Timely, if not a little alarmist, comments from BLDGBLOG:

It’s interesting to note, however, that swine flu, unsurprisingly, comes from “close contact with pigs” – that is, spatial proximity between humans and their livestock.
Swine flu, we could say, is a spatial problem – an epiphenomenon of landscape.
I’m reminded here of a point made recently by geographer Javier Arbona. Referring to the increasingly popular and somewhat utopian idea that, in the sustainable cities of tomorrow, agriculture will have returned to its rightful place in the city center, Arbona asks: “Did everyone think that so much lushness and farming envisioned in the city aren’t going to open up new Pandora’s boxes of infectious diseases and sanitation problems as we come into contact with more manure, more bacteria, and more wild animals that we urbanites are not at all ‘naturalized’ to?”
It’s an important question. After all, it’s incredibly easy, reading about sustainable cities, urban agriculture, and even the locavore movement, to conclude that chickens, pigs, cows, etc., have all been removed from the urban fabric as part of a profiteering move by Tyson and Perdue.
But there were very real epidemiological reasons for taking agriculture out of the city; finding a new place for urban farms will thus not only require very intense new spatial codes, it will demand constant vigilance in researching and developing inoculations. Few people want to see burning piles of livestock in Times Square or Griffith Park, let alone piles of human corpses infected with H5N1.
Indeed, one of the most prevalent, if mundane, reasons why avian flu has become a “global threat” to humankind, as Mike Davis refers to it in his book Monster At Our Door, is space: it sounds like a joke, but people are living too close to their chickens (or their pigeons, as the case may be).
Avian flu, foot-and-mouth disease, swine flu: if these are spatially activated, so to speak, and spread through certain unrecommended proximities between humans and animals, then urban design’s medical undergirding is again revealed.
The space around you is no mere stylization; it is a strategy of containment.

This video has probably the most cool per minute of anything I’ve seen in a while; cyborg penguins, dirigible penguins, biomimetic walls that play music, self-organizing legos etc.  I almost suspect this is a prank video as part of a viral campaign for a movie about some dystopian future where robot penguins with glowing red eyes have enslaved humanity.

Shrinking Flint, Mich.

The New York Times ran a story about how the leaders of Flint, MI are considering planned consolidation of their city:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/business/22flint.html?_r=1&hp.

The idea is to concentrate public services on the healthier parts of town, and let the rest go fallow:

“If it’s going to look abandoned, let it be clean and green. Create the new Flint forest — something people will choose to live near, rather than something that symbolizes failure.”

Imagine that, people taking an active role in returning land to nature.

I saw this project on BLDGBLOG the other day and was a little suspicious of the claims being made:

Larsson has proposed using bacillus pasteurii, a “microorganism, readily available in marshes and wetlands, [that] solidifies loose sand into sandstone,” he explains.

I suspected some undergraduate had misunderstood or over-generalized from a research paper, but after reading the links, this looks like a real possibility.  Here are some images of the project based on the science:

And here are some images from the researchers doing the work on microbes:

I love that project – terraforming on a small scale.

There’s a piece in Portfolio discussing the possibilities ubiquitous computing enables in the realm of complimentary currencies:

Futurist Douglas Rushkoff, famous for correctly predicting the rise of social media, is trying to convince Craigslist’s Craig Newmark to create “craigbucks.” He thinks it’s the obvious next step in the evolution of money. “People could buy and sell things exclusively on Craigslist using craigbucks,” Rushkoff enthuses. “Sure they’ll want to keep their Visas and their MasterCards, but they’ll want a specialized, alternative form of cash too.”

The idea is not as far-fetched as it may seem. Economists already have a term for this kind of community-specific money; they’re called “complimentary currencies” and they naturally take root when conditions are right. For example, in 2006, a Chinese online social network called QQ produced “QQ coins” that became widely traded, used for almost a billion dollars a year in transactions. Even though the currency was designed just to buy things on the QQ network, other websites started accepting QQ coins for payment of even non-virtual goods, and a black market sprung up to convert QQ coins directly to Yuan. The Chinese government cracked down: They feared that QQ could trigger inflation of the Yuan by increasing the total money supply in China.

…

When the developed world gets over its bias for “printing press–era cash technology” then complementary currencies will be commonplace here too, Rushkoff predicts. He sees a future that has people literally reprogramming their economic systems, using computer networks and handheld devices to administer new forms of grassroots cash. Those currencies could be almost anything: Cash we can use only at one local restaurant, cash cards for Wal-Mart or other chain stores, babysitting dollars we can trade in our neighborhoods.

There are some small examples of people of this future here now. In Japan, people trade “elder-care units,” which are measured in time spent caring for elders in the community, and they’ve become quite valuable as the population in that country ages. In the United States, hours of service are exchanged via the online Time Bank or locally in Ithaca, New York. Then there are the “Life Dollars,” an electronic currency used in the Pacific Northwest. The experiments have been successful, albeit quite small. The total amount of Ithaca hours in circulation is $100,000, while Life Dollars are used for perhaps $2,000 worth of transactions per month.

There’s some interesting work being done on implementing cryptographic digital ‘coins’, and another interesting project that’s trying to create a payment system by collecting a large network of trust relations between friends which allows people who don’t know each other, but who can be connected by mutual friends to transact.

