Tags: sustainability

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/18507807 w=500&h=300]

Another animated video in the American Society for Landscape Architects (ASLA)’s sustainable design series demonstrates how to sustainably reclaim building materials for use in new park construction.  The clip highlights ways to convert a former building site into a new open space while minimizing waste and maximizing use of recycled materials.

At NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts, fall term students explored ideas relating to urban farming, phytoremediation systems and environmental data monitoring through a course entitled “Designing Living Systems.” Some of the student projects included a stepped indoor hydroponic farm, a bathroom phytoremediation device and a moss-covered structure with air monitoring capabilities.

The New York Times outlines ways that the New York City Department of Environmental Protection hopes to generate energy from the 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater that enters the city’s sewage treatment plants daily.

Heating fuel can be extracted from sludge and butanol, an alternative fuel to gasoline, from the algae generated by wastewater.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/15225376 w=500&h=300]

A follow-up (or preface) to Dana Gumb’s lecture: as part of its series of sustainable design videos (including the brownfield remediation piece we featured recently), the American Society of Landscape Architects has produced an animated video on designing landscapes to assist in stormwater management. 

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has announced its 2011 Institute Honor Awards for Regional and Urban Design, recognizing “distinguished achievements that involve the expanding role of the architect in urban design, regional and city planning, and community development.”  Honored projects are a design for expansion of Beijing’s Central Business District; a plan for reducing the carbon footprint of Chicago’s building stock; a re-stitching of neighborhood fabric in Louisville, Kentucky; a Low Impact Development design manual;  a plan for walkability in Farmington, Arkansas; and the Gowanus Canal Sponge Park, a public open space system designed to slow, absorb and filter surface water runoff in Brooklyn. 

The Freshkills Park Talks lecture series continues at the Arsenal on Tuesday, January 25th, with a talk by Dana Gumb, Director of the Staten Island Bluebelt at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection.  Dana will be talking about sustainable and ecologically sound approaches urban stormwater management, through the lens of the Bluebelt, one of the most ambitious stormwater management efforts in the northeastern United States.

The Winter/Spring issue of the Freshkills Park newsletter, Fresh Perspectives, is up on the official Parks homepage for Freshkills Park.  In this issue are a walk-through of the design for the first phase of South Park, a primer on composting toilets and how they work, and a history and guide to wetlands at the Freshkills Park site.

The NYC Department of Parks & Recreation and the Fellows of the Design Trust for Public Space have prepared and released a manual called “High Performance Landscape Guidelines: 21st Century Parks for NYC.”  It’s a comprehensive design and construction manual for sustainable parks and open spaces and will henceforth guide the design, construction and maintenance of New York City parks, in alignment with Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC 2030.

As of January 1, Italy became the first country in Europe to ban the plastic bag outright. The motion stems from a global movement to curb excessive usage by prohibiting stores from providing customers with free and unlimited  polythene  bags.  According to Italy’s Environment League, Legambiente, citizens have been using more than 300 bags a year per capita; that’s nearly one fifth of Europe’s total usage.

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 Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES) is a joint project of the American Society of Landscape Architects, the University of Texas at Austin and the United States Botanic Garden to generate and test a set of guidelines and benchmarks for sustainable land design, construction and maintenance, much as LEED ratings are given to buildings. 

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/9051621]

An illustrative lecture by William Reed AIA, an architect at the Integrative Design Collaborative as well as Regenesis, Inc. and Delving Deeper who is a nati0nally recognized expert on the practice of sustainable design, delivered in March as part of the Boston Society of Architects lecture series. 

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/4417679]

The second annual New York City Wildflower Week actually runs for nine days, starting tomorrow, May 1st and running through the end of next weekend.  The various cultural partners involved in organizing Wildflower Week are offering a host of (mostly) free programs all over the City to encourage New Yorkers to learn about, experience and reflect on the sustainability of native plants, particularly. 

Piggybacking on last week’s front-page story on comparative waste management strategies in Denmark and the US, the New York Times runs an op-ed by former Department of Sanitation (DSNY) Commissioner Norman Steisel and former DSNY director of policy planning Benjamin Miller on the need for a new set of policy actions and built facilities to manage New York City’s waste more sustainably, locally and cheaply.

The New York Times runs a very informative piece on the success and prevalence of waste-to-energy plants in Denmark, where they constitute the mainstream of garbage disposal and produce a substantial amount of the energy supply.  Denmark hosts 29 of these facilities, which burn non-recyclable garbage to produce heat and electricity while filtering and capturing pollutants like dioxin and mercury rather than emitting them.  

Engineers at Solar Roadways, a renewable energy start-up based in Idaho, have completed a prototype for a multi-layered, energy-generating road surface.  The company says that when installed, Solar Roadway would generate and store energy through photovoltaic (PV) cells, each cell capable of managing it’s own electricity generation, storage and distribution.

Urban Biofilter, a project of environmental advocacy non-profit Earth Island Institute, aims to plant bamboo forests on brownfield sites along industrial and transportation routes.  The planted zones are intended to remediate the wastewater they are fed, reduce stormwater runoff and filter gases, contaminants and metal pollutants out of the local airshed. 

The National Park Service has launched the Designing the Parks Annual Awards Program, aimed at honoring “the role and significance of public parks in community life and the importance of innovative, responsive, high quality planning and design.”  Awards appear to be purely honorary but intended to boost awareness of and support for the NPS’s key principles of park design:

• Reverence for place
• Engagement of all people
• Expansion beyond traditional boundaries
• Advancement of sustainability
• Informed decision making
• An integrated research, planning, design, and review process

The call for submissions is open to built and publicly open parks throughout the world, administered by all levels of government.