from BBC: Less is more: Simple living in small spaces

Rethink how much space you need!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16348594

temporary space

Finally folks are seeing that resource-intensive permanent structures might not be the best solution for the ebb and flow of meeting people.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/its-time-to-rethink-temporary/

I'm pro city-states

For example, in Honduras:
http://www.economist.com/node/21541392

America's War Within

States spend billions on local homeland security

http://projects.cironline.org/police-grants

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan represent only a fraction of the billions spent to battle terrorists since Sept. 11, 2001. Lawmakers in Washington have shelled out some $34 billion over the last 10 years to state and local law enforcement. This map shows how much each state has raked in by grant program and fiscal year, based on data obtained from the Department of Homeland Security. Click on "per capita spending" to see how the rankings of those who came out on top dramatically shift when a state's population is taken into account.

KZMU Moab Community Radio

100% solar powered!

http://www.kzmu.org/

Life is easy

This is Jon Jandai, from Pun Pun Center for Self-Reliance near Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Life is easy. Build your own house, grow your own food, have plenty of free time.


"The four basic needs, food, house, clothes, and medicine much be cheap and easy for everybody. That's civilization. But if we make these four things very hard for many people to get it, that is uncivilized."

TEDx talk on garden plots (subversive plots)

Roger Doiron: My subversive (garden) plot

Kitchen Gardeners: http://kitchengardeners.org/

1959 urban planning film from National Homebuilders Assoc. rings true on poor development

"Once, the land seemed inexhaustible."

Indianapolis repurposes minor league baseball seats at bus stops

http://www.urbanophile.com/2011/12/13/indy-to-repurpose-stadium-seats-at-bus-stops/

US now exports more oil than it uses each year

from Wall Street Journal:

U.S. Nears Milestone: Net Fuel Exporter

U.S. exports of gasoline, diesel and other oil-based fuels are soaring, putting the nation on track to be a net exporter of petroleum products in 2011 for the first time in 62 years.

A combination of booming demand from emerging markets and faltering domestic activity means the U.S. is exporting more fuel than it imports, upending the historical norm.

According to data released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration on Tuesday, the U.S. sent abroad 753.4 million barrels of everything from gasoline to jet fuel in the first nine months of this year, while it imported 689.4 million barrels.

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Most folks know the United States is the greatest consumer of oil in the world, but we are also one of the greatest producers: we're #3 behind Saudi Arabia (#2) and Russia (#1) (source: Huffington Post). My apologies to Alaska and Gulf wildlife. -Lauren

from NPR: Haiku traffic signs

Haiku Traffic Signs Bring Poetry To NYC Streets

Ikeaville in London

IKEA Urbanism: A New Era In Urban Design?

giving up taste, nutrition, safety, and reason for the perfect tomatoe

Ta-may-toe, Ta-mah-toe: Lessons in complexity from a fruit

know your vegan sources

Vegan Unaware Pineapple He’s Eating Once Used To Beat Cow To Death

http://www.theonion.com/articles/vegan-unaware-pineapple-hes-eating-once-used-to-be,10250/

PRONTO International

PRONTO International Mission: To improve maternal and neonatal outcomes by developing sustainable and effective low-tech, high-fidelity obstetric and neonatal emergency simulation training curricula for use in limited-resource settings.

I am assisting this organization with the design and production of PartoPants.

We re-use materials as much as possible, including donated hospital scrubs, to keep the technology replicable and inexpensive.

what is the point of biomass fueled robots?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=biomass-fueled-robot

great song: Truth by Alex Ebert

lyrics:

The truth is that I never shook my shadow
Every day it's trying to trick me into doing battle
Calling out "faker" only get me rattled
Want to pull me back behind the fence with the [cattle]
Building your [lenses]
Digging your trenches
Put me on the front line
Leave me with a dumb mind
With no defenses
But your defenses
If you can't stand to feel the pain then you are senseless

