Taking walkability seriously

John Lavey and Jennifer Hill have posted a good piece that explores walkability as a actionable idea. The new term seems interesting and useful, but what does it mean? They test the idea against places, proximity and physical access as a means of demonstrating how the idea plays out (or fails to) in different settings.

Read it now. They promise a second part soon.

Flood video

This is the eerily pleasant video of a flood in Oregon that I was unable to play in class today.

Upcoming meetings

Some students are looking for municipal planning board meetings to attend, here are a few to choose from (there are many, many more):

Edison Township
February 19th
March 17th

North Brunswick
Planning Board meetings are normally held on the 2nd Tuesdays of the month for Public meetings 7:30 PM at Municipal Building. 

East Brunswick
March 5th
April 2nd

The snow has cancelled a few this month that might get rescheduled in late February. CAll before you go.

Snows of winter past

Students stuck on campus for snow days sometimes struggle, wanting to do some creative and feeling trapped. If you are still struggling to fill your time with the current snow, you might consider what some other designers have tried. A few years ago our students made the most of snowballs and coloring. Beautiful, right?

A Buffalo professor was trying to use snow to resculpt visitor experiences to an Olmsted park. The video below shows you more.



Snow days area great time for temporal creative expression. What are you going to do during the next one?
 

How Should Climate Change Affect Land Conservation Strategies?

Ecology & Evolution Graduate Program Seminar
Dr. Morgan Tingley
 David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellow
Princeton University

"How Should Climate Change Affect Land Conservation Strategies?"

Thursday, February 6, 2014
4:00 p.m. Alampi Room
Marine and Coastal Sciences

Biomimicry and geodesign

Janine Benyus gave a fascinating and moving talk at the Geodesign Summit today. Her firm, Biomimicry 3.8, looks for new ways that design can be informed by natural processes and forms.  This isn't as much about look like nature as it is functioning like nature, especially in measurable ways.

To help others take a step forward, Benyus has developed a non-profit that is populating  AskNature.org with information and guidance.

Since the Geodesign Summit video might not get posted immediately, you could instead go back and watch one of her old TED videos on biomimicry.

The worst place in the world?

A new geospatial competition for students has them trying to map out where the best or worst places in the world would be for different purposes. The Where in the World Challenge, from NGA, describes it like this:

The Intent for “Where in the World” challenge is to develop anticipatory spatiotemporal analytic skills to create and report “from the future” on the five best and five worst places to live on earth in the year 2025 based on ONE of the following criteria:

• Overall best and worst places for all combined factors
• Overall best and worst places for Water Resources
• Overall best and worst places for Energy Resources
• Overall best and worst places for Food Security
• Overall best and worst places for Health
• Overall best and worst places for Risk for Natural Disaster

A “place” could be a region, a country, a region within a country, or a large city.

 The deadline for registration is soon, so look into ASAP.

Public lecture on coastal habitat restoration

Wednesday, January 29 at 4pm

Cook/Douglass Lecture Hall, Room 110, Cook Campus     

Carl Alderson is a Marine Resource Specialist with the NOAA Restoration Center, located at the Sandy Hook JJ Howard Marine Science Lab in Highlands, NJ. Carl provides oversight of coastal habitat restoration projects through NOAA’s Damage Assessment Remedial and Restoration Program (DARRP) and Community-based Restoration Grants Program (CRP) in the mid-Atlantic region. He is a graduate of Rutgers University, and is a Licensed Landscape Architect in NJ. Before joining NOAA, Carl worked for the City of New York and led a decade long effort to restore tidal wetlands, marine bird and fish habitat as compensation for natural resources damages resulting from oil spills in NY Harbor. Carl is recognized as a national leader in restoration of coastal wetlands and bay habitats.

