Forest Master Plan”.)
[Note that the statistics given in this article apply to the City of Victoria (which is downtown core and core neighbourhoods, ~80K pop.), NOT the Greater Victoria area nor the CRD (Capital Regional District), which is 13 municipalities. CRD/ Greater Victoria municipal politics is screwy – we badly need amalgamation of the core municipalities (Victoria, Oak Bay, Saanich, Esquimalt, View Royal).]
-
“‘Actions’ anthology a handbook for urban revolutionaries” by Christopher Hume (TheStar.com) – Annotated
Discussion of Montreal’s Canadian Centre for Architecture’s publication “Actions: What You Can Do With The City” (Mirko Zardini and Giovanna Borasi): 98 examples of “techniques, events, ideas and strategies aimed at making cities more sustainable, humane, efficient, livable and, not least, fun.” I was especially intrigued by what Hume describes as “Actions”‘ subtext, *waste* – see article.
QUOTE
“Our whole economy has become a waste economy,” writes Zardini quoting Hannah Arendt, “in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to come to a sudden catastrophic end.”
UNQUOTE -
A User’s Guide to 21st Century Economics – Umair Haque – HarvardBusiness.org
Umair Haque’s Jan.7/09 piece, self-explanatory title. Lots of great ideas – and something about the reference to “symmetrical competition” made me think of Greg Lynn’s rejection of symmetry in architecture (to maximize resources) and also of how waste is a major 21st c. trope.
QUOTE
Where do new rules come from? Here are five questions every decision maker should kick off 2009 by asking – and five results summarizing some of the new rules we’ve learned over the last year at the Lab.
UNQUOTE -
“Land Sharing” CEOs for Cities :: Blog, View Entry
QUOTE
“Whether you’re talking about money, goods or even space, these days “waste” has become a bit of a dirty word. Monday, consumers are looking for positive ways to avoid it. They’re beautifying unused or neglected public spaces with guerilla gardening; they’re sharing their pantry’s overstock and garden surplus by food swapping, and they’re taking advantage of bountiful harvests found on public and private property with voluntary harvesting. With waste top of mind, the latest waste elimination challenge focuses on the garden.
UNQUOTE -
Greg Lynn | Profile on TED.com
Portal page to Greg Lynn’s TED talk.
-
Exchange Morning Post: “Greg Lynn: How calculus is changing architecture”
Questioning symmetry:
QUOTE
Greg Lynn talks about the mathematical roots of architecture — and how calculus and digital tools allow modern designers to move beyond the traditional building forms. A glorious church in Queens (and a titanium tea set) illustrate his theory.Greg Lynn is the head of Greg Lynn FORM, an architecture firm known for its boundary-breaking, biomorphic shapes and its embrace of digital tools for design and fabrication.
Who says great architecture must be proportional and symmetrical? Not Greg Lynn. He and his firm, Greg Lynn FORM, have been pushing the edges of building design, by stripping away the traditional dictates of line and proportion and looking into the heart of what a building needs to be.
UNQUOTE -
“Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait / current work” by Chris Jordan
Fascinating project:
QUOTE
Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibililties of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.
~chris jordan, Seattle, 2008
UNQUOTE
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.