Urban Studies just marked 50 years as one of the top journals in the field. To celebrate they’ve launched a new blog along with a free digital issue compiling their top articles from the last half century. As it happens, the inaugural post on the…
Continue readingAuthor: Alex Aylett
openalex: écoHackMTL: An excellent launch
We had an excellent turnout for the écoHackMTL launch. A big thank-you to everyone who helped me put it together! If you missed the action you can see a few photos over on our facebook page.
With close to 75 people in the room the energy was phenomenal, and we had a good mix of developers, community activists and NGOs, and representatives from the city. Those were exactly the connections that we were trying to make possible.
Now the questions is how much of that momentum we can translate into concrete projects between now and the hack itself in October.
Stay tuned. And for more info check out www.ecohackmtl.org.
Continue readingopenalex: écoHackMTL: An excellent launch
We had an excellent turnout for the écoHackMTL launch. A big thank-you to everyone who helped me put it together! If you missed the action you can see a few photos over on our facebook page. With close to 75 people in the room the energy was phenomenal, and we
Continue readingopenalex: écoHackMTL: An excellent launch
We had an excellent turnout for the écoHackMTL launch. A big had for everyone who helped me put it together! If you missed the action you can see a few photos over on our facebook page. With close to 75 people in the room the energy was phenomenal, and we
Continue readingopenalex: écoHackMTL Launches today!
It’s been a long time in the works, but my latest project: écoHackMTL has its official launch today! Cities are getting smarter, greener, and more open. But the challenges of this urban century are huge: climate change, rapid urbanization, resource constraints, food security. We all know the list. But cities
Continue readingopenalex: écoHackMTL Launches today!
It’s been a long time in the works, but my latest project: écoHackMTL has its official launch today!
Cities are getting smarter, greener, and more open. But the challenges of this urban century are huge: climate change, rapid urbanization, resource constraints, food security. We all know the list.
But cities are also home to an amazing diversity of skilled, creative, and dedicated people. There are community activists, NGOs, hackers, developers, and city officials all committed to making our cities better places. écoHackMTL is an experiment into what happens when you put all those people together and help them collaborate on finding solutions to some of our most pressing urban problems. Stay tuned to find out more.
And if you are in Montreal today: Come on out!
http://ecohackmtl-2013.eventbrite.ca/#
For more on the project and the amazing group of organizations that have help put it together you can also see www.ecohackmtl.org
Continue readingopenalex: écoHackMTL Launches today!
It’s been a long time in the works, but my latest project: écoHackMTL has its official launch today! Cities are getting smarter, greener, and more open. But the challenges of this urban century are huge: climate change, rapid urbanization, resource constraints, food security. We all know the list. But cities
Continue readingopenalex: Urban Agriculture is "Gangsta": Ron Finley on Growing Abundance in a Food Desert
Ron Finley, presenting @TED, has come up with possibly the best talk I’ve seen on urban agriculture. Taking urban agriculture seriously has been a favourite theme of mine here for a while. There is something deeply powerful about bringing agricultural production back into public urban spaces, and identifying and transforming
Continue readingopenalex: Urban Agriculture is "Gangsta": Ron Finley on Growing Abundance in a Food Desert
Ron Finley, presenting @TED, has come up with possibly the best talk I’ve seen on urban agriculture. Taking urban agriculture seriously has been a favourite theme of mine here for a while. There is something deeply powerful about bringing agricultural …
Continue readingopenalex: Urban Agriculture is "Gangsta": Ron Finley on Growing Abundance in a Food Desert
Ron Finley, presenting @TED, has come up with possibly the best talk I’ve seen on urban agriculture. Taking urban agriculture seriously has been a favourite theme of mine here for a while. There is something deeply powerful about bringing agricultural production back into public urban spaces, and identifying and transforming
Continue readingopenalex: MIT Seminar: Keystone Cities kicks off
[Update: Thanks to all the participants in this year’s seminar. It was great to get to test out some new ideas and approaches to designing green cities with you!] All this week, as part of MIT’s IAP period, I’ll be teaching an intensive seminar on integrated approaches to urban sustainability.
Continue readingopenalex: MIT Seminar: Keystone Cities kicks off
[Update: Thanks to all the participants in this year’s seminar. It was great to get to test out some new ideas and approaches to designing green cities with you!] All this week, as part of MIT’s IAP period, I’ll be teaching an intensive seminar o…
Continue readingopenalex: MIT Seminar: Keystone Cities kicks off
[Update: Thanks to all the participants in this year’s seminar. It was great to get to test out some new ideas and approaches to designing green cities with you!] All this week, as part of MIT’s IAP period, I’ll be teaching an intensive seminar on integrated approaches to urban sustainability.
