NPR Cities Project- Out of class Experience III

NPR producer and Franklyn Cater and former New York chief urban designer Alexandros Washburn visited IU Bloomington last week to discuss Urban Resilience and the NPR Cities Project.

                                            
                                           One reason why we need to discussion urban resilience Scott Olson/Getty Images


In order to understand and design a resilient urban community, the hosts of the evening focused on 3 central planning strategies, location, design and mobility.

1. Location: As most of us already know, its all about location, location, location, a fact reiterated by Cater and Washburn throughout the lecture.  They illustrated this point by showing communities in Staten Island, NY who lived in houses that were for all practical purposes, located in a swamp. Obviously, this creates problems when significant weather events strike, and after Hurricane Sandy hit the east coast, federal money was granted to buy out some of these homes to provide a buffer from the water. They also mentioned that there are 2 strategies to location, retreat and defend.

Retreat- depending on the building structure or area, one possible way to change 'location' is to retreat vertically, that is, keep building up! If flooding is a foreseeable danger, put all water sensitive items in an upper floor.

Defend: redesign the landscape to provide natural barriers to predicted weather events. Surrounding canals with burms, or redesigning a local flood prone area into a recreational park as  in Meadowlands, NJ. The main problems with this strategy are a vast array of political, local, and stakeholder concerns that must be addressed before any project can move forward.

2. Design: Ensure that all new buildings and existing buildings (if possible) are built in a thoughtful way that incorporates resilience and protective measures. Examples of this include, building vertically, insulators, and using tall buildings as natural shading. One specific example of this was utilizing some of these techniques to prepare for a rising heat index in Arizona based on ancient desert city designs/city planning.

3. Mobility: Ensure that transportation is multi- modal, so that if a disaster strikes, people have many options. For instance, when Hurricane Sandy shut down the subway in NY, people could still utilize ferries, bikes, and walking to commute.

This topic is very important in discussing any aspect of sustainability because it pertains to our communities ability to survive and bounce back after natural disasters. Without plans such as these, most other sustainability efforts on the front of food, water, etc are minimized instantly as disasters strike, especially if fresh water sources are not adequately prepared. While trying to minimize additional carbon output into the environment is crucial, we are at a point currently that exceeds the tipping point for what the planet can absorb and we must not only concentrate on solving the root problem, but also preparing for events already in motion because of choices already made by previous generations.

Governing Sustainable Communities

Resilient Bayview Project

In Mark Roseland’s chapter on governing sustainable communities, he emphasizes the importance of participatory governance that includes the voices of all stakeholders and the necessity of community based efforts.  Much of the chapter focuses on providing advice to both citizens interested in becoming involved in sustainability efforts as well as to local governments that strive for just sustainability for all their residents.

Even after reading the chapter, many of subtle nuances of the various ideas were lost on me, as all of them focused on communicating community opinion to integrate change. However, after a little research I found the Resilient Bayview Project, a initiative centralized in the Bayview area of San Francisco that seems to illustrate almost all of Roseland’s sage advice and is succeeding in forming a resilient community via holistic local efforts.

Lashon Walker- a member of the Resilient Bayview Project

The Resilient Bayview Project is a community-led planning effort that aims to plan, develop and implement a Resilience Action Plan that will prepare the community for major environmental catastrophes (mainly earthquakes). This effort brings together neighborhood leaders, city agencies and all additional stakeholders from local families, immigrant communities, senior citizens, small businesses to local non-profits. The congregation of stakeholders meets monthly with the goal to find ways to protect the region’s most vulnerable citizens in case of emergencies by training residents on evacuation techniques, setting up support lines, distributing emergency kits, and providing additional information concerning emergency response. 

The project has been designed by the community and is staffed by community volunteers in order to protect the community. This seems to be a perfect example of Roseland’s prescription on how to involve residents to govern sustainable communities by using both visioning and implementation charrettes and consensus-based decision making. The Resilient Bayview Project also goes a step further in engaging in community sustainability and resilience by training at-risk youth to secure foundation’s of senior citizen housing, an effort paid for by grant money and serving to protect seniors, construct more durable housing, and provide at-risk youth with skills, income, and purpose, all at the same time. These are the types of plans that only active community members could innovate, communicate, and plan, because they involve a deep knowledge about what each region needs, and also the resources that they can access. Many sustainability initiatives also require trust, which can be built much quicker through community members and local organizations than by government agencies. Also, as we learned in community based social marketing, being a part of a change organization often ensures that you put forth more effort and are much more likely to strive to see the initiative succeed than if it was solely a governmental measure. 

