Environment

The Self-Sufficient City

- Adam Clare

Looking to save the world? Then enter the international competition to design the self-sufficient city. One of the goals is to spur some online discussion, so what do you think the city of the future will look like? And will you enter the contest?

The competition jury, which is composed of architects, directors of some of the world’s foremost architecture schools, and mayors of cities such as Barcelona, is looking for outstanding proposals for any city in the world, at any scale, and within any timescale. Competition entries should be submitted via the Internet (www.advancedarchitecturecontest.org) on Connected metropolises, Eco neighborhoods, Self-sufficient buildings, Intelligent homes or any other proposal for a short-, medium or long-term project to create habitats that respond to the social, cultural, environmental and economic conditions that may obtain in the 21st century. The proposal should include whatever texts, drawings and other images may be needed to make it fully understandable.
The competition prizes will consist of three scholarships for the IaaC Masters in Advanced Architecture for academic year 2010-11, cash prizes, and the latest generation of large-format HP printers. The selected projects will go on show in a major exhibition, due to open in Barcelona in May 2010, which will then travel to key cities around the world. The best projects will also be featured in a book to be published by Actar. The project is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Housing, the Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona City Council, and the publishing house Actar.

How to Make the Suburbs Livable

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Peter Calthorpe is a man on a mission to make the suburbs of North America a place where people can live (seriously, you should see what books he’s written).
The car-dominated culture of the suburbs has produced a series of housing developments that pretends the environment and other people don’t exist, and in the 21st century this lifestyle is confronting reality. Recently, Calthrope has been asked to make a suburb of Toronto, Markham, into a modern city and Markham is moving ahead with the plan. The key component of the plan is to make a more urban setting that revolves around good transportation.

“We’ve had a 50-year experiment with sprawl,” Calthorpe argues. “Now it’s over. Everything’s changing. There’s a huge demographic shift happening. If you include externalities and eliminate subsidies, sprawl is not affordable. The key to unlocking the potential is transit.

But as Calthorpe also points out, successful transit is regional transit. That’s surely true at Langstaff. Cut off by hydro easements, highways, railway tracks and cemeteries, the missing connections to the external world can only be created through transit. Extending the Yonge subway to Hwy. 7 is critical to the project, as are the locations of the new stations.

“If you want to get people out of cars,” says Calthorpe, “you’ve got to get them close to transit. And transit must be there to support walkability, not the other way around. Destinations have to be nearby.”

Iron Current Turning Green

- Adam Clare

Here’s a really cool transition from a symbol of oppression to a symbol of growth and freedom: the old Soviet Iron Curtain has turned into a nature sanctuary. How cool is that?

But when its creators mark its 20th birthday this year, they will also be celebrating the fact that 23 European countries are currently engaged in a project to make it nearly five times as long. “The aim is to turn the Iron Curtain’s entire 4,250-mile length – extending from the Arctic to the Black Sea – into what is already being called the ‘Central European Green Belt’,” says Dr Kai Frobel, a German ornithologist and conservationist.

He was the man who started it all back in 1970s. In those days, it seemed impossible that the Berlin Wall might one day fall or that the Soviet empire could crumble. But that was almost irrelevant to Frobel, now a leading member of the German nature protection group, Bund, but then a teenager from the West German village of Hassenberg, which stood nearly in the Iron Curtain’s shadow. At 13, he was an enthusiastic birdwatcher. Equipped with a pair of pre-war Zeiss binoculars, a green army surplus parka, and heavy gumboots, he used to spend most of his free time in the hilly wooded countryside of his native northern Bavaria looking for new bird sightings, which he would record in his notebook.
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An invisible trace is left by the last of the 1.3 million mines that used to litter the area. The vast majority were removed but the German authorities say they still cannot guarantee that all the Green Belt is completely mine-free. “This has its positive sides,” says Matthias Fanck, who is showing an exhibition on the Green Belt project in the former border town of Probstzella: “It means that tourists tend to stick to the paths and leave the nature reserve untouched.”

Twenty years on, the Green Belt has become an important part of Germany’s tourist industry. At strategic points along its route, visitors can call a free mobile phone number and listen to witnesses’ accounts of what the border once was. “It gives today’s generation of young Europeans an idea of what the Iron Curtain meant,” says Frobel.

9% Return on Solar Investments

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

In the UK it is apparently possible to get a 9% return on investing in solar panels for your house thanks to the economy and government programs. Score one for the environment and for your pocketbook.

How we achieved a 9% return on investment:
The cost of our solar power system was £17,000 but the government paid for 50% which meant it only cost us £8,500 ($13,000). A return of £590 ($903) for that amount of investment equals around 9% return if you take into account that it’s untaxed.
In this economic climate you would be hard pressed to get such a return on investment.
The future
With the cost of photovoltaic panels reducing every year, choosing to purchase solar panels is becoming even more of a sound investment choice.

Greenpeace’s Tissue Guide on Your Phone

- Adam Clare

The USA branch of Greenpeace have turned their Recycled Tissue and Toilet Paper Guide and turned it into an iPhone app. I hope that other Greenpeace regions do the same thing as I find myself carrying my iPhone around but carrying around an extra booklet all the time can get really annoying. If you’re in Canada, you can download the guide as PDF here.

The Guide makes it quick and easy to find out which brands of facial tissues, toilet paper, paper towels, and napkins are truly green and which should be avoided. Our experts have carefully evaluated over 100 brands and recommended those that: contain 100% overall recycled content; contain at least 50% post-consumer recycled content; and are bleached without toxic chlorine compounds.
When you’re doing your grocery shopping or just stopping by the corner store to grab a roll of toilet paper, make an informed decision as both a consumer and someone concerned about the world’s ancient forests.

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