Thriving too

Social Objects and Triangulators - a quick reply

This blog is more a reply to Tessy's blog from earlier today. But because I didn't want to leave out the pictures I post it seperately.

Today a social object emerged justed opposite from where I live. A small open wound in the street - where there used to be a three - was turned into a beautiful garden by my neighbor. Using plants from his own garden, and stone which have been laying around for more then 6 months on the other side of the road, he created a beautiful garden.

And the three things Tessy talk about, using the blog post by Project for public Spaces played out:

1. While creating the garden at least 20 people came up to Willem to ask him about the garden, praising him, bringing him more plants, sand, drinks and thanking him he took care of two places which where bothering a lot of people
2. It was a very mixed group of people - from students to housewives with veils and my other neighbor with her two year old daughter.
3. My daughter and the girl of my neighbor where immediately circling around the garden and another man from across the street volunteered to take care of the garden in the future.

I even had a very long conversation with my neighbor - whose name is Willem by the way - and we learned a great deal about each other which we didn't know before. While reading Tessy post, this story immediately sprung to mind and I just had to share. There are more fascinating things to tell about this conversation, but I will keep those for another time.

You Are Hungry

 

An edible tour of Hackney...

Led by Mikey Tomkins, bee keeper and PhD student at University of Brighton, we wandered round Hackney's hidden growing spaces. Actually, some were very much on view once you knew what you were looking at - with stretches of fencing covered in courgettes and beans (above) and elaborate living marquees called 'dudhi cages' for the dudhi or bottle gourd (below).

Mikey also runs Capital Bee and keeps bees on top of the Space Gallery on Mare Street, so we started the morning with a little taster. Light and full of elderflower and lime - matching the bees local diet. Did you know that 90% of the beehives in the southeast are in the Greater London area? And we've p lenty more rooftops that could become honey making bee farms...

Something else that was interesting to learn, was that most current urban growing plots like the ones we were viewing, are using tradition growing methods in whatever green space people have access to. So needing lots of soil, and flat space. And it isn't productive enough to really feed people fully. But what Mikey found people were valuing, was less the size or quality of the crop, per se. But the opportunity to reclaim  and reuse public land together.

We had an interesting debate about the untidy nature of growing, and how this often seems at conflict with the neat perfection of bricks and concrete. And also what happens when the growing pioneers take up lots of space and it's harder for newcomers to join in. Then we wandered past a little patch of strawberries on a front lawn, and having to work things out didn't seem like a reason not to try in the first place.

Space Gallery: You Are Hungry
Mikeys' edible maps

 

Eat the Scenery

 

Waiting for the bus  isn't my favourite pastime, but if I lived on Landor Road in Brixton, it might soon be, thanks to a group of local residents getting together to create... the edible busstop!

A door drop with 400 leaflets brought out over 40 people to tend for a piece of neglected land, and you can see the resulting bloom here: www.theediblebusstop.org

Excitingly, the guys behind this project are branching out (!) into Park(ing) day which is an internatinoal campaign to reclaim the roads and put real parks in parking bays. Visit Southbank on 16 Sept to see it in action! www.parkingday.org

Social Spaces: Solar Powered Pops

Isn't this beautifully done... Solar powered van selling ice pops....

Herbaceous

 

I am surround by chocolate mint, purple basil, feathery fronds of fennel, meaty sage and tons and tons of basil. Where else could I be but a derelict plot of land by Brentford Lock in west London?

Thanks to Cultivate London (supported by Pathways, with land use provided by ISIS Waterside Regeneration) there are polytunnels full of herbs grown in pallets, ready to supply local shops and restaurants, and training opportunities  in horticulture for young people. And much like the Kings Cross skip gardens, then are designed to be portable, so they can move around the site as it gets developed.

We were well fed with mini grilled mushroom burgers covered in bright green pesto from the basil, and the chocolate mint was scrummy on a soft yellow lemon curd tart. And the PA for the talks was provided by some high energy pedalling!

The farms aren't normally open to the public, so you'll have to get in touch to come and visit. Or you can find out where the herbs are being sold on the website if you want to support the project and sample them yourself...

Read more:
Food production. Skill development. Job creation. www.cultivatelondon.org

 

Holding back the tide

So, what did y'all get up to on Saturday? Bit of a lie-in? Nice warm lazy brunch? Get dressed up in a blue mac and recreate the legend of King Canute on Brighton seafront as part of a worldwide art exhibition to highlight the impact of climate change? Numb toes from the cold, but a great atmostphere and hopefully a few more people thinking a little more about the impact of our lifestyles...
(I'm in the top wave, a few people in from the left)

350eARTh is the world’s first ever global climate art project. In over a dozen places across the globe, citizens and artists will create massive public art installations to show how climate change is already impacting our world as well as offer visions of how we can solve the crisis. Each art installation will be large enough to be seen from space and documented by satellites.