 Dan Homsey speaking about the Neighborhood Empowerment Network from the government point of view

To leave with you with a final thought from the leader of the Resilent Bayview Project, “We aren’t going anywhere. We know that if we work together before a major catastrophe, we will be able to work together during a major catastrophe.”

What other communities that you know about have succeeded in community resilience projects such as this one?  Which of the other types of governance strategies that Roseland mentioned would work best for similar initiatives?

Sources:

1. Roseland, Mark. Toward Sustainable Communities. 2012.

2. How One California Community Prepares fot hte Worst. http://www.governing.com/news/headlines/gov-how-one-san-francisco-city-prepares-for-the-worst.html

Food Matters- Discussion on Food Issues -Out of Class Experience II

Mark Bittman is a food columnist for the NY Times and cookbook author. As part of IU's themester Eat, Drink, Think: Food from Art to Science the author journalist discussed food policy and issues in America.

TED talk with Mark Bittman from 2007- "What's wrong with what we eat?"

To begin, he stated that he believed 60-80% of supermarket food is so packed with preservatives and chemicals that it could not be defined as 'food' by dictionary terminology. He instead classified them as UFO's -'unidentified food like objects.' This made me laugh because it is so true, it has become nearly impossible to find food in the supermarket that doesn't contain unpronounceable and unheard of ingredients.

He equated this public health issue to smoking back in the 80's- many people will likely end up with diseases or die unnecessarily before laws are changed (this time in the form of diabetes and obesity rather than lung cancer).

Bittman also identified 3 changes that he believed that U.S. policy makers should undertake to solve this issue.

1. Create policy's that remove antibiotics from the food supply

2. Limit the ability of food marketers to target children- food preferences are formed infancy or early childhood so targeting children with sugary soda's, candy, cereals etc is creating problems for the future. Bittman even recommended laws preventing children from buying certain foods and drinks before 16 without an adult present. Yikes!

3. Create a national food policy- guarantee all citizens access to 'real' food, guarantee that food will not have a more negative impact on the environment than necessary. Provide comprehensive food service wages

He also left the audience with words of wisdom aimed at answering the question we all had, what can college students do to change the food system in America?

1. Divestment- speaking up and telling policy makers on campus that we do not want our food endowments coming from large food companies.

2. University food services need to be better
      - ban meat with antibiotics ( if Chipotle can do it, universities can)
      - source a significant percentage from local farms
      -compost all kitchen and food court waste

3. Make food important in your own life- be passionate and you will positively influence those around you


What do you think about his advice? Are these the  central changes that need to be made to our food policies in the US? What are some ways that other countries have dealt with similar problems?

The first thing that comes to my mind is the national soda tax that Mexico recently passed- a policy that caused a decrease of almost 10% in soda products sold, and the extra cash from the tax was earmarked to provide clean drinking water to its citizens. For more info on this project go to http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/16/mexico-soda-tax-sugar-obesity-health

One can of Cocoa Cola contains the equivalent of eight sugar cubes, according to its own label. Photograph: Geoff Abbott/Demotix/Corbis

To Brew or Not to Brew

So I've truly been enjoying brewing my own beer. However, I have quite a bit in reserve now and am going to take a pause for a while. While I'm taking a brief hiatus, I'm going to take the opportunity to reflect on 'zero-waste' my project actually is.

Home Brewing Process

Industrial Brewing Process

To begin, going zero-waste on an individual or household scale is pretty near impossible no matter what the subject is. The technology required is just too expensive and unnecessary for small scale projects such as this one. 

The largest 'waste' that home brewing accrues is one that I have not been able to find a solution to, other than a side effect of reduced heating  in the winter. Brewing beer requires about 2 hours of boiling a large amount of water, requiring a large amount of energy. In the fall and winter this produces the wonderful by-product of heat and allows me to give the apartment heater a break. Is this zero- waste? I would have to compare electricity bills over the long run and account for a lot of seasonal temperature variation and behavior to find if this saves money or energy. I doubt that is does, but at least the by-product is useful and achieves duel purposes!

 I don't know what the proper definition of zero- waste should be in regard to this project. Everything in the process can be re-used or recycled, such as spent grains and water as I've discussed in previous blogs, but is re-using water and heat still waste? Depends on the definition. For this project, I think I've done the best that I can do and accomplished what I aimed to achieve. Whether or not this constitutes zero-waste is up to you. Let me know what you think or ways I could improve my zero-waste goal!