« September 2008 | Main | November 2008 »
October 31, 2008
City Eco Lab - the encounters
Like all that soil? One of the key ideas in City Eco Lab is to make eco-systems, earth and water the basis of re-imagining the city - not "the economy".
The lower photograph shows jonggi, or earthen jars, used in Korea to store condiments and kimchi pickles. The image introduces a statement about food storage that Debra Solomon has published at culibog.org by way of a preview of her participation in City Eco Lab, at the Cité du Design Biënale in Saint-Étienne which runs from 15-30 November. (The full November Doors of Perception Report is here).
(Together with chef Paul Freestone, Debra will be pickling, sauerchocrouting and making delicious kimchi as one part of her installation in the food area of the event).
I love this image because it answers, for me at least, a central question posed by City Eco Lab (which is, after all, the main event in a national design biennial). If a sustainable life is to be less about stuff, and more about people - with few new buildings and products being made - what is there left for designers and artists to do?
A big part of the answer is to seek out daily life solutions that already exist - such as the collaborative, low-energy food storage solution shown in the photograph - and then to adapt and improve them for new contexts.
We can discuss that further if you make it to the event - or via this blog.
For now, here is a summary of the encounters and presentations that will run in City Eco Lab during its two-week run. This list will evolve day-by-day and announcements posted on the City Eco Lab blog. (The blog will come properly to life life just before the opening).
VELO WALAS
Avinash Kumar on the story behind velowala.org, a media installation made by a team in Delhi that brings the bike-based commerce of the streets of India alive – in St Etienne. (Saturday 15/11)
ECOSOFT; WORLDCHANGING
New economic models, complementary currencies, local economy trading schemes, alternative trade networks, community supported agriculture: Bethany Koby & Ellie Thornhill talk about their shop-within-a-shop for eco-software. They are followed later that day by special guest Alex Steffen, editor of Worldchanging. (Sunday 16/11)
DESIGN IMPERATIVES; ENERGY
Allan Chochinov, editor in chief of Core77.com, gives a keynote on “design imperatives”. Later, a worskhop on design and energy wil discuss: can design help us choose among the growing number of green energy offers ? (Tuesday 18/11)
COMPOSTING; DE-MOTORISATION; MANZINI
Clare Brass + Flora Bowden from SEED Foundation talk about neighbourhood-level composting services. Later there’s a design clinic : Design for mobiliy, or de-motorisation? There follows a special keynote by Ezio Manzini on "design strategies for the small, local, open and connected". Oh yes, and the French edition of In The Bubble is launched at 18h. (Wednesday 19/11)
OPEN SYSTEMS AND INFORMAL TECHNOLOGY
A sustainable world will be densely networked – but not by closed, proprietary neworks. Juha Huuskonen (Pixelache, Piksel, Pixelvärk, Afropixel, Pikslaverk, PixelAzo) and Jean-Noel Montagne (CrasLabs, Paris) discuss how self organisation and technological autarchy will be crucial in the coming years. (Thursday 20/11)
KIMCHI AND THE CITY; EDIBLE GARDENS IN LYON'S BROWNFIELD SITES
Emanual Louisgrand talks about l’Ilot d’Amaranthes - his gardens on brownfield sites in Lyon. Later, a design clinic on Food and the City features Matthieu Benoît-Gonin (Jardinethic) ; Debra Solomon, (culiblog.org); and François Jégou (solutioning.net). (Friday 21/11)
DESIGNING SUSTAINABILITY EVENTS
Doors of Perception lunchtime discussion. If you are serious about hoping to do a similar event in your own region to City Eco Lab (or Dott 07), Doors cannot fund it, but we can help with the strategy and process. (Saturday 22/11)
RE-LOCALISATION AND SMALL BUSINESSES
Design clinic for and with local companies.(Monday 24/11)
NURTURING A REGION’S HARD AND SOFT RESOURCES
How to find, document and enable eco-materials - and human savoir faire (Tuesday 25/11)
WATER AND THE CITY; SUDS
Re-connecting a city with its natural systems, including projects for St Etienne’s River Furan. Plus a design clinic on sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDS). (Wednesday 26/11)
MAPS OF THE FUTURE
Pirjo Haikola from the Why Factory (NL) a research institute on the future city founded by Winy Maas and MVRDV, shows how maps are used in rethinking, researching, reshaping and enhancing images of future urban life. (Thursday 27/11)
SO WHAT EXACTLY IS AN ECO NEIGHBOURHOOD?