Read more
See the other photos

Living Concrete + Carrot City: Designing for Urban Agriculture

Living Concrete is a cross-institutional dialogue with Carrot City: Designing for Urban Agriculture, an initiative of the Department of Architectural Sciences at Ryerson University in Toronto and is running from 1 October until 15 December 2010. 

Carrot City demonstrates how increasing public interest in agriculture, food supply, and food security is influencing urban design and how design can facilitate a more robust urban food system. This wide-ranging survey of Canadian and American cases examines projects at multiple scales – the city, community and knowledge-building, home and rooftop projects, and a range of products.

Included in the discussion is the newly launched Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn.

And the Vacant Lot - a project started by What If projects.  One of my favourites is their Food Factories which was part of the London Festival of Architecture in 2008.

Slowly but surely it feels like we are getting a proper visual of the future, it is collective, creative, handmade ..... and beautiful!

How People Feel About Green Brands

Yet again another great infographic from Good - well worth exploring - fascinating!

Oil and Water Don't Mix

Limited edition of 200 posters, screen printed with oil from the Gulf of Mexico disaster by Anthony Burrill. The oil was picked up on the beaches of Grand Isle, Louisiana

Farm Together Now

If you haven't discover the work of Amy Franceschini I hope this post will be an inspiration.  Amy is part of Future Farmers and has been working at the intersection of art/design thinking and sustainable food for some time.  Amy was behind the Victory Gardens project in San Francisco. We have blogged about Amy's work here and here.

The latest project, a blog and a book, is 'Farm Together Now - A portrait of people, places and ideas for a new food movement', which Amy has written with Daniel Tucker.

"This part-travelogue, part-oral history, part-creative exploration of food politics will introduce readers to twenty groups working in agriculture and sustainable food production in the U.S. Throughout 2009 the authors visited twenty farms from coast to coast, talking to farmers about their engagement in sustainable food production, public policy and community organizing efforts. Interviews and photo essays with each farm/garden/project will illustrate the inspiring histories, unique characters and everyday struggles of life on these farms."

One example I love from the blog is City Slickers Farms.

From the recent Grist article: “Started in 2001, City Slicker Farms is one of the oldest food and farming organizations in Oakland. Founded by activist Willow Rosenthal, the group, along with the food justice nonprofit People’s Grocery, has become an incubator and hub for agtivists who want to make fresh, healthy food available to all Oaklanders, especially those low-income communities and communities of color who typically have reduced access to quality produce at affordable prices.”

Mapping Delights in Paris

Photographer Ami Sioux's book, Paris 48°49N, 2°29E, is most intriguing. She asked 50 people to draw a map of a part of Paris that was signficant or important to him or her. Then, Ami visited each spot to photograph it. 

Via: Black*Eiffel

[Not that we are obsessed with maps just at the moment or anything....]

The Urban Orchard

I hadn't come across this before today. Projects like this make me smile.

The Union Street Urban Orchard created as part of London festival of Architecture by the Architecture Foundation, Bankside Open Spaces Trust, ProjectARKs and the Wayward Plant Registry.Based in Southwark, London (SE1) you can visit until 19th September.There are a number of events planned over the summer so go on over and pay them a visit.

It focuses on "nurturing and stimulating wildlife and establishing clear ‘places of exchange’ where members of the local community, be they residents, workers or passers by, can meet and interact with one another".Shame I'm in Cheshire and will have to make do with looking at the beautiful photo gallery.

Kite Based Tidal Power

Interesting article in Good on this new technology

The Swedish start-up Minesto is working on a new kind of underwater turbine, called "Deep Green." Here's how it works: You tether this kite-like apparatus to the ocean floor, at a depth of anywhere from 60 to 150 meters. Then, as a tide or current pushes against the kite, it moves from side to side because its wings create a lift force. As it moves, water flows through a turbine in the kite. And because it's moving, the velocity of the flow of water through the turbine can be 10 times the surrounding stream flow, according to Minesto. Here's an animation.

Awareness part 1

So this Friday and Saturday I was at UK Aware - a sustainable lifestyle expo run by brothers Danny and Jodie - to spread the word among the masses of the good work of the RSA.

We pressed the flesh, we handed out some Journals, we explained that the RSA wasn't all about fine arts. Or house insurance.

