PlastiCity FantastiCity
The fabulous RMIT based journal KERB has recently announced a new competition called PlastiCity FantastiCity, to envision a new urbanism. From the site: "The competition re-envisions city systems to explore fantastical opportunities that enable groundbreaking and fun projects which shake the design world. A multi-disciplinary approach is encouraged though not required and we are sure that with help from you and your site we can hit our target audience."

Sustainable Sites - Update
From some sneak peeks of the latest update to the Sustainable Sites Initiative (more from L+U here), I was both excited about the next iteration and establishment of more rigorous set of criteria, and a bit curious how it was going to maintain some of the necessary distance, inclusivity and poetry that is lacking in many other site rating systems. I'm not sure how I feel about the new split between the guidelines and the 'case' for sustainable s

Elements of Urban Agriculture
I had the opportunity today to see a presentation by local urban agriculture guru Marc Boucher-Colbert (the man behind the Rocket Restaurant rooftop garden here in Portland). Instead of focusing directly on rooftops, he outlined a broad version of urban agriculture through an investigation of a range of possible strategies for our cities. This is all information investigated at length at times here on L+U and Veg.itecture, but I thought it apt t

Remembering Lawrence Halprin (or at least some of his projects)
In the blogosphere, this is old news now. It's been a week since I heard about the death of landscape architectural icon Lawrence Halprin - actually the day after while in a meeting where part of the topic was discussing the iconic nature of his p

Reading List: Beyond No. 1
Perfect airplane fare, on a recent trip I had an opportunity to borrow Beyond No. 1, entitled Scenarios and Speculations, featuring a range of short stores on the 'post-contemporary', edited by Pedro Gadanho. An interesting idea, the slim volume takes a different tack: "...dedicated to new, experimental forms of architectural and urban writing, a bookazine in which, amidst other goodies, an extended network of young and upcoming writers are given the freedom to survey the outline of themes and things to come.