Ecocities Emerging – February 2013 Issue

Upcoming events and announcements

Andy Likuski, Technical Advisor

Andy Likuski believes in the capacity of public space to create vibrant communities, regardless of today’s technological influences. He started his career as a software developer, having completed a bachelor’s degree in computer science engineering at UC Davis at the height of the dot-com boom in California in 1999. While working for startups and large companies, he found that the built environment has succumbed to automobile use, leading to inefficient use of space, environmental neglect, and social isolation. He searched for like-minds who wanted to improve public space via pedestrianized streets, passenger rail, cycling paths, and the integration of the natural environment. He subsequently completed master’s degree in urban planning at Tufts University in 2012, during which time he applied his software skills to urban planning projects. He joined Calthorpe Associates, one of the country’s earliest and most influential New Urbanist architecture and planning firms, in early 2012 to help them complete a sophisticated open-source software product, Urban Footprint, to assist in planning long-term regional development. The software enables public entities to “paint” a variety of future land uses on a map of the parcels of their jurisdiction. It continually produces comparative results about per capita vehicle miles traveled, greenhouse gas emissions, energy and water usage, public health, and other important measurements of sustainability. After the completion of the initial version of Urban Footprint, created for the state of California, Andy currently leads the software development of the next more powerful version of the software. Additionally, Andy is on the board of directors of Californians for High Speed Rail, the primary advocacy group for the first high-speed rail network in North America. He also enjoys studying foreign languages, speaking French and Spanish well and currently learning German.

Sven is a San Francisco-based writer, storyteller, and whole systems thinker covering issues of social, environmental, and economic significance. He’s a regular contributor to Yes! Magazine and Shareable, and his work has been published in Grist, Ode, Sojourners, Alternet, Planetizen, and many others. A creative muse at heart, Sven has co-written and recorded five albums with his band Chemystry Set, including Dancing on the Brink of the World, a multimedia book/CD combining archetypal short stories, music, and art.

As a member of Ecocity Builders’ communications team and the International Ecocity Framework & Standards core advisory committee, Sven has been intimately involved in the advancement of ecologically healthy cities for quite some time. His natural affinity for car-free living, however, dates all the way back to his first tricycle ride down the middle of the street in front of his childhood home in Stuttgart, Germany.

When he’s not in his Mission District neighborhood looking for new murals, tasty street food or guys in leotards on unicycles, Sven is helping clients with messaging and web design or musing from the spaces between soil and soul on his blog. Find out more atsveneberlein.com or get the quick twitter fix @ecomuse.

The High Line Park in Manhattan — an old elevated railway transformed into a snaking park trail-has officially sparked a frenzy of excitement about rehabilitating old transit areas into green space, even through the idea has actually been around for a while (Paris’s Promenade Plantee debuted in 1993). But what happens when you’ve got an out of commission rail line-underground?

The defunct “Mail Rail” tunnel — a narrow gauge railway used for transporting mail around London-closed in 2003 and UK’s Landscape Institute, in partnership with the Mayor of London and the Garden Museum, has run a design competition to decide what to do with it. The 170 entries included some wonderfully creative ideas, from public swimming area to rehabilitated wetlands and a floating park. The winner: London-based Fletcher Priest Architects created a plan to turn the tunnels into an urban mushroom farm and pedestrian stroll. The pedestrian walkway would be lit at street level by glass-fiber, mushroom-shaped sculptures and the ‘shroom crop could supply pop-up “Funghi” cafes at the tunnel’s entrance and exit.

Check out the plans for the “Pop Down” here:http://www.fletcherpriest.com/High-Line-for-London/competitions/. Fungi are truly wonderful and under-appreciated organisms. In addition to providing food and visual delight for the visitors, the colony can help clean toxins from the soil. This is a wonderfully creative concept for a public park and truly unique-hopefully it will will be built!

Car Free Journey

By Steve Atlas

 www.ecocitybuilders.org

For the New Yorker

By Richard Register, President, Ecocity Builders 

October 27, 2009 and I was getting off Vancouver’s SkyTrain at the Lake City Way Station. With me was my friend Jennie Moore, Director of Sustainable Development and Environmental Stewardship for the British Columbia Institute of Technology. “There it is,” I said, camera in hand. “I’ve been looking for that poster for my ecological city slide show.” Before me was a sign I’d seen several times flashing by through the window of my moving train. It turned out to be part of a campaign by the Vancouver Aquarium. Featuring an image of a polar bear floating on a slab of ice in an almost open ocean, the copy read:

“Adaptation is not an option. Canada’s Arctic. In the grip of change. Visit the new exhibit to understand the impact.”

The polar bear, on all fours, gazing to the horizon, looked like any you’d expect on a poster, calendar or in a coffee table book… except that it had the black stripes on white of an African zebra. Obviously telling it to adapt was writing it off to extinction. Some changes are exterminating and that’s all there is to it. Working to promote “adaptation” might not be such a good idea. It’s something we should contemplate most seriously.

The New Yorker feature article in the January 7, 2013 issue entitled “Adaptation – how can cities be climate proofed?” took the usual automatic look at solving climate and sea rise problems that is all too ordinary these days. But why start our thinking with adapting to something that disastrous when we could focus our thinking and strategies on preventing it? It is too late to avoid some impacts but the possibilities for worse is more than a little troubling. The positive feedback loops such as the loss of ice on the Arctic Ocean presenting a dark sea to the sky, instead of reflective white ice, absorbs more heat and accelerates heating. The permafrost has begun to melt in Siberia, Alaska and Canada releasing methane from enormous deposits of methane bearing ice, called alternately methane clathrate or hydrate, potentially in immense quantities, a gas with 23 times the heat capturing capacity in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide. As the melting permafrost heats the air and ground it releases more methane which heats more, releases more, heats more, releases more and so on around the “positive feedback loop”. The accurate information and good predictions about carbon dioxide some have been in denial about for more than twenty years now was brought to you by the same folks who also warn us about the even more catastrophic potential of methane release in a world with a rising fever. So we don’t know how bad it can get and our efforts at adaptation may be just distraction enough to lose us the opportunity to stop far worse disasters, and maybe even prevent us from figuring out how to reverse the heating trend.

READ ON