In order to lure people over, we had a small exhibition of images and examples of environmental and sustainabiltiy projects from our archives - which are now up on Flickr here

The image above is "A Design to Prevent the Emission of Noxious Vapors". Clearly a tangible social benefit.

I met some lovely inspirational people, so I'll be posting up a few more stories on here before too long. Watch this blogspace...

Plotters

Airplot is a piece of land in the middle of the proposed 3rd runway expansion of Heathrow.
It is now jointly owned by over 77,000 people worldwide, in an attempt to stop the runway being built, and address the impact increased air travel would have on climate change.

Greenpeace are looking for 100,000 owners in total, so you have just 2 weeks left to sign up and grab your bit of land...

Be an airplotter.

Chicken City

 'Chicken City is a project about the things that matter to us in our dialogue about the design and management of the urban public realm:

The productive use of managed urban landscape.The relationships human beings have with animals. The links between landscape and food products. Cooking and fun for local people – chaos in a good way!

So for our exhibition we have created a concept for a Chicken Coop. This will be a fantastic piece of Pavillion Architecture as beautiful as any ‘so called’ sculpture.  It will involve all sorts of technical jiggery-pokery. Computer aided design, CNC cutting and routing etc. etc. It might use recycled materials e.g. a plastic board made from discarded farm waste (silage wraps).

The first Chicken Coop will be available to buy as a flatpack mail order or in stock at the shop. Watch this space. We’ll do it with some instructions, bolt A to nut B and so on, so it can be assembled by any idiot with basic DIY skills – that’s the plan anyway. We are trying to make it cheap so that anyone can have a go at keeping chickens at home.'

Via: David Barrie

Pot Hole Gardens

 

An ongoing series of public installations highlighting the problem of surface imperfections on Britain's roads by Pete Dungey, a Graphic Design student at the University of Brighton. 

Every Product Has a Backstory

The video below is a really good interview with Daniel Goleman and Bill Moyers about Goleman's book Ecological Intelligence. The book looks at a variety of new ways of gathering information about products that we use. The book was listed by Time Magazine in March 2009 as one of the ' 10 ideas changing the world right now'. 

The concepts help us go a little deeper into green consumerism. I have just downloaded the iphone application from Good Guide which lists 65,000 products based on their ecological assessment - lots of familiar products rated, but think there is a US focus.  This application even has the ability to process a photo of a bar code and give you a rating.

There are many examples cited in the interview and in the book, but one which seemed particularly striking was that some sunscreens contain chemicals that when washed off in the sea, encourage the growth of some algae which are detrimental to coral reefs.... and that literally thousands of tons of this chemical are estimated to be washed into the sea every year.  As far as being a responsible consumer goes, it seems that a lot of knowledge could take us a long way.

Also interesting in the interview was discussion about how companies will be forced into this type of 'radical transparency' and that social media such as twitter will be carriers and spreaders of information on good and bad about products - you can follow Good Guide on Twitter!

Hopenhagen

 We blogged about Hopenhagen in June. Their site now has nearly 450,000 sign ups. COP15 starts in a couple of days... Fingers crossed!

WindowFarms Becomes a Non-Profit

Windowfarmers became a Non-profit this week!

They are hoping in the next year to:

- to create curricula with schools
- to train community organizers in low income areas
- to translate how-tos into different languages

Waste and Hunger

Great new film made by Good and Whole Foods 

Cheerful Old Bags

 
 A tweet by friend Randy Hunt led me explore a really interesting looking book called 'I Swear To Good You Are God At This'.  Inside I found reference to Baggu... they make brightly coloured reusable bags.

"Because reusable bags only reduce waste when you use them, we made BAGGU light weight, so it's easy to keep with you for an unexpected errand, and so beautiful you’ll actually want to carry it. Using one BAGGU for one year replaces 300 to 700 disposable bags."

Love Letters To the Future

Love Letters to the Future is collecting letters in advance of Coepnhagen and the top 100 lettets will be included in a locked time capsule on 13th December.

No Impact Project

I *really* like this No Impact Project. 

It is fun, and could lead to people making real changes to their daily lives by trying their one week 'experiment'. I took to the guy who wrote the book and developed the project straight away. He lived 'no impact' for a year and clips from the film below showed him to be a genuine, non-preachy human! 

BOGOF

Freecycle is a grassroots movement to allow people to swap and change goods for free, rather than send them to landfill.

Following a bit of a ruckus over trademarking issues and leadership style, new networks are forming.

Same great idea, different name. Freegle sorts out giving and receiving free unwanted items.

"Don’t throw it away – give it away!"