In 1859, game hunter, sheep farmer, and horse trainer Thomas Austin released twenty-four wild rabbits on his estate in Western Australia. In ten years, those rabbits had become several million, denuding a landscape that had never before faced the scourge of such determined herbivores. The Royal Commission formed to deal with “The Rabbit Question” came up with a solution called the No.1 Rabbit Proof Fence—2,023 miles of barbed wire right across Australia, sealing off the rabbit-infested western coast, and requiring constant patrolling. Over a century later, seeing a small portion of that fence replicated this month in Lisbon for the exhibition Utilitas Interrupta: An Infrastructural Index of Unfulfilled Ambitions, makes the urgent efforts of an entire continent seem pitifully ludicrous.

Read more…

NOLA native Sarah Markel on the levee bike path along the Mississippi. Photo: Catherine Markel.

Earlier this month, I spent a week in Madison, Wisconsin, where I sat through lectures by some of the world’s leading authorities on ways to make cities more appealing, functional, and sustainable. But the most valuable takeaways came not from inside the Madison Convention Center, but from the city itself; more specifically, from the helmeted, benevolent army that pedaled its way quietly and efficiently through the streets.

I’d heard about Madison being a bike-friendly city, but wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, never having been to Portland or Minneapolis or Davis, California, or any of those other places that usually get the highest praise for their bike-oriented principles. Read more…

There’s a well-worn architectural truism that goes something like this: “Good clients make good projects.” The idea is that a knowledgeable and demanding benefactor can push an architect beyond his normal limits. The inverse might assert that a complacent client makes for uninspired projects.

For some time now I’ve been wondering, to what extent does the relationship between designer and user contributes to the failing infrastructure here in rural Ecuador? Here’s the basic problem: The infrastructure, while designed scrupulously from the engineer’s point of view, be it schools, electric grids, or water systems takes little stock of the human needs or habits of the people it’s supposed to serve. This approach results in badly managed projects that break soon after they’re inaugurated, or which simply do not match the needs of the local population. Read more…

In spite of some starting troubles, it turns out that the recently concluded climate-change talks at Cancun might well be a landmark event in the politics of sustainability. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has miraculously avoided the usual political blame game between developed and developing nations. The talks have ended in a near-unanimous agreement on climate change, including a commitment to reduce green house gas emissions and a fund to help vulnerable countries. But a network of 40 international environmental and business leaders, led by the Green Building Councils (GBCs), is calling for a closer look at how the built environment is implicated in the agreements at Cancun.

Read more…

La Marqueta, between 111th and 116th streets in Harlem, New York, was once the place to drive a bargain on plantains and avocados. But it never recovered from a slow decline in the 1970s, and several attempts to revive it have failed. Luckily for neighborhood residents, however, La Marqueta was built under the tracks of the Metro North rail line. That has given the Harlem Community Development Corporation (CDC) a rather bright idea. With the Center for an Urban Future, an independent think tank, the Harlem CDC is arguing that it is time to give Harlem its High Line.

The High Line has become a sort of urban-planning stereotype by now. Just tagging a project with the words “High Line” defines it instantly—community-led revival of defunct infrastructure for the creation of public space. The presence of an elevated, preferably abandoned rail line is, of course, vital. So the Bloomingdale Trail in Chicago, the Reading Viaduct in Philadelphia, and the Embankment in Jersey City have all lined up for their very own High Lines, but these projects are little more than replicas of what has already been achieved in New York. Thankfully, La Marqueta is actually an entirely different proposition, in spite of the overused descriptor. Read more…

While green roofs have increasingly made headlines as solutions for environmentally sound design in an urban environment, more often than not they are found only as expensive additions to new constructions. Translating the concept for mass production at a cost-effective rate—and for easy implementation on pre-existing buildings—has posed a bit of a dilemma. As a result, although it is already clear what kind of positive impact a green roof can have in terms of energy conservation and aesthetic appeal, there has yet to be much opportunity to measure the widespread impact of green roofing on an urban scale.

Recently, however, Natalie Jeremijenko, an aerospace engineer and an environmental health professor at New York University, may have come up with a solution. Read more…

The ongoing 2010 World Cup has been in the design news for all the wrong reasons. Everybody’s spent a lot of time griping about the design of the new ball, but more serious problems have emerged now. The whole event, it turns out, is an ecological disaster.

