Friday Fotos: Postindustrial

With a long weekend ahead, I thought I should post an extra long photoset. On Wednesday, Dr. Wolfram Hoefer talked with  our students about the post industrial landscapes of Germany's Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord (mapped). This is an old industrial site that has been converted into a pretty amazing park.  The design by Latz + Partner is both an icon of brownfields redevelopment and contemporary landscape architecture.Although my photos are from a cloudy day, they give a sense of the large post-industrial site.

Many more photos after the break...

Changing Ahwahnee

The Ahwahnee Hotel is being forced to change its name. Will the Ahwahnee Principles have to undergo the same change?

Methane map

A very cool example of how digital mapping can help visualize complex environmental problems comes from efforts to show the methane gas around Porter Ranch, CA. The map shows concentrations of the invisible gas, methane. Of course, the map only shows us the conditions, it doesn't clearly dictate the next step.

Mapping Ebola

 With epidemics, there are different scales of mapping. The cases happen to individuals, but the outbreak happens at regional and national scales. you can see mapping at this scale in the Esri Story Map of Ebola Outbreaks from 1976-2014.

But Esri's Hugh Keegan worked with the UN WHO to map Ebola but was given street addresses of cases. He gave a great talk at Harvard last year about the problems he faced.

Transit planning that works like a videogame?

Governing magazine reports on a new software app called Remix that empowers transit planners. They quote Joshua Poe, a planner in Louisville, as saying, "Transit planners have been lacking a long time in anyone building software with us in mind in terms of our daily needs." The tool really looks like the sort of spatially-enabled information-laden app that is usually talked about at the Geodesign Summit.

Oh!Land

The Porto, Portugal landscape architecture firm, Oh!Land Studio, is getting attention for some interesting projects. Check out their square market of carapinheira park.They have a lot of projects on their website considering that they were founded in 2015.

Friday Fotos: Queens

Yesterday I posted a BBC story praising what they called boring places in Europe. But for those unable to travel to Europe, there are closer places that are mistakenly called boring. Maybe some of these rainy day photos from Queens will help you find a place with which to connect.

Flushing Main Street is a neighborhood that is almost like a trip overseas.

Flushing also has some truly historic areas. The Old Quaker Meeting House is hundreds of years old. But Queens was also home to the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs.

 Olmsted's Forest Hills is a great stop. 

And sprinkled throughout are interesting benches and planters and fences and lions.

It doesn't have to be Queens. Just find a place you don't know well and explore. The world is filled with places, and few are as boring as people like to say.

Boring places

This is a great time to be thinking about study abroad for the summer. Late last semester we heard about landscape architecture in Croatia. Our department has a class in Germany (There will probably be a full description at our common lecture on Jan 20).

I worry that some students wait for the big opportunities in places like Paris or Rome, but the BBC ran a piece this week called In Praise of Boring Places, that will leave you yearning for smaller alternatives. "They alter our “muscle memory” – our natural inclination to grow accustomed to anything – and, in the process, make us stronger, better. Isn’t that why we travel in the first place?"

Psychogeography for planners

Psychogeography is the term for how our places - our cities, neighborhoods, streets, parks - shape our psychology or "condition the things we do and think." In Ryan Holeywell's interview with neuroscientist Colin Ellard, it is clear that the differences between our cities and their suburbs are linked with the mental well-being of their residents. How much of this should change our designs for our ccities?

Facts

While getting your brain in gear for a new semester, this is a great time to read over Kathryn Shulz's list of the best facts she learned from books in 2015. (#8 on her list has really stuck with me)

Turning brownfilds into creative commons

Check out this great example from Providence, Rhode Island of how brownfields can become more than just a park.

Princeton Battlefield

The Cultural Landscape Foundation has weighed in on one of New Jersey's special landscapes: the Princeton Battlefield. While part of the site is a State Park, part of it is owned by the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS).

TCLF is concerned about the current threat to the IAS portion of the site: "The current IAS proposal calls for construction of fifteen faculty housing units on the very spot where historians believe Washington’s charge struck the British lines." With municipal authorities having given the project permission to begin, the site was cleared in November and December, but legal appeals may still change the course of this plan.

Millenials in landscape architecture

Ryan Deane has a great post about how Millenials are changing landscape architectural firms. "The beauty of our generation is that we all know at least two languages; our native tongue, and some capacity of a digital vernacular." There is more to it than that, but that begins to capture what is happening.

How bad can it get?

We just finished a semester talking about how the built environment can shape the health of those who live within it. Serious evidence of that is presented in this story from the Washington Post which says arecent study found, "The proportion of infants and children with above-average levels of lead in their blood has nearly doubled since the city switched from the Detroit water system to using the Flint River as its water source, in 2014."