The rest of the schedule looks great too:

Environmental Planning 2014

As a quick guide to resources for Fundamentals of Environmental Planning, here are some links to explore and enjoy on this wintry afternoon:

• Sakai.Rutgers.edu - home to basic class materials
• Ian McHarg and Design With Nature - an early leader in concepts central to environmental planning
• Phil Lewis - another early, albeit less known
• Explore detailed terrain maps of New Jersey at USGS Topographic Quad Sheets
• One of the most popular planning weblogs is PlaNetizen
• What are some major legal sources of pollution near you? Check out TRI Data and RTKnet.org

On research in landscape architecture

As we launch a semester on research in landscape architecture, I would like to encourage readers to look over two very different resources.

The first the standardbearing journal in the field, the Landscape Journal. Take some time to look over the journal's overview and explore how it presents itself. A different lens through which to look at the Journal is Google Scholar's list of most cited papers.

The second resource to explore is the Landscape Architecture Body of Knowledge (LABoK). This document was developed as an initial stab at describing the specialized knowledge that comprises the intellectual content of our field. A close reading of the document will show that the authors understood that this as a flawed first attempt. Unfortunately, it is now 10 years old and still without a 2nd edition, despite a decade of rapid change in landscape architecture.

A critical fork in the road

"The profession of landscape architecture and the schools perpetuating it stand at a critical fork in the road.  One fork leads to a significant field of endeavor contributing to the betterment of human environment, while the other points to a subordinate field of superficial embellishment.  The question the profession and the schools must answer i s which road shall be followed and what adjustments may be made adequately to prepare landscape architects to solve the rising problems.  The need for comprehensive landscape architectural planning is not diminishing; on the contrary it is increasing.  The expansion of population and increase in complexity of environmental organization make the need greater today than ever before in history."

Hideo Sasaki, 1950

"Thoughts on education in landscape architecture"

in Landscape Architecture Magazine

It is about time

Twenty years ago this winter I made a presentation at a meeting of the Wisconsin Land Information Association showing clearly that government could be cheaper and more efficient through the use of geospatial technologies. But through the efforts of the Wisconsin Land Information Program and individual county leaders (usually LIOs) efforts could be coordinated to create further savings. We went on to document how a consortium of counties saved on image acquisition, how agencies coordinated to reduce duplication and how cooperation was improving outcomes.

Well, the US GAO has finally caught wind of these radical ideas. Their new report's title says it all, Geospatial Information: OMB and Agencies can reduce duplication by making coordination a priority. An interesting twist came in the section where they call out the FGDC for not making agency coordination a higher priority. There were some other interesting findings for GIS policy geeks, so head over and read it.

Rebuild by Design for NJ

The Star-Ledger looks at four of the post-Sandy designs from the Rebuild by Design competition. As the day goes on the comments could become revealing. The designs aren't finalized yet, so the this is a set of preview images. Still worth a peek.

Grand Canyon quote #2

"Wherever we look there is but a wilderness of rocks; deep gorges, where the rivers are lost below cliffs and towers and pinnacles; and ten thousand strangely carved forms in every direction, and beyond them mountains blending with the clouds."

- John Wesley Powell

Big day at SCOTUS for Rails to Rails?

Today is a big day at the Supreme Court for those who are tired of seeing underutilized railroad corridors converted in popular, public trail systems that encourage physical activity and connections with the environment.

The argument calendar says that today the Court will hear arguments in Marvin M. Brandt Revocable Trust v. United States. Acording to the SCOTUS Blog, the issue at hand will be "Whether the United States retained an implied reversionary interest in rights-of-way created by the General Railroad Right of Way Act of 1875 after the underlying lands were patented into private ownership."

The Rails-to-Trails Conservancy says that the stakes are high. An adverse decision "could also threaten existing rail-trails across America that utilize federally-granted rights-of-way."

Can you imagine a city without cars? Hamburg can. Hamburg's Green Network Plan is designed to eliminate the need for cars in the city in 20 years.

Grand Canyon quote

"We are three quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth, and the great river shrinks into insignificance as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs that rise to the world above; the waves are but puny ripples, and we but pigmies, running up and down the sands or lost among the boulders."

