Mossnets x Radical Intersections

The following images come out of trying to visualize how nature makes it’s way back into these communities in behaviors, structure and culture. I’d like to share this set of images as a way to visualize nature finding it’s way back into these communities in the structural, as well as social and cultural realms. These are photos along the Arroyo Seco in Pasadena.

The rock wall held together by cement is the vision of or current situation with a structure largely defined by the materials of it’s construction, functioning but somewhat inflexible.

In some places along the wall the moss grows out of the cement and branches out to eventually cover the cement portions, leaving islands of stone peeking through. How does this growth of a living colony over a manmade solution function as a methodology for re-designing communities and social interaction? Does it scale up to communities such as the ones in our exercise? Can this vision be seen as a way to re-imagine the growth of these communities over time? Can it happen quickly?

This image is of a work by Gordon Matta Clark and one of his intercuts in to a suburban home on the east coast. I share this image as a way to spark imagination about the possibility of radical intersections in the communities. Can we strip away pieces to reveal or allow new growth to occur. What form does this take or how does it re-define pre-exisiting ones?

The Importance of Instilling Values in the Community

by Mari Nakano, Justin Gier, Jonathan Jarvis

Instilling proper values and ideas about sustainability is just as important as a successful sustainable infrastructure. Without the mentality to live in a fashion that is protecting the community, the community will most likely fall apart and not maintain it’s original goals. Therefore, it is important to consider the various ways in which one can instill such values into the community without it being considered a form of brainwash.

Our group looked into how the socio-cultural can contribute to creating a sustainable tract-home style community. I focused on the possible roles of youth, and I also researched models of existing eco-communities. There are a lot of ideas that we can pull from the articles on these links.

Education
Green Schools Initiative
Having a green school can allow sustainable education to naturally happen

The Eco Literacy Project
This project was founded by Fritjof Capra. It talks about how to incorporate healthier lifestyles (particularly around food) in the school.

Youth Leadership
This link is an example of how youth leadership can play a role in the environment. This site also talks about making eco-projects part of the graduation requirement.

Transportation & Other Things We Should Consider
Green Cities and the End of the Age of Oil
This is a good article that gives us things we can consider when building our own

Models of Existing Eco-Cities
Green Affordable Housing Initiative
Sustainable environments are possible for everyone – not just the rich.

Audubon International
Scroll to the middle of this article and read Audubon’s International’s Principles of Sustainability.

New Urbanism and CoHousing
Check out examples of eco-communities and homes. They talk about “co-housing” which is this idea of having to work on parts of the community together or have to contribute to communal activities. This article also touches upon building on the natural landscape, which is something we talked about in class last week.

I also included some points that I found would be helpful or worth considering for our project:
• making things accessible within walking distance to lower fuel emissions.
• designing the architecture of the home to be more energy efficient/ sustainable
• Supporting initiatives that can push/ support the idea of green building practices.
• Instilling conscious values into the youth – particularly through school curriculum or school graduation requirements
• Biomass: “releasing solar energy stored in plants and organic matter by burning agricultural waste and other organic matter to generate power.” This could really legitimize the idea of burning cities.
• Friendly Competitions: i.e. Competition for Most Eco-Friendly City of the Year. Can be city to city or neighbor to neighbor.
• How can “outsiders” (those not living in the community) contribute to sustaining and protecting the community? How can they benefit the community? How do they benefit by helping?

Re: Project 1: A Look At the Socio-Cultural

The “Socio-Cultural” group decided to take a look at how social and cultural aspects could play a role in a sustainable community. Our main focuses will be on: school systems and curriculum integration into the community, services for the community, creation spaces and community centers, youth leadership, voting systems, sharing/bartering/farmer’s market models and festivals, events and holidays focused on sustainability issues. Our posts will be up in the “Socio-Cultural” category of our blog.

Earth-Sheltered Housing?