[Since] this
I've grown up some
Different kind of fighter
And when the darkness come let it inside you
Your darkness is shining
My darkness is shining
Have faith in myself
Truth

I've seen a million numbered doors on the horizon
Now which is the future you choosen before you gone dying.
I'll tell you 'bout a secret I've been underminding
Every little lie in this world come from dividing
Say you're my lover, say you're my homie,
Tilt my chin back slit my throat take a bath in my blood get to know me
All out of my secrets
All my enemies are turning into my teachers.
Because, lights blinding, no way dividing what's yours or mine when everything's shining
You darkness is shining my darkness is shining
Have faith in ourselves
Truth
Yes I'm only loving, only trying to only love
That's what I'm trying to do is only loving
Yes I'm only lonely loving feeling only loving
Till I'm feeling only loving
Ya say it ain't loving ain't loving my loving
But I'm only loving only loving only loving
Only loving the truth.

Seattle Times article: The Great Recession's toll: Tallying the impact in the Northwest

For most of us, Washington's economy has never been this bad. Since the mortgage bubble popped we've lost more jobs faster, and recovered more slowly, than at any time since the Second World War. That includes iconic slumps such as the Boeing Bust, the early-'80s double-dip and the dot-com crash barely a decade ago. As these charts and graphs show, the recession has fallen hardest on people in the lower-middle and working classes -- folks who were just getting by or maybe starting to make some headway when the bottom fell out. Statistics can't capture the pervasive sense of economic dislocation the slump has engendered. But they can at least help us understand what's happening and to whom.

How Algorithms Shape the Landscape

"the physics of culture"
"we're designing for this kind of machine dialect"
regarding the fiber-optic cable laid between Chicago and New York, aided by bulldozers and dynamite: "that is a kind of manifest destiny, and we'll always look for a new frontier"

related links:
2010 Flash Crash
Netflix Pragmatic Chaos code

from newgeography: Wall Street Plays Occupy Whitehouse

Despite his occasional remarks that decry “fat cat”’ bankers, Obama has effectively serviced the financial bigwigs. Bank prosecutions have declined markedly under Obama — to levels not seen for more than 25 years. Obama has even tried to derail aggressive bank prosecutions pursued by state attorneys general, most of them liberal Democrats.

Read the full post here.

coolest stair designs

Why waste all that space? These are amazing!

http://dornob.com/10-clever-under-stair-storage-space-ideas-solutions/

http://dornob.com/space-saving-staircase-shelves-for-floor-to-ceiling-storage/

Anne Spalter kaleidescope city video

snobby urban bike riders: interesting post on Salon.com

Are urban bicyclists just elite snobs?

As cycling's popularity rises, the cyclists are despised. If riders want to change cities, they need a new attitude

Welcome to the new urban order: the Jag-driving New Yorker columnist is a philistine better suited to the suburbs of Wichita. Meanwhile, the city’s bicyclists are an entitled, imperial cabal cruising around on Trek Bellville three-speeds, an insidious locus of unchecked power and influence. How is this possible? As the blog Bike Snob NYC put it, someday in the future, “humanity will marvel that there was once an age in which a mode of transportation as inexpensive and accessible as the bicycle was considered ‘elitist.’”

quote on freedom from David Foster Wallace

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day."

-David Foster Wallce, This is Water

from the Economist: Seasteading- Cities on the Ocean

Seasteading: Libertarians dream of creating self-ruling floating cities. But can the many obstacles, not least the engineering ones, be overcome?

The Constant Gardeners | OnEarth Magazine

The Constant Gardeners | OnEarth Magazine

The Best Time Investments You Can Make

The Best Time Investments You Can Make

Some decent recommendations.
I liked this mention: "In other parts of the world, such as India, it’s normal for people to enjoy each others’ company without activity or even conversation" I remember this being one of my favorite things in India.
-Lauren

MOAB

Ralph Waldo Emerson poem on friendship

Friendship (from Essays: First Series, 1841)

A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs,
The world uncertain comes and goes,
The lover rooted stays.
I fancied he was fled,
And, after many a year,
Glowed unexhausted kindliness
Like daily sunrise there.
My careful heart was free again,
O friend, my bosom said,
Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red,
All things through thee take nobler form,
And look beyond the earth,
And is the mill-round of our fate
A sun-path in thy worth.
Me too thy nobleness has taught
To master my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life
Are through thy friendship fair.