According to a recent study undertaken by the Norwegian government (bless those Scandinavians!) the World Cup will have a carbon footprint of 2,753,251 tons of CO2, equivalent to one year’s emissions from one million cars. There are a number of reasons why this year’s event is so unsustainable. For one, South Africa had to build a lot of the infrastructure from scratch. Five new stadiums were built, five old ones were upgraded, roads were improved and bigger bus systems were put in place. Secondly, a large portion of the World Cup’s audience is European. A non-European venue means a lot of fuel burnt on flights to and from Europe. All in all, the World cup might be the most unsustainable sporting event so far. But by all reports, the 2012 Olympics aren’t going to score any green goals, either. Read more…

On Friday I spent all day at the Regional Plan Association’s annual conference. This year’s terrific event was entitled “Innovation and the American Metropolis.” The RPA, as it always does, cast a wide net, bringing in experts from the fields of architecture, urban planning, sustainable design, transportation, alternative energy, city planning, computer technology, politics, and so on. Bill McDonough—whose lucrative speaking engagements seem to have survived the hatchet job Fast Company did on him two years ago—kicked off the event in the morning with a typically rousing and poetic speech that had attendees still buzzing at lunch. (I, alas, missed him, but I’ve heard some version of Bill’s song and dance before.) Read more…

In developing ideas for the What’s Next issue, we had a rather logical thought. The subject was “Landscape/Climate Change”—and the thought? We need to talk to a Dutchmen about this, for fairly obvious reasons. So we contacted Jan H. de Jager, a civil engineer and an expert on dikes and dams, who in the course of our conversation gave us a primer on the Dutch ways with water.
.

Tell us how the Dutch approach the problem of rising sea levels. They’ve been at this for thousands of years.

Our coast is very soft and sandy, with a number of major rivers crossing into the North Sea. The country was actually formed by these rivers over the last one or two hundred thousand years. It’s a country built on sediments, which were brought in by the Rhine River. A couple hundred thousand years ago we didn’t even exist. Our ancestors have dealt with sea level rises in the past. And they had only modest means, so what they did was build little platforms, plateaus, where they built up their farms and houses. So when sea water would rise, they would run to their earth plateau and sit out the high water.

When the country got more inhabited, and now I’m talking about two thousand years ago, these practices were still in use. About one thousand years ago the population increased to such an extent that the people felt that we had to organize things. The water boards were an early form of democracy. Our oldest water boards’ [jurisdictions] are over one thousand years old. They choose a chairman and a secretary. All the people living in a certain area had to contribute to the water board, whether in money or manual labor, or horses or cows to transport earth. And then we started to build dikes. Not the same sort of thing we consider a dike now. These were earth berms, which were extended over many kilometers to fend off possible high waters. The water boards evolved over the years. In the early days, there may have been one thousand water boards, in a country the size of Maryland. But up to sixty percent of the country is below the current mean sea level, which means most of the country is still being protected by dikes. The number of water boards has decreased. We now have less than one hundred, which is cheaper and easier to manage. People don’t supply the labor anymore. They just pay a bill every month. The inhabitants pay according to the size of land they own and the properties built on it.

That’s how they maintain the dikes?

Yes. And to maintain the water levels, because precipitation falls into these polders behind the dikes and we have to pump it out. We also have water seeping in from underneath the dikes that has to be pumped out. All those costs are borne by the water boards but paid for by the inhabitants of the area. Read more…

Last year, the inaugural SHIFTboston Ideas Competition called on architects, designers, engineers, and others to submit provocative visions “to enhance and electrify the urban experience in Boston.” The competition sponsors weren’t necessarily looking for build-able schemes, but rather for inspiration—for ideas that would engage citizens and galvanize the local design community.

But the winning proposal, announced last month, actually doesn’t seem that far-fetched. The architects Sapir Ng and Andrzej Zarzycki—the former is an associate at Tsoi/Kobus & Associates, the latter an assistant professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology—envisioned a new use for the abandoned Tremont Street Subway tunnel, which runs underneath Boston Common. In their scheme, the tunnel becomes a network of underground cultural venues, including a theater, a cinema, art galleries, and a “media-infused trolley museum.”

What are the chances that such a thing could actually be built? Right now it’s simply too early to tell; according to a press release from Tsoi/Kobus & Associates, “[m]eetings to share details of the plan with politicians and policy makers are currently being scheduled.” Here’s hoping those meetings happen, and that the city’s politicians are canny enough (and/or jealous enough of New York’s High Line) to take Ng and Zarzychi’s proposal seriously.

Read more about the Tremont Underground Theater Space at SHIFTboston.org.