Citizens and designers involved in one of St Etienne's "eco quartiers" (eco neighbourhoods) will discuss what functions make a place eco - or not - and how to measure their performance. (Thursday 27/11)
LESSONS OF CANTEEN 80KM
The City Eco Lab restaurant serves food sourced within a 80km radius - the maximum distance food may travel in France without being refrigerated (Friday 28/11).
Posted by John Thackara at 11:15 AM | Comments (4)
October 29, 2008
Unplugged - or unhinged?
I'm reading reading a moving and important book by Sharon Astyk called "Depletion and Abundance: Life On The New Home Front".
Uniquely among recent books on life after the Peaks - energy, protein, biodiversity etc - Astyk does not write to scare us all witless. She does not write about elaborate ways to fix The Economy. She does not even furnish a shopping list of green tools and equipment that we can all buy as evidence that we are Doing Something. (This latter prohibition is a particular disappointment to Kristi and me: we've been compiling a shopping list of high-end fruit dryers, choucroute kits, and grain grinders, that we were about to send to our friends before Christmas).
On the contrary, Astyk writes about the benefits that can come (and will come, for most of us) from being poor in material terms. She proffers practical advice on how best to live comfortably with an uncertain energy supply; prepare children for a hotter, lower energy, less secure world; and generally how to survive and thrive in an economy in crisis.
This shocking approach clearly freaked out the the New York Times: they ran a patronising story in their Fashion and Style section about Astyk's work and life. The Times even dug up a so-called "mental health professional" - a Dr. Jack Hirschowitz - who was happy to pronounce Astyk's "compulsion to live green in the extreme" as a kind of disorder.
There is no recognized syndrome in mental health related to the "compulsion toward living a green life" but Hirschowitz - a professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, for goodness sake - said that "certain carborexic behaviours might raise a red flag.
"The critical factor in determining whether something has reached the level of a disorder is if dysfunction is involved,” he said. “Is it getting in the way of your ability to do a good job at work?".
Aaah: work. That would be the activity that makes tens of millions of people do depressed that they have to be medicated by people like Dr Hirschowitz just so they can carry on doing it?
And that would be the work whose trainees - ten per cent of all American school-age boys - are now doped up to the gills with psychoactive drugs by Dr H and his colleagues to make them pay attention?
Rather than fight The Economy, or try to fix it, Astyk seems to be suggesting that we simply ignore it - that we unplug. It's a very un-male, un-macho solution - which is why the book is subversive.
Astyk may have unplugged, but she's not the one who's unhinged.
Posted by John Thackara at 10:44 AM | Comments (2)
October 27, 2008
Moths to the flame
I was mesmerised by last night's tv ad for Westfield, a vast 150,000 square metre shopping mall that opens in West London next weekend. The ad features attractive and horny young people who turn into fairies. Fair enough, but they then start taking off and fly across the city's rooftops in ever-denser swarms. Their destination is the burning light of....."a new and innovative shopping experience".
Please reassure me that I did not imagine the whole thing. Go, check out their ad . Is it, or is it not, a film about moths to the flame ?
Posted by John Thackara at 07:11 AM | Comments (0)
October 23, 2008
It's mad, but it's not complicated
I imagine you're having the same experience that I am? All around me, people are figuring out that the money situation may be mad, but it's not complicated.
As the Big Dipper of financial bloggers, Ilargi, writes today, for example: "Stocks are plummeting once more all around the world, and if you think that trend will stop anytime soon, then you haven’t been paying attention. As long as there is maybe $1 of real money for every $25 dollars (or $100, or $200) of funny virtual money, stocks have a long way left to fall. Especially since what little real money is left tends to stay away from the crap tables. And that is what the exchanges - or make that the entire economy - have become".
Illargi wonders, surely wisely, whether we properly understand what this means. "The funny money will disappear, no matter how hard its creators - the banks and governments operating in our societies - try to prevent that from happening. Nobody with assets that have some real value left will be willing to risk them in trades with what they know to be largely worthless counterparties. The only players staying at the table are the ones who are already broke. The only money left is the funny sort".
This sounds depressing until you realise that you don't need funny money to be active in the world. On the contrary, as countless social innovators already understand, the Law of Locality describes a near-infinity of opportunities to improve practical aspects of daily life. True, these opportunities exist outside the formal economy - but that's more a problem for the formal economy than it is for human beings. Acting locally corresponds to laws of nature that don't admit to action at a distance.
