Frick Park, Pittsburgh

I was able to go to Frick Park last week. It is located on the east end of Pittsburgh. I was told it is the second largest urban park in the world (but maybe just the US), the first being Central Park in New York. The park has many playgrounds, tennis courts, fields, and walking paths. And all in between are patches of forest. Children could play forever in those woods and never get bored. They could let their imaginations run wild as they too run through the wild. I hope you enjoy some of the photos that I took.

I was able to do some open space and playscape design in a previous course, but I never really considered a  forest as a playground until very recently. Frick Park is an excellent example of how it works. The picture above shows a field that I came across after walking on a foot path for sometime. The forest just opened up and there was this secret playing field. I was told that there were probably several more similar to this throughout the park.

There was at least one stream flowing through the park where I was walking. The park wraps around much of the nearby canyons so there were probably more streams like it. 

Along the perimeter of the park there were several playgrounds, baseball fields, tennis courts, and probably much much more. 

It was a neat experience, especially the forested areas, and it made me want to add more nature in any future open space designs that I might do. 

Embodied Energy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXzYoKtRqPg

A quick definition of embodied energy is the energy required for an entire lifecycle of that item. This includes material extractions, transport, manufacture, assembly, and deconstruction.

I'll use a brick as a brief (and no way complete) example:

Extraction:

• A tractor scoops up the raw clay material
• That tractor is made of and uses metal, wires, gasoline, etc
• Labors
• A driver must operate the tractor
• The driver ate breakfast that morning
• Trucks carry the clay to the factory (possibly hundreds of miles)
• Truck material, labors, roads, etc

Manufacture:

• Processes the clay
• mixed with straw and other materials
• straw grew in a field
• sun gave light, photosynthesis occurred, etc
• put into mold
• mold was designed, calculated, etc
• Fires the brick
• Electric furnace heats the bricks
• electricity came from grid
• runs off of coal burning power plant
• transmission lose 
• scrubbers needed to clean the smoke stacks
• heat lose, dissipated energy 
• Moves bricks to warehouse 
• semi-truck or train

Assembly:

• Bricks stored on wooden palette
• wooden palette came from a tree: extracted, processed, assembled, etc (I think you get the idea)
• Inventoried, cataloged, bar coded
• Purchased and moved to construction site
• labors begin laying brick for a building, one by one
• labors eat breakfast, drank coffee, drove to work, etc
• Coffe has embodied energy too
• coffee beans came from Columbia, shipped by boat,

Deconstruction:

• Building is removed
• bricks can possibly be used in another location

Transport:

• All along the way there were roads for the tractors, trucks, and other vehicles
• Vehicles run on gas or diesel
• create pollution in the air

Clearly a lot of energy is embodied in everything around us. Even something as everyday as a single brick, has energy tied to it. That is one reason why recycling old materials is so important. If it can be reused it should, otherwise all (or most of) that embodied energy would be lost.

Concrete and CO2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LhST0dKMwY8

http://calera.com/index.php/

These are some examples of ways to use things like concrete - something that normally produces CO2 - and engineer it so that uses CO2 as a building material.

Brent said that for every one ton of portland cement produces one ton of CO2. It inspired him to look for solutions elsewhere and he found it in nature - in the coral reef.

Calera makes materials that sequester the CO2 from the atmosphere; cementitous materials that could replace the typical portland cement.

Plat of Zion

Urban designers in Salt Lake City praise innovations of the ‘Mormon Grid’

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/politics/56386379-90/lake-salt-duany-blocks.html.csp

Salt Lake City's large grid has some potential benefits. I like the idea of a ring of buildings - high density, mixed-use, green development around the perimeter of the 10 acre blocks with a "block of agriculture" in the center. It is important to keep the buildings facing the street interesting and vibrant. Furthermore, the streets should not be so large as they are now (which is roughly 140 ft of Right-of-Way).

Social Sustainability (Part 2)

Here is a short article about the strengths of urban cores as apposed to sprawl.

http://unews.utah.edu/news_releases/strong-urban-cores-promote-socializing-in-the-city/

In the future I plan on taking about social interactions and the relation with innovation/ creativity.

Nature as design guidelines and blueprints

Sadly, I have to admit that the idea of using nature as a guide and blueprint for solving problems had not dawned on me til very recently. I can say with high levels of confidence that the civil engineering courses that I participated in did not promote this idea. It was more important to get the math right than to design the solution correctly.

Nature has been solving the same problems that we (humans) face each and every day. For instance, how do I build a durable shelter from the elements while still remaining cool in the summer and warm in the winter? How does one purify water? How is solar radiation harvested for power?

Some people, however, have figured out how to follow nature's blueprints.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/packaging-you-can-eat.html

Fruit often comes in an "edible packaging" and people like David Edwards are developing the same thing for other foods.

Janine Benyus gets it. She talks about biomimicry - a new discipline that learns and takes design advice from the planet.

http://www.ted.com/talks/janine_benyus_biomimicry_in_action.html

Clothesline Paradox

The idea of the "clothesline paradox" which was explained by solar architect Steve Baer (and possibly others) is basically as follows:

Oil is drilled from the earth, say in Alaska. It is then piped hundreds of miles to be refined and shipped throughout the country. The oil is then burned to produce electricity. The electricity is then pushed through wires, undergoing transmission loss along the way, and eventually sent out onto the grid. From there the electricity powers a clothes dryer - turning the drum, heating the coil and ultimately allowing the clothes within to dry.

