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Branden Born on Urban Ag
Cascadia Region Green Building Council:Transformational Lecture Featuring Branden Born Tuesday, June 155:30-7:00PMWhite Stag Building70 NW Couch Urban Food & Agriculture: Making the Jump in SustainabilityDr. Branden Born, Assistant Professor of Urban Design and Planning from the University of Washington, will offer his thoughts on how we can make the connection between equity and sustainability in…
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Portland Photographic Record – Places
A completely different scale from the concentrated landmarks – and perhaps the antidote to the over-documented – comes from the great Portland Grid Project a photographic essay of the city using a loose framework of grid points in which photographers are unleashed to document the ‘other’ places in the community. The plan, photographers are directed…
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Portland Photographic Record – Landmarks
The ubiquitous nature of digital data offers unique opportunities to display data about places that tells us a much richer story about ourselves than the actual city. Case in point, spotted via A Daily Dose of Architecture – are these ‘Geotaggers’ World Atlas‘ maps generated from geographically tagged data of uploaded photos to popular image…
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3rd Coast Atlas
Having resided in Portland for over 13 years, I now consider myself solidly ‘West Coast’ and an adapted non-native (as opposed to invasive) resident of the Cascadia Megaregion. But 20+ years living literally near the middle and continued explorations of some midwestern cities has given me an appreciation for the third coast – a term…
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Walhattan
An amazing if somewhat shocking graphic spotted on A Daily Dose of Architecture, “The above is from Jesse LeCavalier’s essay “All Those Numbers” at Places: Design Observer. In it, the architect investigates “the design possibilities latent not only in Walmart’s building types but also in the organizational practices — especially its unparalleled expertise in logistics.”…
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Ecological Urbanism: Introduction Part 2
Continuing the investigations of the introduction to the book ‘Ecological Urbanism‘ (read Part 1 here) – we pick up on the concepts of ecological urbanism in the explosion of interest in urban and local food production. Near and dear to my interests, the ability to transform such shrinking cities like Detroit, emulating the lessons and…
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Ecological Urbanism – Introduction Part 1
‘Ecological Urbanism‘ (640 pages, Lars Müller Publishers; 1 edition (May 1, 2010) edited by Mohsen Mostafavi with Gareth Doherty) literally arrived with a thud last week, the 650 page brick like tome touching down on the front step of the house with much anticipation. Tempted as I was, a number of deadlines made me hold…
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Ephemeral Urban Gardens: Installations
Examples of ephemeral productive agricultural landscapes give an indication of the possibilities of occupation of urban sites for education and growing food. LAND GRAB CITYA recent installation called Landgrab City as part of the Shenzhen & Hong Kong bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture. Designers Joseph Grima, Jeffrey Johnson and José Esparza have created a farm in…
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Ephemeral Urban Gardens: Temporality + Mobility
The last remnants of ephemera sitting around the archives is under the auspices of terrestrially based gardens within the foodsheds of our cities, and – and the need to address the issues of permanence (both the pros and cons). One option is to incorporate food production within our permanent landscaping by using the principles of…
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Rooftop Agriculture
I’ve purposely steered away from the pure rooftop farms in discussions of vertical farming solutions recently featured (here, here, here, and here). This isn’t due to any particular reason other than I think that rooftop farms area a separate typology in it’s own right – as it is focusing on a separate area of emphasis…