Posted by John Thackara at 12:16 PM | Comments (1)
October 22, 2008
Alternate Reality Game?
I saw this poster outside St Etienne station. It portrays The Mongoose who is "an infamous hitman hired to carry out assassinations and other evil deeds...the cruel and cold-blooded murderer carries out his orders with eagerness and glee." It says it's a game, and that it's is powered by "Unreal Engine".
Now is it me, or.....
Posted by John Thackara at 07:52 AM | Comments (0)
October 21, 2008
Stuff-o-meter
So what exactly, I wondered, is the Baltic Dry Index? And is it a good thing, or a bad thing, that it is plunging downwards at the fastest rate since records began etc etc?
These turn out to be two good questions.
The Baltic Dry Index (BDI), I discover, measures the freight rates of raw materials around the world. It's therefore an important measure of material and energy intensity in the global economy.
We hardly ever see bulk carriers like the monster above, or this one below
- still less think about them. And yet we should: Shipping’s CO2 emissions, and energy intensity, are in the same order of magnitude as those of road and rail - which move much smaller cargoes over much shorter distances.
These high levels of resource intensity place a big question mark over the long term viability of bulk trade in food and raw materials.
A briefing by Global Dashboard recently commented on the shipping industry's own numbers including the graphs below.
"One of the bits of data posted " says GD, "compares the CO2 emissions from moving a ton of cargo 1 kilometre with the emissions that would result from moving it instead by rail, road or air. For shipping, the figure is 12.97 grammes of CO2 - as opposed to 17 grammes for rail, 50 for road and 552 for air.
"Presumably, the shipping companies involved think this constitutes a good argument in shipping’s favour. But in fact, the surprise is that shipping’s emissions are so high relative to the other three transport modes, rather than so low".
This brings us to the Baltic Dry Index and its impressively plunging graphs....
BDI rates have plunged 50 percent this year - in large part, apparently, because iron ore demand from China is plummeting.
Do we want the Baltic Dry Index to recover and shoot upwards again?
If the Berge Stahl stays dockside, and empty, it's good for the planet - but bad for the global economy in its present form.
Clear?
Posted by John Thackara at 09:54 AM | Comments (1)
October 20, 2008
I told you so
"We will not have any more crashes in our time."
"There is nothing in the situation to be disturbed about."
"... the outlook is favorable..."
I couldn't resist reproducing this 1927-1933 Pompous Prognosticators Hall of Fame
Someone should stand by to make a similar chart plotting, against actuals, today's confident statements that we should not worry about climate change, or peak oil, or peak protein....
Posted by John Thackara at 05:31 PM | Comments (0)
Megacities after the meltdown
The received wisdom for a decade has been that the world will continue to urbanise, and that power and money will continue to congregate in a handful of megacity regions. The Megacities Congress in November begins to question these once-comfortable certainties. Well I will, anyway: I'm speaking on Friday 28th. The evening before (Thursday 27th) there's a lecture by Adriaan Geuze on the Randstad, followed by a discussion that includes Ed Soja (et moi).
Posted by John Thackara at 10:27 AM
October 16, 2008
City Eco Lab: on site and building...
...only we're pouring earth not concrete See you in our little shed!
Posted by John Thackara at 09:52 AM | Comments (1)
October 14, 2008
When red is green and up is down
George Monbiot, in today's Guardian, also links the financial crisis and the ecological crisis."The financial crisis shows what happens when we try to make the facts fit our desires", writes Monbiot. "The two crises have the same cause. In both cases, those who exploit the resource have demanded impossible rates of return and invoked debts that can never be repaid. In both cases we denied the likely consequences.The rules are the same in both cases. Ecology is the stock from which all wealth grows (but) if you extract resources at a rate beyond the level of replenishment, your stock will collapse". Monbiot concludes, "Now we must learn to live in the real word."
This is a good cue for me to head back to St Etienne head back to St Etienne for the coming days. I'm more convinced than ever that working at the level of the region - as we are doing there - is a better use of one's life energies (which are also finite) than making demands of national politicians that they are in no position to meet - nor even, for the most part, to understand. As Jonathon Porritt puts it in his new book Globalism and Regionalism at least two of the basic foundations of civilised life – energy, and food – are readily and satisfyingly available at a regional level. "A watchword of sustainable economics is self-reliance. This entails combining judicious and necessary trade with other countries with an unapologetic emphasis on each country maintaining security of supply in terms of energy, food, and even manufacturing".