On the other hand, the clothes could have been put on a string and hung out to dry on a clothesline.

Frack!!!

Here is an awesome presentation on the dangers of  hydraulic fracturing (or Fracking) for oil.

http://www.dangersoffracking.com/

It is fun to just scroll down and read the facts about it.


This video shows that some of the chemicals actually leaked out into this man's drinking water.

Bogota

Here is a neat video about Bogota about building a sustainable city for themselves. And it is narrated by Brad Pitt - what could be better? (I also want to give a shout out to Kyra for sharing this with me)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IjhMQM8eaVY#!

This shows another city that did not invest in more freeways, and very little investment in anything that would promote the automobile. They focused on pedestrians, bicycles, and transit (buses).

Chris Jordan

I was recently introduced, or rather, became aware of Chris Jordan. He has done some remarkable work and I thought that I would share some of it.

Here is a link to a TED talk that he gave. In it, he goes through some statistics - staggering statistics - of things done by the US (at least I think all the stats are from the US alone). He then takes these stats and turns them into art because we as humans are not capable of comprehending such large numbers.
http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_jordan_pictures_some_shocking_stats.html

One of his examples is the amount of plastic cups used by airlines: 1 million plastic cups are used every 6 hours!!! 4,000,000 cups a day. Watch the video. It's crazy to see such waste.

Here is a trailer for his work he did on the Midway Atoll in the North Pacific. The film should be coming out later this year I think.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozBE-ZPw18c

The island is home to a majority of the world's population of Black-footed Albatross. Midway Atoll, along with other islands nearby, get a lot of debris from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The garbage floats and accumulates on the beaches. Much of the garbage is made from plastics, which then ends up in the birds digestive tracks.

"Do we have the courage to face the reality of our time and allow ourselves to feel deeply enough that it transforms us and our future?"

Social Sustainability (Part 1)

Sustainability is quite the buzz word these days, but it usually comes up when talking about the environment. However, sustainability concerns more than just the environment - it deals with economics as wells as social relations. I have been thinking about the social side of things for quite some time now.

Before I go too far I will provide a definition of sustainability. I'm using the definition from the 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future. It states that "sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

With that being said we can think about what social (or equity) sustainability would be.

I see two very different and somewhat contradicting social applications of society today.

On one side I see what is being represented by social media - things such as Twitter and Facebook. People are connecting with other people, when they want, where they want, and with whomever they want. They are in control of their relationships in a way that the world has never seen before. We are no longer confined to the people immediately around us. It's a new social phenomenon and many people are loving it. If nothing else is said about social media at least this much is true - people want to be connected with other people.

On the other side, as I move about the public realm, I see people putting up barriers between themselves and others. They are listening to their music as they ride the light rail to work. They are playing games, watching videos, or texting on their phones. In a way, mentally they are anywhere but where they are physically. They have no intention of interacting with the people with whom they share their space.

One may argue that these two things are related (and they might be right). People are choosing their associates (real or virtual) because they can. This has long been one of the comparisons made to urban and rural living. In a rural setting, people were very limited in their choices for personal interactions, whereas the urban setting would provide much richer diversity. Thus people in the city found other people that they wanted to spend time with.

So, what does that mean?  - - - I don't know. This thought is still in its infancy in my head. So bear with me here as I do a little stream of consciousnesses.

As an urban planner/designer what does all of this mean to me? How can I possibly strive for social sustainability when I cannot even figure it out?

I have never been one to talk to a stranger on the bus. I don't meet new people when I go to the park. But just because I don't do it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I'm sure it happens, but for whom? Or how often does it happen? Can it only happen if both people have their headphones out of their ears?

Unintended consequences

I have known for sometime that doctors often proscribe pills to people even though the drugs are only responding to that person's symptoms. This is unfortunate, because in these circumstances there is nothing being done to help fix the cause of the problem - if the problem was solved then the pills would not be needed.

In order to explain what I mean I will give an example of a somewhat typical elderly lady living in the suburbs. This lady lives alone, in the suburbs, having outlived her husband. She is past the age of being able to drive safely. She can no longer drive to her friends' homes for social interactions. Furthermore, she cannot get groceries from the nearest store since it is too far to walk. She has to rely on someone else to get her groceries and help her move about the neighborhood. Most of the time this lady is alone. Eventually she becomes depressed and goes to the doctor for treatment. The doctor gives her medication.

This lady's medication was to help with her depression. Pills treating the symptoms of a problem. In this case the problem is directly related to the design of the city in which the lady lives. Clearly it is beyond the power of the doctor to address the real problem - it is up to those that improve and design the layout of the metropolitan area. Improved design would treat the problem, not just the symptom(s). These improvements could include a variety of solutions, such as better, more reliable transit, or walk-able mixed-use communities. As a city planner, it will be (and perhaps currently, it is) my responsibility to fix these problems.

It is difficult to foresee any unintended consequences of the design of a city, but this example has taught me a lesson about the importance of choices as a urban designer/planner.