NYC’s online guide to conscious urban living: City Atlas

As Rachel Northrop, the Manhattan Green Living Examiner, shares:

If you’re looking for something more productive to do online than comment on Youtube’s latest viral cat video, check out City Atlas, the web’s newest portal to living sustainably in New York City.

City Atlas goes beyond telling you to put your recyclables on the curb in a blue back on the right day; it connects you to people, organizations and initiatives that are shaping the future of urban life in New York City.

Find listings of events, talks, gardening sessions and outdoor concerts or read (and listen to!) full interviews with individuals who have a huge voice and hand in implementing sustainable programs that make NYC a better place to live. Hear what Projja Dutta, MTA’s Director of Sustainability Initiatives, has to say about urban transit and learn the motivation behind the development of Brooklyn’s extensive Greenways from their founder, Milton Puryear.

The bar along the bottom of the page is the best way to navigate the site; start with the Explore tab and the Atlas Beat to stay in the loop on sustainable happenings in all five boroughs. The site is designed to be shaped by its users, so leave a comment and check back often to become part of the dialogue that will shape the New York City of tomorrow.

Continue reading on Examiner.com: NYC’s online guide to conscious urban living, City Atlas, is up and running – New York Green Living | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/green-living-in-new-york/nyc-s-online-guide-to-conscious-urban-living-city-atlas-is-up-and-running#ixzz1ZmR7fWzZ

Better Living Through Art

The first leg of the BMW Guggenheim Lab is launching in New York on 3 August. The think tank-slash-art installation is part of a six-year, nine citywide enterprise that aims to better urban living through arts collaboration. “We’re using the lab literally to conduct experiments on the city,” said Charles Montgomery, a member of the New York lab team.

The BMW Group and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation have teamed up for the project. According to Richard Armstrong, the Guggenheim’s director, BMW’s sponsorship affords the museum “the luxury of intellectual opportunity”. The programme is divided into three different themes. Separate architects will design unique mobile structures to reflect each theme, which will then travel to three cities worldwide. Future locations and architects have not yet been announced.

Read more at The Art Newspaper

Brooklyn Grange: Rooftop City Garden

Rooftop gardens are gaining in popularity in dense urban areas. Check out this cool video about urban rooftop farmers in New York City – the 40,000-square-foot rooftop garden in Queenseven has chickens and beehives (and is the largest rooftop farm in the world). Ben Flanner, one of the farmers profiled, said, “It started with the desire to farm, and also a reluctance to leave the city.”

Watch the ABC News video about New York rooftop farming

Check out the full post on 30 Days at a Time

Creating Authentic, Healthy Neighborhoods

This post is quite interesting, as is the whole Dom’s Plan B blog it comes from. What is Plan B?

 “Plan B” refers to the growing need for our communities and our nation to forge a dramatically new path if we expect a sustainable future rich in a rewarding quality of life. Our path for much of the past century (“Plan A”) is conventionally known as “The American Dream.” This dream has been dependent on endless low-density (and therefore community-destroying) development, forced and isolating travel by car, and high levels of consumption—mostly fueled by cheap oil. It is an inherently unsustainable path that a number of analysts now fear may be leading to the end of the American empire.

The blog post is a list of essential ingredients for creating a town or neighborhood:

1. First, houses need to be within a short walking or bicycling distance of the most important regular tasks of the household. Those tasks (or trips) include jobs, shops, services, culture, public meeting places (such as parks, squares or plazas) and civic institutions.

2. Places conducive to true towns and neighborhoods provide “Third Places” (think of a neighborhood pub, or the TV show “Cheers”). Neighborhoods and towns also provide “social condensers” and other features which nurture a sense of community and sociable conviviality and neighborliness. Sidewalks – the most common form of social condenser — are therefore found on both sides of most or all streets.

3. Neighborhoods and towns have connected streets with short block lengths, and the streets have low design speeds. Such design is essential for minimizing trip distances and maximizing travel safety, both of which are extremely important in inducing travel by foot, bicycle, and transit.

4. Finally, residents of real towns and neighborhoods tend to know the boundaries of their town or neighborhood, which gives their place an identity.

You can read the whole blog post here.

Creating Healthy Human Habitats

How do we create the best human living conditions in cities?

Dr. Howard Frumkin, dean, School of Public Health, University of Washington, asked the audience at the National Building Museum’s Intelligent Cities forum to imagine they were zookeepers and just received a shipment of hundreds of frogs. Immediately, the zookeepers would need to create a habitat with the correct temperature, humidity, water and plants to ensure the frogs are healthy and live long lives. Cities are really just habitats for humans and our zookeepers are our elected officials, urban planners, and designers. However, Frumkin wondered if the ideal habitat is now being created for people - one that offers a healthy environment for all?

