We love… moss graffiti

Mosstika’s living graffiti is amazing | Grist.

Filed under: Feel Good, Urbanismo, art, environment, NYC

Beautiful, affordable housing in SF’s Hunters Point

LEED Gold Community Springs up in Hunters Point: “David Baker’s colorful design ethics get scaled up to an affordable community development of 124 townhouses and 116 senior homes, aka the LEED Gold Armstrong Place and Armstrong Senior Housing in Hunters Point… (via Inhabitat – Green Design Will Save the World.)

Filed under: Architecture, San Francisco, environment

A Farm Grows in Brooklyn – on a Rooftop

Check out this project to build a 1-acre working vegetable farm, producing local produce for Brooklyn, on a rooftop.

Aside from the intrinsic interest of the project – and the importance of urban agriculture to creating sustainable cities and a sustainable society – the “Kickstarter” site is an interesting experiment in alternative funding.

Filed under: Urbanismo, environment, gardening, localism, NYC, urbanismo

Feel Good: Baby Chicks – first cranes in UK since 1600s

Crane chicks hatch hours after ‘epic’ road trip thanks to volcano flight ban: “First cranes in UK since 1600s hatch at Gloucestershire reserve and will be taught by humans dressed as birds to survive in wild…”

(via guardian.co.uk.)

Filed under: Feel Good, environment

The Plan to Map Every Tree in San Francisco

The Plan to Map Every Tree in San Francisco: Every tree in San Francisco will soon be accounted for online, thanks to a new, Wikified project that aims to plot them all.

The Urban Forest Map will officially launch Wednesday, drawing on tree information collected by the city of San Francisco and Friends of the Urban Forest, a non-profit group. Though the project is getting its start in the Bay Area, the site will head to other major cities in the coming months.

“We’re going to publish the most up-to-date data from our data sources. Then, from that point on, we’re going to allow the community to add and edit and update that information,” said Amber Bieg, the project manager of the Urban Forest Map project. “It’ll become a tree census from the community and function like a Wiki.”

(via Wired Science | Wired.com.)

I love this idea – the decentralized, anti-authoritarian aspect, the environmental focus, the whole thing. It is projects and ideas like this that make me so proud of San Francisco – we rock! – and hopeful for the social changes that computer technology might help bring about. It also suggested to me the possibility of taking more control over the urban forest, and perhaps switching some (more) of it to productive ends, to food and other resources we could all share.

Filed under: Interweb, San Francisco, environment, urbanismo

ElectroSmog International Festival for Sustainable Immobility

ElectroSmog International Festival for Sustainable Immobility.

The ElectroSmog festival is a critique of the worldwide explosion of mobility, and an exploration of the new forms of connectedness with others offered to us by network and communication technologies.

Filed under: Tech, community, environment, globalization