Posted by John Thackara at 07:26 AM | Comments (1)
October 13, 2008
Measuring what matters
Totally lost amongst the financial news last week was discussion of a new report on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (Teeb).
According to this EU-commissioned study, the global economy is losing more money from the disappearance of forests than through the current banking crisis. The report puts the annual cost of forest loss at between $2 trillion and $5 trillion.
The figure comes from adding the value of the various services that forests perform, such as providing clean water and absorbing carbon dioxide.
According to Pavan Sukhdev, lead author of the report, "whereas Wall Street by various calculations has to date lost, within the financial sector, $1-$1.5 trillion, the reality is that at today's rate we are losing natural capital at least between $2-$5 trillion every year."
Strictly speaking, Mr Sukhdev, we are not "losing" natural capital, we are consuming it. And the superhuman efforts of politicians these days are all fixing the system so that we can carry on consuming a lot more.
As Illargiputs it today, "the intention of all these daily federal interventions is to keep the credit spigots open so Americans can go even deeper into debt to buy more stuff they can't actually afford". And he goes on to quote Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee: "We have to prop up consumption."
Key to understanding Sukhdev's conclusions is that as forests decline, nature stops providing services which it used to provide essentially for free. So the human economy either has to provide them instead, perhaps through building reservoirs, building facilities to sequester carbon dioxide, or farming foods that were once naturally available.
Or we have to do without them; either way, there is a financial cost.
So I have a proposal. Let's pass a law compelling anyone in possession of an information screen describing the financial markets to split the screen, make the money chart half the size, and place it beside a real-time feed from a site opf ecosystem degradation.
Posted by John Thackara at 08:49 AM | Comments (0)
October 11, 2008
Toxic sludge machine
I was critical last week of commentators who describe the financial crisis as "psychological".
Those who blame a "lack of transparency" are on stronger ground - although ignorance of the facts or the law is not a valid excuse in other domains of life.
The process chart above describes something called a Financial Products Markup Language which is said (on its website) to be "the business information exchange standard for electronic dealing and processing of financial derivatives instruments". The idea is to "streamline the process supporting trading activities in the financial derivatives domain".
The chart looks neat and orderly - hygienic, even, with all that blue - but reflect a moment: The system has been programmed for deranged individuals who, as we now know, believe that exponential growth to eternity is a right and proper basis for the design of the world's financial system.
GIGO - or Garbage In, Garbage Out - is a phrase used by computer programmers to remind laypeople that computers "will unquestioningly process the most nonsensical of input data and spew out mountains of erroneous information in a short time".
Where we're at now is that systems designed to "streamline" the market have been spewing out financial derivatives which, insofar as anyone can count them, now amount to eight hundred times global GDP.
This mass of red stuff (the red wedge on the inverted pyramid above, also known in financial circles as "toxic sludge") has now started to leak out of the balloon. And that's why this crisis is not psychological.
For Dan Roberts in The Telegraph "the real mystery is how the negative feedback loop in the financial markets became so devastating. How could this domino effect happen so quickly? How could we lose control of something we designed to serve us?".
It's not a mystery. Think back to Three Mile island . (The photo above is of its mis-named control room.) During that calamity, within a few seconds after the physical accident at the nuclear reactor began, more than a hundred warning lights were flashing in the control room.
"I would have liked to have thrown away the alarm panel," one of the duty operators, Craig Faust, said later. "It wasn't giving us any useful information." Water pumps, the turbine and the reactor had all unexpectedly shut down. But none of the blinking lights told the operators what they needed to know.
Or wanted to know.
In today's financial discontinuity, the complexity of the information available (think of all those screens) has been compounded by two further factors: a lot of the trading is driven by powerful semi-automated systems ; and a lot of people clearly have not wanted to know what the screens were telling them.
Posted by John Thackara at 10:58 AM | Comments (0)
October 10, 2008
Redemption
I'm sorry, but if I hear one more "expert" on the box describe the financial crisis as "psychological" I'm going to barf. I also heard a French commentator today blame "the redemption factor" - which sounds biblical, but apparently refers to the price being put on that huge red chunk of the pyramid (see story above) which seems to represent eight hundred times global GDP.
Norrie C at The Guardian explains that what's unwinding is "the mathematically flawed system of debt-based, fiat, Fractional Reserve Banking which is predicated on indefinite exponential growth. That is growth in debt, population, industrial activity, consumption of energy, consumption of raw materials, production of waste, production of pollution, destruction of the biosphere".