A City Dashboard

If a city were to have a “dashboard” tracking all the important indicators of a healthy human environment, “what would it feature?”, asked Frumkin. For Lucy, the dashboard would track traffic fatalities and the percentage of people driving alone to work. Lucy said traffic fatalities are actually higher in the sparser outer areas of cities. Kinney said air pollution and water quality are key data to track. Green made the case for “new intersections, miles of sidewalks and bike lanes, and percentages of people walking to work each day.”

Demographic Shifts 

Lucy sees a coming population shift that will also have major health implications. Currently, “poorer people have captured the better locations in the center of cities. They live in the convenient locations.” However, this trend is changing. With the revival of cities, “white flight has turned into white return.” As a result, the poor are moving to the suburbs. Just as in Paris, where the suburbs are the site of poorer immigrant communities, U.S. cities may soon face the same issues.

Read the full article here.

Publish your Essay on Urban Living!

Would you like to publish your thoughts about the urban lifestyle? Urban Essays invites you to do just that.

Email a copy of your essay to essays@urbanessays.org. The best essays will be displayed on our website. Essays can be submitted as text or as a Microsoft Word document. Please include your name and a telephone number where you can be reached.

All essays must be related to urban living in order to be considered for publication. The definition is pretty broad, so be creative and use your imagination.

By submitting an essay you give UrbanEssays.org the right to display the essay on this website, but otherwise you retain ownership. Unlike other contests, we don’t wish to steal your intellectual property.

Urban Living Is Greener

Wired Magazine reports:

To many Americans, ecological nirvana is a bucolic existence surrounded by wilderness. But the Thoreauvian desire for more elbow room has led to sprawl, malls, and cougar attacks. The edge-city upshot is a national cadre of 3.5 million “extreme commuters,” who spend more than three hours a day in transit, many of them spewing carbon dioxide between exurb home and city office. Automobile exhaust in the US contributes roughly 1.9 billion tons a year to the global carbon cloud, more than the emissions of India, Japan, or Russia. Even worse are the 40 million lawn mowers used to tame the suburban backcountry: Each spews 11 cars’ worth of pollutants per hour.

The fact is, urban living is kinder to the planet, and Manhattan is perhaps the greenest place in the US. A Manhattanite’s carbon footprint is 30 percent smaller than the average American’s. The rate of car ownership is among the lowest in the country; 65 percent of the population walks, bikes, or rides mass transit to work. Large apartment buildings are the most efficient dwellings to heat and cool.

Tips on Buying an Urban Loft

From HGTV Front Door comes these great tips for buying urban:

Tired of long commutes and suburban sprawl? Join the thousands of homebuyers flocking to the urban core. Find out what it’s like to live downtown, tour urban areas across the country and see how city dwellers spend their days, buy a loft or condo and squeeze into small spaces.

• Get the Pros & Cons of what it’s like to live in an urban home
• Survival Tips for small space living
• Condo & Loft Buying Guide
• Buying Tips from urban agents

Get around town on a Yike Bike!

People hunting for urban transportation solutions might want to get familiar with the YikeBike, a miniaturized version of the original Penny-Farthing bike. Only this mini-farthing bike is powered by a battery and can be folded into something the size of a briefcase — ideal for crowded urban offices and apartments.

Parking and security — two fundamental concerns with urban living — are no longer a problem, says Grant White, the designer and founder of YikeBike, based in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The handlebars fold down, the seat tucks away, and the whole thing turns into something like a thickened disc, a procedure that takes 20 to 30 seconds. When a padded shoulder strap is added to the package, it becomes a mode of transportation that can truly be carried over the shoulder.

The bike itself is priced at $3795 and $1995 (USD)— the more expensive frame built with carbon fiber and the other from aluminum and composites, with all other features the same.

Source: Clean Technica (http://s.tt/12uNh)

People for Urban Progress

We just learned of this terrific organization – the People for Urban Progress (or PUP), based out of Indianapolis. PUP is a non-profit organization that promotes and advances public transit, environmental awareness, and urban design.

They deal with projects regarding urban livability, public transportation and recycling; and they have a lot of cool products that are made from recycled materials. The website states:

We stand for project-based urban progress.

We’re an idea incubator, design center, and do-tank.

We began with the idea that the SOLUTION to any urban problem must consider transit, environment, and design in unison. As such, we work with communities and designers to develop innovative and affordable strategies to enhance Indianapolis’ urban quality of life.

In order to do this, we MAKE things. And these small things help fund the big things – the big IDEAS. Our DOME BAG PROJECT is a quintessential example of this way of thinking and working. After we salvaged the roof of the RCA/Hoosier Dome in 2008, we started working with local designers to make products from the fabric. The sale of these products helped us fund the installation of larger public shade structures and pavilions throughout our community… many of which will be installed the summer of 2011.

Check it out!