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Wit the popularlty of New York City's High Line, other cities are looking for ways to incorporate elevated green spaces into public infrastructure. Recently a Los Angeles developer announced plans for "High Line West" in Hollywood. With "Urban Air," LA-based designer and SHFT compadre Stephen Glassman introduces a new twist on the aerial garden rage. The plan involves converting LA billboards......read more
It goes without saying that a vacant lot looks a far sight better with abundant greenery than filled with trash and dirt. But, aesthetics aside, greened lots may also be better for the health of people living nearby. At Fast Co Exist, Andrew Price points us to a new report from the University of Pennsylvania, which studied the health impacts of Philadelphia's vacant lot greening......read more
With global honeybee populations in decline, backyard beekeepers are looking to pick up the slack by domesticating the critters that are so critical to the world's food supply. The problem for many of us is that getting into beekeeping seems, well, hard. Enter the Urban Beehive, a stackable beehive design by New Zealand native Rowan Dunford that makes beekeeping simple. The product, spotted on......read more
According to a comprehensive study of bumblebees in the US, the populations of four of the most common species have declined by 96% in the last few decades, and their geographic ranges have declined 23%-87% in the past twenty-odd years. And the shocking figures are not unique to the US; in the UK, three of 25 bumblebee species are already extinct, and half of the remaining species have shown......read more
Philips, the multinational Dutch electronics giant, made a big splash at the recent Dutch Design Week with its innovative Microbial Home, a net-zero vision of household appliances and fixtures that all work together in an "integrated cyclical ecosystem." Aside from the Bio-digester -- the design's main hub -- which converts solid kitchen and human waste (ewww) to methane gas......read more
Created by Brooklyn filmmaker Keith Ehrlich, the excellent web series Made By Hand profiles various pockets of artisinal activity around New York City. The latest episode departs from the black-and-white look of the first two episodes, with a beautifully shot, sun-soaked view of a rooftop beekeeping operation in Brooklyn. Local farmer Megan Paska has witnessed beekeeping as it......read more
We all want our children to be enthusiastic about local, sustainable food, but there are moments when they can get a little too, er, focused on it. For Pete Wells, author of the always great (and too infrequent, in our opinion) Cooking With Dexter column in NYT Mag, that happened when his six year-old started demanding backyard chickens and rooftop beehives. After hiding his copy of "My......read more
For most of us, the thought of being without clothes in some dark, desolate corner of an abandoned factory is, quite literally, a nightmare. For Miru Kim, it's just another day at the office. In Naked City Spleen, the New York-based artist photographs herself standing stark naked in urban ruins such as abandoned tunnels, sewers, catacombs, factories, hospitals, and shipyards. The body of work......read more
For a nice example of an economic slump yielding positive results, check out this ingenious urban farm that has popped up in midtown Manhattan, where the recession halted development of the Alexandria Center, a bioscience complex just east of FDR Drive. When the project stalled, the developer leapt on the opportunity to use the space to grow fresh produce for Riverpark, the Tom Colicchio......read more
For sixty years, an empty space gathered garbage in a section of Berlin's Kreuzberg district. In 2009, over a hundred volunteers cleaned the area of two tons of trash to make way for a community garden. Today, Prinzessinnengärten (Princess Gardens) is a thriving urban agricultural project, providing fresh, organic produce for Berlin residents and a space to come together to learn more about......read more