NY Times Article: Generation Sell

Generation Sell

By: WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ

Published: November 12, 2011

EVER since I moved three years ago to Portland, Ore., that hotbed of all things hipster, I’ve been trying to get a handle on today’s youth culture. The style is easy enough to describe — the skinny pants, the retro hats, the wall-to-wall tattoos. But style is superficial. The question is, what’s underneath? What idea of life? What stance with respect to the world?

Previous youth cultures — beatniks, hippies, punks, slackers — could be characterized by two related things: the emotion or affect they valorized and the social form they envisioned. For the hippies, the emotion was love: love-ins, free love, the Summer of Love, all you need is love. The social form was utopia, understood in collective terms: the commune, the music festival, the liberation movement.

The beatniks aimed at ecstasy, embodied as a social form in individual transcendence. Theirs was a culture of jazz, with its spontaneity; of marijuana, arresting time and flooding the soul with pleasure (this was before the substance became the background drug of every youth culture); of flight, on the road, to the West; of the quest for the perfect moment.

The punks were all about rage, their social program nihilistic anarchy. “Get pissed,” Johnny Rotten sang. “Destroy.” Hip-hop, punk’s younger brother, was all about rage and nihilism, too, at least until it turned to a vision of individual aggrandizement.

As for the slackers of the late ’80s and early ’90s (Generation X, grunge music, the fiction of David Foster Wallace), their affect ran to apathy and angst, a sense of aimlessness and pointlessness. Whatever. That they had no social vision was precisely what their social vision was: a defensive withdrawal from all commitment as inherently phony.

So what’s the affect of today’s youth culture? Not just the hipsters, but the Millennial Generation as a whole, people born between the late ’70s and the mid-’90s, more or less — of whom the hipsters are a lot more representative than most of them care to admit. The thing that strikes me most about them is how nice they are: polite, pleasant, moderate, earnest, friendly. Rock ’n’ rollers once were snarling rebels or chest-beating egomaniacs. Now the presentation is low-key, self-deprecating, post-ironic, eco-friendly. When Vampire Weekend appeared on “The Colbert Report” last year to plug their album “Contra,” the host asked them, in view of the title, what they were against. “Closed-mindedness,” they said.

According to one of my students at Yale, where I taught English in the last decade, a colleague of mine would tell his students that they belonged to a “post-emotional” generation. No anger, no edge, no ego.

What is this about? A rejection of culture-war strife? A principled desire to live more lightly on the planet? A matter of how they were raised — everybody’s special and everybody’s point of view is valid and everybody’s feelings should be taken care of?

Perhaps a bit of each, but mainly, I think, something else. The millennial affect is the affect of the salesman. Consider the other side of the equation, the Millennials’ characteristic social form. Here’s what I see around me, in the city and the culture: food carts, 20-somethings selling wallets made from recycled plastic bags, boutique pickle companies, techie start-ups, Kickstarter, urban-farming supply stores and bottled water that wants to save the planet.

Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms.

Call it Generation Sell.

click link above for the rest of the article -Lauren

from citiwire.net: rooming houses for Millennials?

Bring Back the Rooming House?

Neal Peirce / Nov 12 2011

For Release Sunday, November 13, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group

Is it time to restore the old-fashioned rooming house — or something akin to it — in America’s cities?

OK, maybe not the century-old stereotype of a dowdy rooming house with doilies on the furniture, tiny rooms with cast iron beds, a shared bathroom down the hall, and meals ruled over by a stern older woman.