"We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Ah, well! We may conjecture many things. The men talk as cheerfully as ever; jests are bandied about freely this morning; but to me the cheer is somber and the jests are ghastly."

 - John Wesley Powell

GIS history quote

“When conferences end, of course, most cartographers have to come down to earth and return to all the familiar problems of the map factory and its inexorable schedules. Perhaps an encouraging first step would be a cost reduction in automated cartography of an order of magnitude - but in itself even that is not enough, we have to try and look further ahead. Many of the surveyor/cartographers who came to our seminar believed that their function was to "get the geometry right" and everything else would fall into place. Some of them left also believing that it was important to get the topology, the taxonomy and the structure right as well.” 

- David Bickmore, Royal College of Art

at Auto-Carto 5 (1982)

Not fans of FEMA

NJ Spotlight has posted a profile of the leader of Stop FEMA Now, George Kasimos. The group is described as "an online group of residents opposed to the the new requirements to elevate their homes in accordance with the FEMA flood maps or else pay dramatically higher flood insurance premiums."

Kasimos moved into a lagoon community because he wanted to live close to the water, describing it to NJ Spotlight as living "the American dream." But the storm has changed all of that. While he thinks insurance has gotten too high, he is reported as conceding that people who live in flood-prone areas should pay more for flood insurance than people who don't. It remains unclear how much he thinks that people should pay for flood insurance if they don't need it.

In an area sometimes considered more politically conservative, it will be interesting to see how Stop FEMA Now fares as the call for the government to build protective sand dunes and subsidize insurance, potentially at a rate of tens of thousands of dollars per house per year. Meanwhile, outside groups on the right are upset at the scale of government dependency that flood insurance is creating.

The politics of the shore remain confused/confusing/jumbled/fascinating. Undertones of populism continue to bubble up on both sides of the aisle. We see is sometimes characterized as government-favoring liberals wanting less government support for home owners while some of their more conservative neighbors are suddenly hoping that government can step in to preserve their way of life.

There will be some who will see all of this as competing hypocrisy or self-serving political movements. But whatever it looks like to you, it looks to me like something that is going to remain interesting for quite some time.

Seniors shifting after storm

It is no secret that the Jersey shore has a lot of seniors, but the Star-Ledger reports that Hurricane Sandy had the effect of forcing a lot of seniors into senior housing. The story focuses on examples from Little Egg Harbor.

More of looking back at 2013

PlaNetizen has posted their most popular pieces from 2013.  My favorite might be Steven Snell's piece linking parks and healthy living.

Norman Wright, AICP has posted a column on PlaNetizen about the people who most inspired him in 2013.

Yanko Design had a list of best design concepts of 2013.

Design intelligence had their odd list of top design programs.

Atlantic Cities has posted a list of the most innovative maps of 2013. Some great stuff in there.

What do we know about design and health?

The Atlantic has a nice piece today emphasizing that despite some strong beliefs, "We Don't Know Nearly As Much About the Link Between Public Health and Urban Planning As We Think We Do."The impetus for the piece is a report on The State of Health + Urbanism by MIT's 10 year long Health and Urbanism Initiative. The more we study it, the more we see that we need to study it. And yet, what we do know, tends to be more about specific American cities. Imagine how little we know about the new megacities in other parts of the world.

Smart Campus folks

Last week in Santa Barbara, I met some very interesting folks that I either didn't know or didn't as well as I do now:

• Johannes Schöning - has written about augmented reality and Angry Birds
• Jeremy Crampton - Intell mapping, Bringing Foucalt to the Bluegrass
• Joaquín Huerta Guijarro - Spain, new remote sensing technology
• Carsten Keßler - VGI in education, linked data, semantics
• Michael Scott - Vulnerability, Caribbean

Of course there were plenty of folks that I already knew too, but we'll save that for another day.

Old trees, watch out!

There has been a change in the world's old tree standings. The Senator, a pond cypress in Florida, has moved off the Top Ten oldest living trees making room for one of the younger trees to move up on the list. Someone better check on The President.

