Surbana International Consultants’s marine-themed urban design in the Chinese city of Rizhao shows that industrial cities can co-exist with nature through careful planning.

Source: www.eco-business.com

Ecological design in service of..? Can people be accommodated too?

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Apple is open sourcing Research Kit in a bid to turn the iPhone into a medical research tool.

Source: www.zdnet.com

What else will you do with your smart phone – computer assisted www network today-tomorrow?

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 Two weeks ago New York State came one step closer to creating the electricity system of the future when the New York Public Service Commission (PSC) adopted its first major Order as part of the Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) proceeding. This is a significant milestone on the path to create a cleaner, more affordable, more modern, and more efficient energy system in New York by harnessing distributed energy resources (DERs) such as demand response, rooftop solar, energy efficiency, and microgrids.

Source: blog.rmi.org

Distributed Energy Networks (DERS are the future of urban co-generationof our energy needs – NYC is in leading with regulation that allows this to happen, Cape Town and the cities could learn form this and give ESCOM with its "load shedding: a run of its money of they have the will to allow visionary regulatory environments to be shaped by such thinking

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The growing number of people living in cities – and changes in rural-urban linkages – are re-shaping our relationship with food. Policymakers need to take note

Source: www.iied.org

Poverty and its causes are related to food security, but how can we address these on the ground?

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When the New York City Department of Transportation started to turn streets into plazas in 2008, public opinion varied. Hundreds of New Yorkers demonstrated their enthusiasm by immediately populating what had just recently been the realm of the car while others proclaimed that traffic congestion and loss of parking would cripple surrounding businesses. The Department of Transportation’s 71 plazas are now more figuratively and literally cemented into the landscape of the city, and the benefits of these open spaces — increased foot traffic, activating programs, beautification, pedestrian safety — are well recounted.

Each of these plazas requires a local nonprofit partner to fund and carry out their maintenance and programming, an extension of the kinds of public-private partnerships, including conservancies and “friends” groups, that are increasingly relied on for operational and maintenance funding at parks across the city. The Neighborhood Plaza Partnership (NPP), a program of The Horticultural Society of New York, seeks to support low-capacity organizations that have taken on the role of plaza manager by providing them with services and capacity building. And as NPP Managing Director Laura Hansen explains, the Partnership is leveraging the plazas by using their maintenance as a workforce development tool and documenting the needs of their managers to consider the future of the public-private partnership model that currently supports them. Hansen lays out the motivations, realities, and potential behind plaza management while asking the very important question of how much we should, and can, rely on private support for maintaining our public realm

Source: urbanomnibus.net

Can our public spaces benefit by a similar program?

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