Shared meals? Maybe not anymore. But we do need much smaller, more affordable units than today’s market offers, especially for our millions of “millennials” — twenty-somethings who are now selecting cities to live in. Millennials find themselves stuck with meager pay (median income $31,000) in today’s limping economy.

Unquestionably, tens of millions of oncoming youth will disconnect from the American vision of home as a “homestead” — the self-contained units of our pioneer forbears, translated since World War II by a suburban home occupying its own staked out lot.

The shift will shock some. For decades, the popular idea’s been that rooming houses, mother-in-law apartments, garage flats and accessory units should be zoned away to prevent a wave of flophouses and seedy units subverting neighborhood values and stability.

But it’s time to turn a fresh page, argue two keen observers of the current scene: Seattle-based urban designer Mark Hinshaw (writing in Planning, the American Planning Associations’ magazine) and David Smith of Recap Real Estate Advisors in Boston.

Recognize, they urge, that we’re into a new urban age. Cities are “in”, especially with youth. And those millennials are delaying marriage — by a full five years over the previous decade, the Census Bureau reports. And rather than the suburbs where many grew up, they are instead seeking, Hinshaw observes, “cities or older, close-in suburbs that have a rich array of choices — in employment, transit, bicycling, arts and entertainment, and a ‘cafe culture’ similar to what’s found in many European cities.”

Smith argues it’s high time we shake “the tyranny of the homestead vision as expressed in antiquated, restrictive, and exclusionary zoning and building codes.” Examples of such rules include arbitrary density limits based on units per acre, minimum lot sizes, minimum setbacks, minimum bedroom sizes, and prohibitions against dividing flats.

Smith and Hinshaw suggest we even take on the sacred cow of minimum parking requirements for apartment complexes, saving both cash and prime real estate by repealing them. (Many of today’s young urbanites don’t have cars anyway — so why oblige them to rent units with a car stall figured in, inflating the cost?)

And, Smith underscores, do away with Nanny State restrictions on unmarried cohabitation or student occupancy.

Candidate strategies for more compact urban housing units abound. Smith suggests, for example, basement or attic flats that use the “excess” space in larger homes in which an aging homeowner wants to remain but has rooms that are idle and chores that need to be done. “A bargain can be struck,” he suggests, with a younger tenant who pays reduced rent in exchange for upkeep and light maintenance. The net result: “to turn an over-housed, under-maintained single-family dwelling into a multi-household home that benefits both parties.”

In Seattle, developer Jim Potter has put up several buildings specifically for people in their 20s, assuming their basic need is a safe place to sleep that has a private bath. The units are a few hundred square feet in size, rents (WiFi included) just $500 a month. There’s a very compact kitchen in each unit, but in ancient rooming house tradition, larger shared kitchen as well. Potter offers parking stalls but most go untaken.

The Tree House in Palo Alto, Calif., specifically for young singles, has four stories stepped and terraced back to avoid a boxy look. Rents range from $400 to $900 a month, compared to about $1,500 to $2,000 for market rate studios.

But Hinshaw has developed plans for a model 21st century rooming house (still unbuilt) that’s even more imaginative. The small (400-500 square feet) units would have high ceilings, allowing for a low-head-height sleeping loft above the kitchen area and bath.

And he’d seek to make the building even more interesting. There’d be a green roof with grasses to collect and absorb precipitation. And then a ground floor occupied by small shops and cafes, possibly compact start-up businesses– “sort of a street-level commercial incubator.”

This kind of housing, Hinshaw believes, would “be immediately applicable” to urban areas served by subway, light rail, or high-capacity rapid bus transit. But his loft design, he asserts, could fit well into smaller towns or suburbs with underused properties such as strip malls or car dealerships.

To make these strategies work, localities will have to reform ancient zoning laws. It’s easy to imagine apprehensive neighbors turning out in opposition. But all need to be reminded: We’re all in it together in the new limited economy — and the young millennials are America’s future.

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If we changed the way we build houses, this could be different.

-Lauren