Continue readingopenalex: Aaron Swartz, Open Access Information, and Sustainability
The death of Aaron Swartz, internet innovator and open data activist, has sent waves through political, hi-tech, and academic communities. Swartz – whose many accomplishments included writing the code that powers the RSS feeds for all your favourite news sites – was facing a possible 30 year jail term for
Continue readingopenalex: Aaron Swartz, Open Access Information, and Sustainability
The death of Aaron Swartz, internet innovator and open data activist, has sent waves through political, hi-tech, and academic communities. Swartz – whose many accomplishments included writing the code that powers the RSS feeds for all your favourite news sites – was facing a possible 30 year jail term for
Continue readingopenalex: Aaron Swartz, Open Access Information, and Sustainability
The death of Aaron Swartz, internet innovator and open data activist, has sent waves through political, hi-tech, and academic communities. Swartz – whose many accomplishments included writing the code that powers the RSS feeds for all your favouri…
Continue readingopenalex: Carbon Zero: Imagining Cities that can Save the Planet
Alex Steffen, the man behind the excellent inertia defying and inspiring WorldChanging blog, has just released his new book. Carbon Zero: Imagining Cities that can Save the Planet is a short punchy introduction to some of the most important ideas that are shaping how we are thinking about, and creating,
Continue readingopenalex: Carbon Zero: Imagining Cities that can Save the Planet
Alex Steffen, the man behind the excellent inertia defying and inspiring WorldChanging blog, has just released his new book.
Carbon Zero: Imagining Cities that can Save the Planet is a short punchy introduction to some of the most important ideas that are shaping how we are thinking about, and creating, green cities.
I worked with Alex on (the now sadly defunct) WorldChanging, and I also had a chance to give some feedback on early stages of CarbonZero. After almost two years of work the book is done, and it’s a real success.
Look at what discussions of “green cities” focused on in the 1990s and compare that to today and you’ll see a huge shift. We’ve gone from talking about one-off projects (think LED traffic lights) to complex and interconnected visions of cites that are simultaneously livable, efficient, and productive (economically, socially, and environmentally).
It’s been an exciting transition, and one that (finally) is getting us closer to realizing the transformative potential of city-regions. Anyone wanting a quick but still insightful flyover of this new way of looking at urban sustainability should take a look at CarbonZero.
The full text is up over at Grist, and you can also buy the digital version here.
Cities in the age of climate consequences: ‘Carbon Zero,’ chapter 1
Forewarned
On Monday the 29th of October, 2012, a tidal surge 13.9 feet high (the highest ever recorded) washed up and over the waterfront in Lower Manhattan, pushed forward by the superstorm Sandy. That same week, the storm destroyed large swathes of coastline from the New Jersey shore to Fire Island, while driving torrential rains, heavy snows, and powerful winds inland across the eastern U.S. and Canada. By the time the storm blew out, it had killed more than 100 Americans, made thousands homeless, left millions without power, and caused at least $50 billion in damage. Sandy was, by any reckoning, one of the worst natural disasters in American history.
Maybe, though, the word “natural” belongs in quotes. Because what was surprising about Sandy wasn’t that it happened (indeed, many had predicted that rising sea levels and storms intensified by warmer oceans would make something like Sandy inevitable), but that it was seen so clearly, and so immediately, for what it was: a forewarning of what a planet in climate chaos has in store for us.
Sandy was far from the first sign that climate change is here — scientists have been warning for decades of the dangers of a heating planet, and in the last 10 years we’ve seen a flurry of unprecedented storms, droughts, floods, melting glaciers, and wildfires, as well as record-breaking heat waves following one after another. Sandy, though, knocked down walls of denial and inattention that have kept us from admitting what’s happening to our world.
What’s happening is that we’re losing the climate fight. Climate change is here, it’s worsening quickly, its effects are more dire than many thought they would be, and — if we continue with business as usual — we’re on a track to unleash an almost unimaginable catastrophe on ourselves, our children, and our descendants.
“Part of learning from [Sandy] is the recognition that climate change is a reality,” said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo at the time. “Extreme weather is a reality. It is a reality that we are vulnerable.” He added later, ”Anyone who says there is not a dramatic change in weather patterns is denying reality.”
Our choice: “extremely dangerous” or “catastrophic”
To not warm the planet at all no longer remains an option. The Earth is already dangerously hotter than it was before the Industrial Revolution.
We used to think that warming up to 2 degrees C fell within a sort of “safe zone,” where we could expect change but not crisis. But in a world we’ve warmed only by about 1 degree C above the historical baseline, we’re already seeing massive climate impacts across the planet. These unexpected impacts, along with new projections from ever-improving climate models, tell us that the climate is not nearly as forgiving as we’d like it to be. As the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research’s Kevin Anderson puts it, “1 degree is the new 2 degrees.” Two degrees, meanwhile, now appears not just dangerous, but extremely dangerous.
…
It’s not too late to avoid catastrophe
If that were the end of the story we could all just start drinking now. Hell, I’d buy the first round. But it’s not. We still have a choice. We still, just barely, have the option of choosing to limit warming to 2 degrees and then working hard to restore the climate once we’ve stabilized it. We can, yet, pause at “extremely dangerous” and pull back from the brink of chaos.
Continue readingopenalex: Carbon Zero: Imagining Cities that can Save the Planet
Alex Steffen, the man behind the excellent inertia defying and inspiring WorldChanging blog, has just released his new book. Carbon Zero: Imagining Cities that can Save the Planet is a short punchy introduction to some of the most important ideas that are shaping how we are thinking about, and creating,
Continue readingopenalex: Sustainable Urban Resilience: A Contradiction in Terms?
David Bello, Associate Editor over at Scientific American, has an interesting post up today looking at the supposed tensions between “resilience” and “sustainability”. His argument in a nutshell is that precisely the characteristics that make many urban systems resilient can also make them deeply unsustainable from an environmental point of
Continue reading