Mandela memorial

The Washington Post has a photo of a fascinating Mandela memorial in Howick, South Africa.

London's answer to the High Line?

Slate writes about the new proposal for a garden bridge across the Thames. Does London even need an answer to the High Line?

Wi-fi trees

As seen on Twitter.

Great Networking Opportunity

MAC URISA's Fall meeting is just a few days away!

Data Sharing and Transparency: Using the Cloud to Manage Transportation GIS Data

Tuesday December 10, 2013 8am-3pm

www.macurisa.org/fall2013

Presentations Include: 

UPlan:“Utah’s Open Transportation Data in the Cloud”  by Mr. Frank Pisani

 

PennDOT’s Pennshare platform by Mr. Patrick Kielty

Who Should Attend:

GIS Professionals

Transportation Professionals

Regional Planners

Metropolitan Planning Organizations

Consultants

Chief Information Officers

State and Local Government Agencies

 

Venue Address:

RUTGERS EcoComplex
Environmental Research and Extension Center
1200 Florence-Columbus Rd.
Bordentown, NJ 08505-4200

Directions: http://ecocomplex.rutgers.edu/about_us_directions.php

Is the Sandy recovery is in the details?

The Star-Ledger seems to think that the details aren't working out as well as they ought. They offer this interesting piece of evidence, "A full 75 percent (of Sandy victims) now say they feel forgotten by the administration’s Sandy relief efforts."

Garden toilet

Last year when a Japanese designer named Sou Fujimoto built a garden space toilet, it might have seemed like a gag. After all, the video hardly makes it look like a garden. But this fall's garden toilet, also by Fujimoto, looks like a game changer. And before you write off Fujimoto as a Bansky-type provocateur, check out his extensive record as a serious architect.

The coming impact of climate change on forests

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune ran a 4-page feature on the impact that climate change is anticipated to have on the forests of Minnesota's famed Northwoods. Check out the slider bar that allows you to compare a map of the current forest and the anticipated changes.

 

Laurie Olin oral history

The Cultural Landscape Foundation has posted an amazing record of the career of landscape architect Laurie Olin with both video and transcripts. While you have a few hours of the holiday weekend left, it would be a great time to watch and reflect.

Mapping out football migration

Slate has figured out that map addicts will look at and share maps of almost anything. On a weekend that is traditionally dominated by football, they have posted an interactive map for fans of European football. It shows the migration of talent from any country in the world or to any country in the world. Amazingly, the US seems to have a balanced import and export.

NJ's best cities: A methodology

Movoto blog has "developed" a methodology for rating cities in NJ. They have come up with a list of the top scoring cities that includes Edison at #2.

New Sea Level Rise projections

Real Climate comments on a recent expert panel that has described the best understanding of what sea level rise is expected to bring to our shores. The fascinating thing that it includes are 2 different measures of what to expect depending on the human response to climate change:

With successful, strong mitigation measures, the experts expect a likely rise of 40-60 cm in this century and 60-100 cm by the year 2300. With unmitigated warming, however, the likely range is 70-120 cm by 2100 and two to three meters by the year 2300.

The difference between the strong mitigation and unmitigated is nearly double. It really speaks to both the inevitability of impacts and the value of intervention. The commenters are more interesting than on many blogs. Check out comment #40 which speaks to design responses. BTW, The original paper on the panel is written by Rutgers' Ben Horton. 

GIS Day follow-up

As a follow-up to my "short" presentation at GIS Day I wanted to post some links for readers interested in learning more about our work mapping the food and physical activity environments.

Here are some links to recent work on mapping the food environment:

The Food Trust Report on Supermarkets in NJ

Physical Activity Chart Book for Trenton

Food Environment Chart Book for Newark

The full CSHP list of Chart Books from the NJ Childhood Obesity Study

Two of our recent peer review papers are:
Neighborhood Perceptions and Active School Commuting in Low-Income Cities

A Closer Examination of the Relationship between Children's Weight Status and the Food and Physical Activity Environment

The latter established a clear link between BMI and the density of convenience stores within 1/4 mile of children's homes and also found a significant relationship between BMI and large parks (more than an acre) within 1/2 mile.

