March 7, 2012

Blots, or Blotting

by Anna LaRue jargon, terms • Tags: adjacent property, annex, blots, blotting, de-densifying, detroit, empty lot, interboro, jargon, neighborhoods, shrinking cities, side lot expansions, vacant lot

(Image credit: StructureHub)

I started hearing about blots and blotting late last year, first via a couple posts I found on Shrinking Cities (here and here) and then most recently via a story on NPR. Both sources feature stories about the de-densifying city of Detroit. Interboro claims credit for coining the term “blotting” about eight years ago.

According to Shrinking Cities, “the use of ‘blots’, or ‘side lot expansions’, is a technique that gives homeowners with vacant land adjacent to their home the opportunity to purchase that property as an expansion to their own for a nominal cost.”

The NPR story cites a startling statistic – in Detroit, it’s estimated that up to 40 square miles of land sits vacant.To give a sense of scale,the entire city of San Francisco is about 47 square miles. So both formally and informally, Detroit is encouraging its residents to buy or just sort of annex adjacent properties in order to take care of the properties and stabilize neighborhoods.

Part of our series making sense of eco-lingo and technical terms.

For more, check out our Jargon page.

February 2, 2012

Snippets – Waste Not Want Not

by Anna LaRue snippets • Tags: bakken shale field, bank of america, carbon dioxide, chicago, cleaned wastewater, cleanmetrics, cleveland, climate change, contagion thinking, cosmetic blemishes, derelict homes, detroit, epa, flared gas, food industry, food industry alliance, food loss, food waste, gas, greenhouse gas emissions, human thinking, kumar venkat, landfills, natural gas, north dakota, oil, overstocking, power plant, recycling paper, reduce waste, sewage, usda, waste, wasted food, wastewater, yard trimmings

Today, I want to share a few not-quite-so-recent stories related to waste that have been on my mind lately.

Via the New York Times, a food industry alliance is planning a three-year initiative to reduce the tremendous amount of food that Americans still throw in the garbage even as they grow somewhat more conscientious about recycling paper and yard trimmings. … A substantial portion of food is thrown away while still fully edible because of cosmetic blemishes or overstocking. … According to the most recent available statistics, more than 30 million tons of food was dumped in landfills in 2009, making food by far the most abundant material there by weight, the federal Environmental Protection Agency says.

From NPR comes a story about how all that wasted food contributes to climate change. A company called CleanMetrics gathered USDA’s estimates of food loss from retail and consumers for 2009. And when the company’s founder, Kumar Venkat, fed the data into his software he found that food waste is responsible for 135 million tons of greenhouse gases every year, or about 1.5 percent of all emissions ,,, “If you compare beef to tomatoes, beef has a much higher footprint,” says Venkat. “So if you’re going to reduce waste, you need to prioritize.”

Via Bloomberg, a story about Bank of America selecting some its most decrepit, derelict homes in Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago and paying up to $7,500 to local agencies toward demolition costs. “There is way too much supply,” said Gus Frangos, president of the Cleveland-based Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corp., which works with lenders, government officials and homeowners to salvage vacant homes. “The best thing we can do to stabilize the market is to get the garbage off.”

From the New York Times – Across western North Dakota, hundreds of fires burn as companies rushing to extract oil from the Bakken shale field treat the gas as waste and simply burn it. … Every day, more than 100 million cubic feet of natural gas is flared this way — enough energy to heat half a million homes for a day. The flared gas also spews at least two million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, as much as 384,000 cars or a medium-size coal-fired power plant would emit.

And again from NPR, some insight into why cleaned wastewater stays dirty in our minds. … “It’s a very broad feature of human thinking,” Nemeroff explains. “Everywhere we look, you can see contagion thinking.” … The conclusion? “It is quite difficult to get the cognitive sewage out of the water, even after the real sewage is gone,” Nemeroff says.

June 22, 2011

Pecha Kucha Rundown: Denser, Part 1

by Anna LaRue local • Tags: access, architect, automobile, blighted property, boston, building density, buildings, car, city edge, cleveland, community, controlled abandonment, craig scott, de-densification, dense city, denser, density, detroit, downtown, expansion, experiences, farmland, flint, geographical area, geometry, grady gillies, high speed rail, iwamotoscott, landscape, manhattan, merced. toledo, migration, neighborhoods, new orleans, pecha kucha, performance, population, population decline, population density, population peak, robin levitt, ruins, san francisco, silicon valley, solar industry, space, SPUR, suprastudio, tucson, ucla

Noelle and I had fun at Pecha Kucha in San Francisco at the SPUR Urban Center on Tuesday. For those unfamiliar with the Pecha Kucha format, each speaker has 20 slides and 20 seconds per slide. The format makes for a fun but focused look at what a wide range of professionals is working on and thinking about. Presentations are loosely organized around a theme. The theme this time was “Denser.”

Using my notes, I am putting together a set of posts that lists the presenters in order, along with links to their website (if I could find them) and any major thoughts I jotted down. For some presentations, I took a number of notes. Other presentations have fewer notes (maybe I was looking at the images more carefully?). All of the presentations were more interesting and beautiful than revealed by my notes and these posts.

– – –

Grady Gillies – Architect – UCLA, Suprastudio

DENSE city

dense buildings

dense population

dense space

dense community

Looked at 8 cities as part of the studio, including:

Cleveland, OH – transforming access and landscape

Flint, MI – advantage of a shrinking city’s migration is SPACE

New Orleans – blighted property presents an opportunity

Tucson, AZ – relentless expansion of the city edge

Merced, CA – looking at potential impact of high-speed rail

Toledo, OH – city’s solar industry as a new urban identity

More information on the studio and work:

http://www.suprastudio.aud.ucla.edu/

– – –

Craig Scott – Architect – IwamotoScott

DENSER

environmental / technological performance

spatial / material geometry

urban / architectural experiences

3 focuses of firm’s practice – buildings, installations, and digital fabrications

– – –

Robin Levitt – Detroit

(Anna’s note – his entire introduction was “Robin Levitt, Detroit” but there is a little info on the ever-helpful Wikipedia)

Talking about the de-densification of a city

Birthplace of the automobile

Detroit was the Silicon Valley of its day

1950s saw Detroit’s population peak just under 2 million

[Image of reduction in building density in the downtown district]

Detroit could geographically fit San Francisco, Boston, and Manhattan, but has a much lower population density

Population decline over the years

But actual geographical area of the city was expanding

Ruins now dominate the Detroit landscape

Neighborhoods have been cleared

City looking at a strategy of controlled abandonment

City of Detroit began as farmland, and in many neighborhoods it is returning to farmland

– – –

Parts 2, 3, and maybe 4 coming soon!

– – –

Zero Resource

Use less. Use data.

Tag Archives: detroit

Blots, or Blotting

Part of our series making sense of eco-lingo and technical terms.

For more, check out our Jargon page.

Snippets – Waste Not Want Not

Pecha Kucha Rundown: Denser, Part 1

Part of our series making sense of eco-lingo and technical terms.

For more, check out our Jargon page.

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