COW URBANISM

Do you recognize these images from previous posts on synchronicity?
Just found another cow-this time in Liverpool. The Udder Way is a project back from 2005 also featured at the shrinking cities interventions exhibition.
On the 18th July 2005, in the early hours of the morning, 5cows, 5 calves, 3 stockmen and a milking parlour arrived in Toxteth, Liverpool and remained for 9 days.
What do you think you can gain out of a piece of cow dung? Go for the Udder Way's product site.
There you'll find this:

Cow dung - BBQ briquettes for all exterior cooking
Anti wrinkle agent - Skin care- 100%organic cow manureFor strong teeth and fresh breath - Udder tooth polish - 100%organic cow manure ash

FARMADELPHIA

Front Studio's FARMADELPHIA proposes to transform the urban environment by introducing bucolic farmlands into
the city's urban fabric. Farmadelphia adopts the extensive sprawl of overgrown lots and vacant buildings as a source of inspiration while it fortifies and reinforces the ongoing green legacy of Philadelphia.

Philadelphia would become an 'edible landscape', with vast crop fields, and free roaming farm animals.The project would also address – or is intended to address – "the rehabilitation of the existing city fabric by proposing ideas for vacant buildings that would allow the present-day character to remain while creating new uses."Whole sections of the city would be deliberately cultivated. Or, from a slightly different perspective, it's the controlled re-wilding of the city.Some appropriate crops for the proposed agricultural stabilization of the city might include the following, the architects suggest:

—start with low maintenance, easy to grow, and profiting crops; consider perennial crops such as asparagus, shallots, garlic and herb varieties
—other crops include shade tolerant, easy to grow kale, sweet potatoes, lettuce
—other crops that do well in Philadelphia climate: collard greens, broccoli, mustard greens, corn, raspberry bushes
Those plants, in particular, would form a biosystem that could help push the city onto a seven year agricultural plan – after which this newly implanted ecosystem would level off, forming something like a cultivated permaculture.
find out more on Front Studio's website or see the panels here

Related posts: Urban Agriculture

URBAN AGRICULTURE

urban agriculture, urban farming, vertical farming, subterranean farming, guerrilla farming - according to my recent www-cruises it appears that this issue is coming back to discussion. Here is a list of links:

Subterranean Farms of Tokyo by pruned
A subterranean farm cultivated inside a former bank vault beneath a high rise building in one of Tokyo's business districts. Tomatoes, rice, lettuces, strawberries, and other fruits and vegetables, as well as flowers and herbs, are grown in an area covering almost a square kilometer.


Watch out for an Urban Farm for PS1 posted by Life Without Buildings or again from pruned with A Farm Grows in Queens
A proposal by Work Architecture that won this year's Young Architects Program at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Arts Center in Long Island City, Queens.
The eight-year-old competition calls for creating an outdoor social space for dancing and drinking in the summer months.

To organize the space Dan Wood and Amale Andraos, the husband-and-wife duo behind Work Architecture, chose heavy cardboard tubes in part because of the shadows they would cast and because of their resilience. Columns will be bolted together to form a span that rises on either side of a pool like a large V.

Each tube will play its own role. Some will contain plantings on dirt shelves equipped with liner bags to prevent leakage.

There is a fabric tube that people can enter through a curtain where you can 'hide' from the party.

for guerrilla gardening follow this link.

for Vertical Farming go to The Vertical Farm Project or watch this project of Atelier SOA Architectes Paris

Roof Farming in London (via BLDG BLOG)

finally Wikipedia's Urban Agriculture and an article about Food Less Travelled

Posts on farming in Philadelphia and on Algae harvesting in San Francisco will be featured soon, so stay tuned

LANDSCAPES OF DECAY

“The skeletons of the plants are for me as important as the flowers.” Garden designer Piet Oudolf creates melancholic natures which beautifully decompose. Romanticism is back!
He is also responsible for the plantation of Field Operation's High Line in New York which will open in September.
Read the related New York Times article 'A Landscape in Winter, Dying Heroically'.

"He's gotten away from the soft pornography of the flower," said Charles Waldheim, the director of the landscape architecture program at the University of Toronto. "He's interested in the life cycle, how plant material ages over the course of the year," and how it relates to the plants around it. Like a good marriage, his compositions must work well together as its members age.

EARTH WITHOUT PEOPLE²

Welcome to earth : Population 0. Since I Am Legend this topic seems to be quite popular (see our post Earth Without People). The History Channel launched recently its documentary 'Life After People'. For almost 2 hours they explain chronologically, from one day to 10,000 years, what would happen on a planet from which humans have suddenly disappeared. In contrast to Alan Weismans bestseller 'The World Without Us' which describes a more garden eden like planet, the documentary draws a more apocalyptic vision, while referring on similar speculations.
Also read the review on NYT.

CARTOGRAPHY AT IT'S BEST

stamen design is a San Francisco based design and technology studio which designed for example archinects cover page. Very interesting are their amazing mapping projects, including crime mapping or mapping photos on flickr.com. For seeing Invisible Dynamics take a look on Cabspotting. Using GPS technology for tracking cabs creates a living and always-changing map of city life in San Francisco.


For constructing your own map of Manhattan go for Transparent New York. Do Manhattan's historic districts correlate at all to the island's original farm plots? How many office buildings are constructed in the last 10 years compared to post-war period? All that you can see there.



Fake is the New Real (what a name!) offers a broad range of new cartography and taxonomy ideas. For example Chicago Mile by Mile (image above) maps every intersection of the city's mile streets through photography. And finally the best: How long have I been waiting for that? A comparison of more than 30 city's subways at scale. Could somebody please compare the track length of those networks, now that we know that San Francisco's BART is covering a huge area, and Tokyo's network expands not so much as expected, and Bejing's looks like a piece of minimal art. Bravo! subways at scale

thanks to where for this incredible mapping links

EARTH WITHOUT PEOPLE

The movie I Am Legend recently satisfied the curiosity of what would happen if mankind vanished from our planet. With incredibly appealing images the movie creates a New York absent of people proliferated by nature. This takes us to Alan Weisman's book The World Without Us published last summer.

The following timeline of post-human New York below is taken out of the same author's article from discover magazine which was the initiator for his book

If humans were to vanish from New York, how soon would nature take over? Scientists predict that within . .

• 10 years Sidewalks crack and weeds invade. Hawks and falcons flourish, as do feral cats and dogs. The rat population, deprived of human garbage, crashes. Cockroaches, which thrive in warm buildings, disappear. Cultivated carrots, cabbages, broccoli, and brussels sprouts revert to their wild ancestors.

• 20 years Water-soaked steel columns supporting subway tunnels corrode and buckle. Bears and wolves invade Central Park.

• 50 years Concrete chunks tumble from buildings, whose steel foundations begin to crumble. Indian Point nuclear reactors leak radioactivity into the Hudson River.

• 100 years Oaks and maples re-cover the land.

• 300 years Most bridges collapse.

• 1,000 years Hell Gate Bridge, built to bring the railroad across the East River, finally falls.

• 10,000 years Indian Point nuclear reactors continue to leak radioactivity into the Hudson River.

• 20,000 years Glaciers move relentlessly across the island of Manhattan and its environs, scraping the landscape clean.

Speculations about the future in the movie seem to be partly realistic. Certain aspects will happen also from a scientific point of view. Nevertheless the situation in the movie, which should draw an image after 3 years is drastically overdone. understandable, due to the fascinating effects we wouldn`t have liked to have missed.