JFK Memorials from around the world

View Larger Map

With this view from the JFK Memorial Bridge in Longport, NJ pause to recognize the 50th anniversary of that tragic day. Slate.com took the day to publish a map illustrating the spatial array of "all" the different JFK memorial schools, streets, plazas, etc. from around the world.

Finally I offer a couple photos of Kennedy's burial site in Arlington National Cemetery taken on Memorial Day Weekend.

Another class for Spring 2014

An SAS honors seminar is being offered this spring on ‘Climate change and justice.’ The instructor is looking for a diverse and lively group, including qualified students not in the honors program – meteorologists, political scientists, geographers, earth scientists, activists, undecided freshmen, etc! So if you advise or work with any students you think might be interested, please let them know about this 3-credit offering (that also satisfies the ‘WCd’ SAS Core writing requirement). They should email the instructor, Melanie McDermott so she can help them with the process of getting into the class. 

The details:

 01:090:295:03 Climate Change, Justice and Equity: from the Tropical Rainforest to the Jersey Shore

T 02:15-05:15PM, Hickman Hall Room 129

The initial premises of this course are that climate change poses a grave threat to humanity, and that those who have contributed least to generating the problem -- i.e., the global poor, future generations, and non-human species, are the most vulnerable to its impact. This interdisciplinary seminar will explore the implications this challenge raises for notions of justice and equity.

We begin by examining the fundamental question, ‘what is justice?’ Our understanding shifts when we focus first on injustice and how it is produced and reproduced in social relationships.  In what ways are inequities among nations and social classes related to the drivers of fossil fuel and forest combustion? How might inequity be exacerbated not only by the impacts of climate change, but by policies designed to combat or adapt to them?

Our discussion will be focused by in-depth consideration of two major case studies. The first concerns the various paying-poor-people-not-to-cut-trees policies under the rubric of Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (or REDD), and the second looks at Hurricane Sandy impacts and responses on the Jersey Shore.  Finally, through the lens of literature and performance art we will examine how this crisis makes us feel, and the course as a whole will lead us to confront what we – as individuals and as Rutgers University, can do about it.

GIS Day 2013

May all your GIS dreams come true.

Another great GIS Day.

GIS Day Common Lecture Live Blog: Erika Svendson

Visualizing the Social: Understanding and Mapping Urban Environmental Stewardship
Erika Svendsen, Research Social Scientist
People and Their Environments: Social Science Supporting Natural Resource Management and Policy
NYC Urban Field Station, Northern Research Station, US Forest Service

Cultivating more places of places of social meaning - a little green or a lot
Different research types
...Intensive-Extensive + Social-Biophysical
  
Inspired by Prof. Bill Burch at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
Human Ecosystem Framework (HEF)
Virtuous vs. Viscous Cycles - Disturbance can be useful

Stewards as first responders.- adaptive/polycentric
Gardeners as first responders - urban fiscal crisis 
...Strengthening social cohesion and fostering new forms of governance
Resilience cycles
Giuliani and community gardens

Book/blog: Greening in the Red Zone - this isn't just for wealthy urban enclaves


Joplin Tornado Memorial - USFS still has a forester there, helping the city recover - extending the recovery timeline - already planted over 5000 trees

Nature: As asset and a threat


Stewardship mapping
STEW-MAP Project
Online and mail-in survey
initial n=5861
final n=2517

NYC Oasis map  Mapping stewardship "turf" like it was gang turf

Network analysis identified the individuals/groups that served as nodes within the massive stewardship network in NYC- bridge, broker, and bi-modal governing



Timeless threads and places of Social Meaning
Jamaica Bay neighborhoods after Superstorm Sandy
zone mapping for each of the parks - a new social layer for NYC Parks
found lots of 'mad love' for parks
Example: Frank Charles Memorial Park
Example: Sea Song Memorial

Tree planting helps strengthen democracy

Stewardship is a restorative mechanism, it is a part of our social infrastructure



See also: Stewardship, learning, and memory in disaster resilience (paper)
See also: Integrating grey and green infrastructure to improve the health and well-being of urban populations
And myriad other papers

Exciting class for Spring 2014

If you have already taken an ecology class and are ready for more, check out Myla Aronson's Urban Ecology 11:704:487.