This as a great article about the impact the financial situation is having on shopping malls.  It hints at a lot of threads we’ve been following with the Re:Vision Dallas proposal:

The vital signs are not good. Even before the recession hit, consumers had developed mall fatigue, and the classic enclosed shopping mall was in decline. More than 400 of the 2,000 largest malls in the U.S. have closed in the past two years. The last new major mall in the U.S. opened in 2006, and only one big mall is scheduled to open this year—the troubled Xanadu mega-mall in Rutherford, N.J. (See below.) With some 150,000 retail stores projected to fail in the U.S. this year, more mall closings are imminent. Mall mainstays such as Mervyn’s department stores, Linens ’n Things, and KB Toys have already disappeared into bankruptcy, and mall vacancy rates topped 7 percent last year, the highest level since 2001.

…

Sales are growing at Wal-Mart, where shoppers can pick up groceries, fill their prescriptions, and buy socks without leaving the store. Many consumers are also shopping online. “I can’t take a couple of hours out of my weekend to drive down and browse the mall,” says Burlington, N.J., teacher Kari Holderman.

…

Some are being razed to make room for “big box” stores such as Home Depot and discount clubs such as BJ’s and Costco. Still others are being turned into open-air “lifestyle centers,” ersatz Main Streets to replace the real Main Streets that were decimated when malls lured away their customers in the first place. The stores in these centers are at ground level and have entrances facing the street, which helps boost store traffic and sales. Like real Main Streets, lifestyle centers include restaurants, movie theaters, and pedestrian plazas, as well as shopping. The amenities “draw the consumer in for reasons other than to just purchase items,” says Erin Hershkowitz of the International Council of Shopping Centers.

…

Some developers have already tried building “lifestyle centers” in downtown areas left blighted when stores and shoppers fled to the outskirts. But there is no single “big fix” that will pump life back into downtowns full of boarded-up stores, says development expert Teresa Lynch. That means some communities will soon be without a mall or a thriving shopping district, leaving them with no central gathering place

Cnet just published some images of the goings-on at the Long Now Foundation.  If you’re not familiar with them, they’re working on the design and construction of an enormous clock (the image above is a scale representation of a stairway spiraling down a 60′ portion of the clock) which they’re planning to build in New Mexico.  The clock is designed to be accurate to a few seconds for 10,000 years.  Which is to say if the Egyptians had built one of these it wouldn’t have lived out even half of it’s intended lifetime.

There are so many things to love about this project; the machining is beautiful, the idea of creating something that will work on that timescale is amazing, and the basic ideas they’re using to design the clock are very interesting.

I’ve read about this, but I had no idea there were people actually working on it, much less signing contracts:

California’s biggest energy utility announced a deal Monday to purchase 200 megawatts of electricity from a startup company that plans to beam the power down to Earth from outer space, beginning in 2016.

…

Solaren would generate the power using solar panels in Earth orbit and convert it to radio-frequency transmissions that would be beamed down to a receiving station in Fresno, PG&E said. From there, the energy would be converted into electricity and fed into PG&E’s power grid.

…

“While a system of this scale and exact configuration has not been built, the underlying technology is very mature and is based on communications satellite technology,” he said in a Q&A posted by PG&E. A study drawn up for the Pentagon came to a similar conclusion in 2007. However, that study also said the cost of satellite-beamed power would likely be significantly higher than market rates, at least at first.

In contrast, Spirnak said Solaren’s system would be “competitive both in terms of performance and cost with other sources of baseload power generation.”

I wonder what they’re assuming energy will cost in 2016 when they say it will be competitive.  To put 200 mW in context, the US produced 3891tWh 2003, which is roughly 442,000 mW capacity, so this satellite will be producing roughly .04% of national demand

The LA Times reports that the City of Santa Monica is pairing would-be gardeners lacking land with land owners lacking time:

Santa Monica officials say there are simply too many would-be gardeners and too little public garden space.

So gardeners and officials have come up with an idea they call the frontyard and backyard registry. The idea would connect gardeners with homeowners who are interested in hosting gardens but don’t have the time to care for them.

They are now developing the registry and looking for homeowners willing to allow a stranger with garden tools and seeds to tend a section of their yard.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-santamonica-garden13-2009apr13,0,6036316.story

OK, so this sounds like something out of bizarro-world, but as far as I can tell it’s not a late April Fools joke:

Microscopic algae called diatoms could help triple the electrical output of experimental, dye-sensitized solar cells, according to researchers at Oregon State University and Portland State University.

Dye-sensitized solar cells are favored as a thin-film material because they work in low-light conditions and are fabricated with environmentally benign materials compared to silicon solar cells. However, silicon cells have more than twice the efficiency, as much as 20 percent compared to less than 10 percent for dye-sensitized solar cells.

The Oregon engineers fed titanium dioxide to living diatoms so they would build shells from the photovoltaic material instead of silicon dioxide, from which they usually build their shells.

“We have found that diatoms will readily accept titanium dioxide in place of silicon dioxide if that’s all we make available to them,” said Rorrer.

The engineers have grown diatoms on a substrate. They have also bred them in bulk, then coated a glass surface with the material. In either case, the pattern of intricate nanoscale features both boosted the photovoltaic surface area available and trapped incident light inside the pores.

After removing the organic material from the shells, leaving behind the diatom’s nanoscale skeletons composed of titanium dioxide, the researchers mixed the material in a dye. The resulting thin-film solar cells had three times the efficiency, according to Rorrer, than the same thin films without diatom nanoscale patterning.

I want a set of titanium-algae-skeleton solar arrays!