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Putting down roots in the city
Victoria Bone, BBC News
Can our cities keep consuming in the face of food shortages and higher prices? A solution could be for urban areas to grow their own food as is being tried in Canada. Campaigners hope the UK will follow and some hope the 2012 Olympics in London could be the catalyst.
So, would you like to study on an edible campus? Or live on an edible estate? And no, we’re not talking about a university run by Willy Wonka or a home designed by Hansel and Gretel.
Instead, this is architecture – and entire urban landscapes – designed to fulfil our ever-growing need for food. Could we make our cities more sustainable – even self-sufficient – if the need to grow food locally was designed into every stage of building, from drawing board to decor?
South East False Creek in Vancouver could be one of the world’s first purpose-built sustainable communities, with growing food at the top of the list of priorities.
(9 July 2008)
Environment, Attitudes, and Behavior
Clark Williams-Derry, World Changing
Does where we live shape how we think and act?
This isn’t the sort of thing I blog about regularly, but it strikes me that this New York Times article on suicide, of all things, has an important lesson about how our physical environments can shape our behavior.
According to the article, large numbers of “impulse” suicide attempts — the ones that are undertaken with little premeditation — could be prevented simply by making the most common means of taking one’s life a little less convenient. Consider Great Britain, where replacing deadly “coal gas” with relatively non-toxic natural gas in home ovens led to a dramatic decline in the national suicide rate:
… The lesson here is some matters that seem intensely private — and exclusively in the realm of personal psychology — more properly belong in the domain of public health. Preventing suicide attempts that result from temporary despair may be less a matter of identifying and dealing with the underlying emotional issues, and more a matter of making the actual mechanics a pain in the ass.
At risk of reading too much into one article, I think there’s a more general point to be made here: our physical environment — the objects we surround ourselves with, and the places we make for ourselves — can have a potent influence both on what we do, and on how we think.
(8 July 2008)
Foreclosures’ financial strains take toll on kids
Stephanie Armour, USA TODAY
In many ways, Shelby Morrow is a typical 16-year-old. She likes hanging out with her friends, dreams of getting her own car and enjoys writing short stories in the bedroom of her wood-frame house in Palm Harbor, Fla.
But in the past few months, she’s been grappling with a financial reality that most teens don’t face. The home she shares with her mother, Melody, and younger sister, Lindsey, is falling into foreclosure. Some days, she watches as her mother cries over the stress.
“I completely understand what’s going on, so I went out and got a job as a server at a nursing home,” Shelby says. “I don’t want to move. Sometimes, I blame my mom for it, but I know it’s not her fault. I’m scared.”
Shelby and millions of other young people have become the largely overlooked victims of a real estate crisis that’s led to record foreclosures, sinking home prices and rising numbers of families straining to pay mortgage bills as adjustable-rate loans grow more costly and home equity shrinks.
(9 July 2008)