Course Description

Urban landscapes are rapidly expanding globally and over 50% of the human population now lives in urban areas. Because the majority of human settlements are in areas of high biodiversity, the rapid urbanization of the world has profound effects on global biodiversity.

 

Urban Ecology is a seminar course, with a mix of lecture and discussion, where we will focus on the processes determining patterns of abundance and distribution of organisms in urban ecosystems, the

interactions among organisms in the urban environment, the interactions between humans (and  societies) and nature in urban environments, and some aspects of urban planning as it relates to

ecology and the environment. 

 

Pre-requisites: Principles of Ecology (11:704:351), or Plant Ecology (11:704:332), or equivalent.

No pre-requisites for graduate students.

Maps are powerful

 Saturday morning at 8am Jack Dangermond will be speaking at the ASLA conference in Boston. I am sure that he will include some mentions of how GIS can affect change in the world at large. In anticipation of that, here are 5 outstanding examples of how maps could "solve some of the world's most daunting problems."

HT: @petermickulas

 

Geeks vs. Nerds: The Inforgraphic

As the geeks vs. nerds debate continues, there is now an infographic to help novices navigate these dangerous waters.

Harvard University on MVV

Harvard Magazine has published a cover story on Michael Van Valkenburgh. Since we are hearing about ecology at his Brooklyn Bridge Park tomorrow, it would be a good time to read it.

Van Valkenburgh’s resistive independence is described well by Alan [sic] Shearer, M.L.A. ’94, Ph.D. ’03, a professor at the University of Texas and former MVVA employee: “Others at the GSD in the 1980s and ’90s turned to varieties of art—abstract minimalism, pop art, and land art—as a way to infuse the profession with new ideas. In contrast, Michael’s thinking—about gardens, plants, ephemeral states in natural processes, and precedents of landscape architecture—was trying to reclaim the profession’s core.”

Lecture: Forest Transitions and the Global Carbon Sink

The Human Ecology Brown Bag Series Presents
“Forest Transitions and the Global Carbon Sink”

Dr. Pekka Kauppi
Department of Environmental Sciences
University of Helsinki


Date: November 13th, 2013
Time: 12:30 to 2:00 pm
Location: Blake 131, Cook Campus

Dr. Pekka Kauppi is a world renown expert on the carbon density of forests. His research on forest cover change and carbon budgets has been published in Science, PNAS, and other high profile journals. He is currently Professor and Head of the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.

To see additional events, please visit our website: http://www.humanecology.rutgers.edu/events.asp

Rising Waters exhibition

The Museum of New York City has opened an exhibition of photography from Superstorm Sandy called Rising Waters. The photos are both eerie and, photographically, beautiful. Digital Photography Review has posted some images online that incredibly powerful. But I imagine that seeing them on a wall, printed pretty large, could be much more emotional.

Old SCOTUS case in Florida

In a case of reliving past glories, I am encouraging our studio students to go back to this old NY Times Sunday Magazine piece on a case known as Stop the Beach Renourishment v. Florida. Since it was published before the decision was issued, it focused on the issues rather than the outcome. And you can see how it is going to come up again.

Lecture on urban agriculture

PLANT BIOLOGY SEMINAR SERIES 

Matthew Smith 

Sabedo Argueta 

Mark Robson 

Rutgers University will present a seminar entitled 

“Case Studies: Urban Agriculture in Detroit, Chicago and Milwaukee” 

Friday – November 8, 2013 

12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. 

Foran Hall Room 138A Cook Campus 

Leopold quote

Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong.  Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief.

— Aldo Leopold