The Farm City Fair is a festival taking place over three weekends at various Brooklyn sites to celebrate and build knowledge about current practices in urban agriculture.  Farmers, artists and urban planners will be on hand to discuss and present rooftop farm projects, urban homesteading, city beekeeping, parking lot agriculture and more. 

The annual meeting of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) is in Washington, D.C. this weekend, September 10-13.  The design and planning of Freshkills Park will be presented in one of many ‘Education Sessions’ by Ellen Neises, Associate Principal at James Corner Field Operations, and Tatiana Choulika, FO’s Project Manager for Freshkills Park. 

NYC Department of Sanitation Anthropologist-in-Residence Robin Nagle is featured on the cover of the current issue of The Believer (along with Wallace Shawn and “Weird Al” Yankovic!).  The issue’s in-depth interview with Dr. Nagle is terrific, covering the ‘cognitive problem’ of garbage, the outlook and perception of Sanitation workers and the role of the anthropologist or archeologist in the study of waste and waste management.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/13517348]

Flavorwire features six particularly interesting art projects featuring plastic shopping or garbage bags.  Nils Völker‘s one hundred and eight is particularly beautiful.

Eco-Cycle, a Boulder, Colorado-based non-profit recycler, has conceived plans for a “zero waste” industrial park model designed to keep resources out of incinerators and landfills. Based on executive director Eric Lombardi’s work with a Hawaiian community group  considering landfill closure and incinerator construction, the park would be a one-stop facility for truckloads of pre-sorted city waste.

Open House New York, the weekend look inside what are normally closed doors of New York City’s architectural and design fascinatia, takes place Saturday and Sunday, October 9th and 10th this year.  Volunteers are needed.  Volunteers would assist with the weekend’s many programs, including tours, site-specific performances and discussions. 

The American Society of Landscape Architects has put together an online exhibition called Designing Our Future: Sustainable Landscapes.

[The exhibition] highlights real-life examples of sustainable landscape design and its positive effects on the environment and quality of life. These spaces use natural systems to clean the air and water, restore habitats, create healthy communities, and ultimately provide significant economic, social, and environmental value.

Expedition Gowanus is a series of Saturday workshops focused on low-tech, do-it-yourself sustainability practices happening in tandem with an informing the self-sustainable redesign and retrofitting of a houseboat in Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal.  The first workshop will be held Saturday, September 11th and will focus on phytoremediation, the use of plants to draw pollutants out of the surrounding environment. 

Last Friday, we made our second annual visit to Randall’s Island for a field trip to the Department of Parks & Recreation’s Five Borough Technical Services Complex and its incredible green roof.  Chief of Technical Services Artie Rollins gave us a comprehensive overview of the roof’s 20+ green roof systems, including tray systems, bag systems, Xero Flor systems, homemade mixes of soil and perlite, elevated planters, overhead trellises and green walls.  

The Greenbelt Conservancy is hosting a guided night hike in High Rock Park, this Sunday evening, August 22nd.  The 2,800-acre Staten Island Greenbelt is some of the most densely forested and wild-feeling public space in New York City, and 90-acre High Rock is one of the gems in its crown. 

Last week, the New York City Council passed the first comprehensive update to the City’s recycling legislation since 1989.  The biggest addition to the curbside recycling program will be the Department of Sanitation‘s (DSNY) capacity to recycle all rigid plastic containers, including those used to hold laundry detergent, motor oil and yogurt—but as we noted before, that capacity won’t be real until the completion of a new recycling facility in Brooklyn, expected in 2012.

The new exhibit at Wave Hill in the Bronx, called Remediate/Re-vision: Public Artists Engaging the Environment, opened on Sunday.  It showcases remediation- or sustainability-based public art projects since 2002 that have either been completed or are in the planning stages for parks and gardens. 

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/13491802]

The Olmsted Legacy is a one-hour documentary about the contributions of urban planner and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, visionary designer of many of America’s first great parks.  It features the voices of Kevin Kline and Kerry Washington. 

Such a huge crowd came out to hear Peter Harnik speak in our Freshkills Park Talks/Uncommon Ground joint lecture last week!  We’re grateful to the many attendees, and to Peter, who made the trek up from Washington, D.C. and gave an interesting overview of projects happening nationwide to turn existing spaces within our cities into public parks. 

Spectacle Island, part of the Boston Harbor National Recreation Area, was home to a horse rendering plant and a city waste incinerator from 1857 to 1937.  When the incinerator closed, the island served as a landfill until 1959.  Though the island’s original size was approximately 49 acres, landfilling increased its size to 85 acres (with an additional 28 acres in the intertidal zone). 

The Imagination Playground opened today in the South Street Seaport area of Lower Manhattan. It’s the first permanent site where children can interact with the loose parts—a collection of moveable, stackable, manipulable pieces that can also couple with sand and moving water—that have been designed and developed by architect David Rockwell, who also designed the playground.

In the wake of our staff canoe tour last October, we’re now looking to gradually expand access to the glimmering creeks of the Freshkills Park site.  Last Sunday, we organized a kayak tour of the site for representatives of community boathouses throughout the City. 

Artist Tattfoo Tan will lead bike tour of Staten Island community gardens this Saturday, July 24th, hitting Castleton Hill Moravian Church community garden and the Joe Holzka Community Garden. Attendees are encouraged to wear a helmet and bring plenty of water. 

Urban Omnibus recaps (and streams) an Architectural League discussion between Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New Yorker, and former NYC Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Dan Doctoroff.  The discussion covers a number of the controversial projects Doctoroff helped initiate before and during his tenure, including the City’s failed 2012 Olympics bid, the West Side Stadium project, the Atlantic Yards and congestion pricing. 

Miami-based duo Alain Guerra and Neraldo de la Paz, known as Guerra de la Paz, create large-scale sculptures from discarded clothing, reflecting on consumerism, waste and history.  They speak about their work and the ‘history of things’ in this 2008 STUDIO 360 interview on NPR.