Kent State University’s 2013 COLDSCAPES Competition, a contest that tested ideas for improving livability in cold weather cities, recently announced their three winning designs. (Cleveland Urban Design Collective)
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
- Landscape architecture faces a slow climb out of the recession. According to the ASLA’s Q2 Business Quarterly survey, though most landscape architecture firms are reporting stable or increasing work, many firms won’t be looking to hire anytime soon. (Fort Mill Times)
- Anyone up for a late summer road trip? Sam Fox School’s landscape architecture students will travel through five midwestern states to learn about productive landscapes as part of the inaugural Spatial Practices seminar. As visiting professor Jesse Vogler puts it: “The orientation of this seminar is to frame the countryside not as idyll or antidote to an urban condition, but as a constituent part in its production.” (Sam Fox School)
- The legal battle over urban farming on public parkways has temporarily come to a close, a relief to urban farmers who will be allowed to keep their vegetable gardens–at least until the city releases their new permitting process. (The Dirt)
& RELATED
- On Monday,serial entrepreneur Elon Musk released his designs for the Hyperloop, a new form of transit to transport you from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 30 minutes, a speed of almost 800 miles per hour. The hypothetical $6 billion project–Musk says he’s too busy running SpaceX and Tesla to take the Hyperloop project on–seems like the stuff of science fiction when you think about the tubes, pods, and magnets that go into it. What do you think about the “what if” Hyperloop compared with the California’s slower, $70 billion high-speed train? (Business Week)
- Get excited, it’s that time of year again: Planetizen has just announced their top 10 planning, design, and development websites of 2013. (Planetizen)
- Can the craze for urban beekeeping actually be bad for honeybees? Two British scientists say yes, if the city you’re living in doesn’t have enough bee-friendly plants around to feed on. (This story reminds me of an op-ed I featured over a month ago on the short-sightedness of urban agriculture.) (NPR)
- UCSF wants to remove significant numbers of beautiful, but invasive, eucalyptus trees and it’s a contentious issue that has many up in arms. Those looking to save the eucalpti invoke famous naturalists such as John Muir, while others argue that the thick groves are like “a match head waiting to explode.” (SFGate)
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