The mayor's response has been to declare a State of Emergency in the city whose health is being threatened by its own damaged environment.

Amazing photo from China

The soon to be complete Qingshui River Bridge.

Panama and ports

Places has a fascinating look at the new changes to the Panama Canal. The construction on the isthmus are having a ripple effect as cities around along the American coasts are responding with rapid changes to their ports.

Landscape photography

The landscape photography of Daniel Jones probably got more expensive this week when it was featured on CBS Sunday Morning. But it deserves a close look since it really captures landscapes nicely.

Backyard Habitat

Ecology & Evolution
Graduate Program Seminar

Dr. Susannah Lerman, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

"Beyond benefits for people: How backyard habitats support ecosystem services for wildlife"

Thursday, December 3, 2015
4:00 p.m.
Alampi Room, Marine and Coastal Sciences

Mapping Global Migration

Esri has posted a very cool interactive tool for exploring global patterns of migration.

Team thinking

In class we recently talked about teamwork and the importance of understanding different approaches of team members. The Harvard Business Review just published an interesting piece about 8 different workplace thinking styles. The diagram is helpful and worth looking at for a few minutes.

Statewide GIS meeeting

The quarterly meetings of the NJ Geospatial Forum are a great place to meet local GIS professionals and hear about some of the issues on their minds.

The NJ Geospatial Forum will meet Thursday, December 3rd at 10 a.m.
All are welcome to attend the meeting in the ITC room at OIT 300 Riverview Plaza, Trenton NJ 08611

Happy GIS Day

Once again, GIS Day is here. May all your geospatial dreams come true. To celebrate, we have brought back a few of the graphic reminders of the early years:

A special thanks to Caroline Phillipuk, whose GIS Day posters outlived the celebrations.

GIS Day is almost here

Join us in celebrating our 5th Annual GIS Awareness Day event at Rutgers
University! Learn how maps, GPS and satellite imagery are used for
things like: community mapping, invasive species spread, watershed
management, road networks and more!  Speakers will represent a variety
of national and regional organizations focusing on geospatial analysis.

The evening will consist of a series of lightning talks, followed by
refreshments/poster session, then a panel discussion on careers in GIS,
and a dessert social to round out the event.

Food + networking + free giveaways!

Nov 18th, 6-9 pm
Rutgers University, Marine Sciences Building (71 Dudley Road, New
Brunswick, NJ)
Free parking in lots: 97, 98A and 98B

Our Facebook site:
https://www.facebook.com/Rutgers-GIS-Day-434169550105881/timeline/

Everyone is welcome to attend!

Organized by RU Intermediate Environmental Geomatics students.
Sponsored by the Department of Landscape Architecture.

Bias in remote sensing

Ever wonder why drones are an increasingly popular way to capture imagery? There are lots of reasons. But as Aaron Rothman points out in Places, "the apparently open visual access to the world afforded by satellite image systems is limited by vested government and corporate powers."

It is something worth pondering during this most special week, the week of GIS Day.

Friday Fotos: Cordoba

Millenials hunger for better food

When we hear reporting about the Millennials, it usually focuses on them as a generation of tech-savvy individualistic single adults, enjoying the best of urban living and reinventing modern culture. But a substantial portion of the millennials have come of age at a time when jobs are scarce and times are tough. This piece from Refinery29 takes a look at a group of young adults struggling, even with government assistance, to feed their families and get their lives on track. As it points out, "While food culture across the United States explodes, hunger rates have simultaneously risen."

Kate Orff

Kate Orff is becoming one of the best known landscape architects in the U.S., as shown by a Times profile of her at home.

National Parks

Today is the last day in the Byrne Seminar on National Parks and Parklands. The conversation will include a very brief discussion about International National Parks. One of the places that will get mentioned is Virunga National Park in the Congo. Virunga is the subject of a recent documentary available on Netflix that is powerful and important but also highlights how different their national parks are from ours. We contrasted it with the recent Ken Burns series on PBS about the U.S. National Parks: America's Best Idea. 

The links above are to YouTube-hosted previews for each. Compare and contrast.

Less driving is a problem

After years of encouraging people to drive less and take the train or bike, or at least drive a hybrid, it turns out that someone finally listened. Standard and Poor's reports that gas tax revenues are dropping because millennials are living more sustainably and healthier. And the problem is that we were counting on those revenues for road construction and maintenance.

The Star-Ledger reports that New Jersey isn't the only state struggling with this. But it isn't clear which states will be the first to recognize that this change in America's car culture is based on a dramatic generational change (not just a behavioral change) that might require some creative thinking about community priorities.