Landscape+Urbanism

Category: ecology

  • FOOD inc.

    The beauty of being taken down by illness is the opportunity to lay on the couch and catch up with some movies that have been in the queue. One such film was FOOD inc., a documentary that provided a concise summary of the content of Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma –…

  • Urban Crude

    One the most fascinating passages of the book ‘The Infrastructural City’ was the chapter on oil production that still existed in a variety of forms throughout the urban form. The fabulous Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) has done some investigations, which are captured on a post in the Places portion of the Design Observer…

  • Sustainable Sites – Update

    From some sneak peeks of the latest update to the Sustainable Sites Initiative (more from L+U here), I was both excited about the next iteration and establishment of more rigorous set of criteria, and a bit curious how it was going to maintain some of the necessary distance, inclusivity and poetry that is lacking in…

  • More on Plant VOCs

    A follow-up email from Susan McCoy at Garden Media Group offered some follow-up information on the my previous post related to Plants and VOCs (Sept. 6, 2009). My take on it was at least on the right track, unlike some others – but I figure the press release (and upcoming report) is a good opportunity…

  • Plants + VOCs

    A recent, somewhat hyperbolic title from Treehugger, “Bad Green: Some Indoor Plants Release Volatile Organic Compounds” provides a snippet from some recent research that mention, gasp, that plants, particularly indoor ones, release volatile organic compounds (VOCs). It’s a strange conceptual notion indeed, as there has been much research and information on the ability of indoor…

  • More Fake Trees

    And They’re Pretty Handy if we are Attacked by Giant Interstellar Swarms of Flies: :: image via InhabitatVia Inhabitat: “A report published last Thursday from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IME) suggested that a forest of 100,000 artificial “trees” could be “planted” near depleted oil and gas reserves to trap carbon in a filter and…

  • EcoCity Hamburg

    Hamburg, Germany’s new planned EcoCity by TecArchitecture and Arup has received a lot of attention as of late… let’s take a look::: image via WAN Wind turbines… check. Green roofs and walls… check. Water and futuristic, semi-biomorphic building forms… check. Reuse of structures… check… Multiple green rating systems… check! Looks like an eco-city… Ok, I’m…

  • LEED Sustainable Sites

    I was fortunate enough recently to be chosen for the US Green Building Council’s Technical Assistance Group for Sustainable Sites (SS TAG). This appointment will allow me to be directly involved in defining how sustainable site strategies are integrated in existing determinations and future iterations of various LEED rating systems. The following is an interview…

  • More from the Ecotone

    I am a fan of the conceptual parti of the ‘ecotone’ as seen from the Integrating Habitats competition award winner ‘Urban Ecotones’ from 2008. The use of this landscape ecology principle, which is defined as a transitional zone between distinct plant communities, offers a lot of mileage as an evocative strategy within it’s original sphere…

  • Garden City Detroit

    A great dialogue that happened a few weeks back over at Kaid Benfield’s blog at NRDC (read it, the links, and the comments… good stuff) – about the fate and potential for Detroit. Seems that without reading the report – there’s a lot of knee-jerk reaction to what has been percieved as ‘bulldozing and planting…