I still think this might be of some interest if we are thinking about developing a fire proof community from scratch:

These are some links to various sites about underground living\building:

http://www.undergroundhousing.com/

Also, a site discussing this kind of solution ( and others) for housing on Mars (maybe not so relevant for L.A at this point, but amusing at any rate..):

http://www.iit.edu/~mars/housing_report.html

And, a pdf covering some of the specifics surrounding earth-sheltered building methods:

http://www.uaf.edu/ces/publications/freepubs/EEM-01359.pdf

(Cat)

Uninventing Suburbia…

There was a page on a NY Times blog this morning about suburbs and energy consumption. There are a number of links on the page that might be of interest. One is to a trailer of a film called the End of Suburbia which examines the evolution of these systems. A paper on the concept of retrofilling and a lot of the positive work being done to adapt these existing structures. There’s also a link to a website on dead malls. It seems that in trying to adapt these systems to deal with the fire ecology that modding or solutions will also be tied to other issues with this type of lifestyle.

BIOMIMICRY AND FLOW IN CITIES

Dayna Baumeister is a biologist in the field of biomimicry, an educator and design consultant. She is the co-founder of the Biomimicry Guild.Of course you know my answer, biomimicry! Taking us out of nature and consolidating in urban centers furthers the artificial divide between humans and nature, as if they are two separate things. It does not occur to us that we’ve been on this planet for a mere few seconds if you look at the age of the earth, yet we think that these big brains are all that it takes to figure out how to live. Nature has been around for 3.85 billion years, and that is exactly what we need to do, to ask nature how it does it. We need to ask the whale how to do it. How do you transport such a large biomass thousands of miles on just fractions of energy? We need to ask the gecko how to climb walls without glue. How does an ecosystem filter water? Can we mimic them? With six or seven billion of us, the only way we can live on this planet is to have a substantial proportion in the cities, but cities cannot function like the way they do today. We need to have cities themselves mimic ecosystems. Flow is everything. Ecosystems work because flow is fostered by the form of the system. The forms of our cities today do not foster flow. That is where redesign comes in. I think emergent systems like slumsÑif you aren’t imposing hierarchical human hubris on top of that systemÑwill evolve to become working, functional systems, but we have to create the conditions to allow natural evolution to occur as opposed to creating artificial constructs that hinder flow and the form and pattern that we need.

Here is a link to Case Studies of Biomimicry.

WILDFIRES

Here is a link to information on the so-called “big blow up” that we are now experiencing with modern wildfires.

State of Green Business 2008

posted Mari Nakano

Here is the PDF for Joel Makower’s State of Green Business 2008. Makower was one of the speakers at the Sustainability Conference Pre-Summit.

download the PDF here and check out the site while you’re at it.

You can also visit greenbiz.com for more information.

Burning Edge Cities Brainstorm #2

Our group discussed the realities of making cities that, to quote the video from James Howard Kunstler, “were worth caring about.” It seemed to us that his ideas were excellent in terms of designing new things, but that the costs of retrofitting/redesigning old things to have more value to a community of “citizen”-minded residents could be extremely prohibitive. Who would foot the bill for it? This was somewhat frustrating to us led us to discuss what it would take to enable such a sea change for consistent value in both new and existing communities, and our main thought was that any change on a large scale would need to be driven by the citizens themselves. Values such as sustainability and usability will need to be adopted by communities on a huge scale before the people who actually make things and design living spaces (we talked a lot about homebuilding corporations) will be willing to spend a little extra money on things like only buying local raw goods or making commercial spaces more appealing and functional. There needs to be some kind of financial motivation for them to do it; it seemed to us that they need to know that people are interested and willing to buy and use thoughtfully produced residences/communities/commercial districts etc…Otherwise their main concern will only be their profit margin.

Social Networks in Cuba: Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR)

by Mari Nakano

Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR’s) are neighborhood-based organizations that were initally formed in defense of the Cuban Revolution. They are networked all across Cuba with anestimated 122,000 chapters and approximately 7.6 million members. Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), are citizen-based forces meant to reinforce the Cuban government’s goals and ideals. They
exist so that information can be disseminated rapidly in a fashion that is not dependent soley on the affordances of mass media. Their initial purpose was to protect Cuba from the United States Counter Intelligence Agency (CIA) spies, but over the years has transformed in a way that gears itself more towards the needs of the community.

View the visual interpretation here.