Continuous, relentless exponential growth of the above list is simply not possible indefinitely - and the end of indefinitely is what seems to be happening now.
The fiscal model is fatally flawed, Norrie explains, because "you need a relentless, geometric increase in debt for there to be enough money in the money supply to pay back all the capital and interest when only the capital was ever created. The debt-based Fractional Reserve Banking system is killing itself, our savings and our planet".
This is a disgrace, and somebody should do something about it.
But personally I've made a killing out of the crisis this week. On Monday, in Brighton, Andre Viljoen gave me my first Lewes Pound:
This new complementary currency is designed to encourage demand for local goods and services and thereby to help build resilience to the rising costs of energy, transport and food.
It's intended to be used alongside pounds Sterling - but I couldn't help noticing that LPs are selling at a healthy premium on eBay: 
In other words, my global holdings in complementary currencies (one Lewes Pound) have gone up fourteen times in a single week.
I've only got one Lewes Pound, and I'm hanging on to it. Or will someone out there will make me a good offer? What shall we say: a kilo of gold for it?
Posted by John Thackara at 08:21 AM | Comments (0)
October 08, 2008
The rain in Spain stays mainly in the Hog
Harvesting rainwater is key for any town or city determined to use its water sustainably. Rainwater HOG is a rain rescue and storage tank designed as a water-filled building block. It was conceived and developed by an Australian architect, Sally Dominguez, who had been designing drought-ready buildings but was frustrated by a lack of options for domestic scale urban rainwater catchment. HOG’s flat walls, and use of through-holes as bracing, allow water to flow in any direction. This enables HOG to store water horizontally and vertically. Because HOG modules are deliberately slim and compact, they are easy to retrofit into the tightest spaces. As Dominguez explains,"the problem with a drought is that when it rains, it often gathers in the wrong areas for it to be of use. As an architect I wanted to fit in rainwater storage without giving up valuable real estate". The product has taken off so fast in California that Dominguez has moved her family and the business to Marin County. Hog is on display at the Autodesk Design Gallery in San Francisco as one of the winners of the Spark design awards.
I can't judge whether the system can be used as it stands in a European context, but the potential market in London must be 35 million units on its own. It never rains but it shines, at least for this designer.
Posted by John Thackara at 05:28 AM | Comments (0)
October 07, 2008
Feeling peaky
I have this image of the 19-strong Emergency Economy Committee sitting down in Number 10 Downing Street in London (as they did yesterday, for the first time) to discuss the money crisis. The economy war-room is lined with screens on which red graphs plunge downwards. The Prime Minister calls the meeting to order: "Any suggestions?" Before any of the 19 hand-picked experts, the finest financial minds in the land, can speak, a functionary bursts into the room bearing a clipboard. "Prime Minister, we really must deal with the peak oil crisis, right now". The Prime Minister opens his mouth to reply, but before he can speak another functionary comes in waving another print-out: "Peak phosphorous, peak phosphorous, it's going to run out and there'll be no bread and we're all going to starve" the functionary babbles. At this point the Prime MInister stands up and stamps his foot: "I don't want to hear any more bad news. Someone give me some good news". At this point a small nerdy guy comes in and says, "Prime Minister, we really need you to co-ordinate emergency international action on the peak indium crisis". "Where the hell is Indium" cries Brown. "It's not a place, Prime Minister, it's a rare metal" stammers the nerd."It's essential to the production of liquid displays but it's going to run out and when that happens the world will run out of computer displays". "You mean, like the displays in this room?" asks Brown. "I'm afraid so, yes, Prime Minister". "Excellent" cries Brown, and claps the nerd on the back. "I'm appointing you Minister for Clear Thinking. "I want you to buy up all the indium in the world and pour it down that hole where we keep all the nuclear waste".
Posted by John Thackara at 07:57 AM | Comments (0)
October 02, 2008
Beyond the building: behind the website
This is what it looked like when three of the best critics in the Netherlands set out to write an online book in five days at the Venice Architecture Biennial (which was two weeks ago),
Did I say concentrated?
Inspired by the recent burning-down of the Faculty of Architecture in Delft, the Dutch Pavilion (commissioned from Stealth by Ole Bouman) was turned into a project called ARCHIPHOENIX - a week long debate on "the capacities and capabilities of architecture - beyond building". My own contribution, a talk on the theme
"What would radical ecology imply for architecture? is online: click on "keynote speaker marathon: Beyond the sustainable".
Posted by John Thackara at 09:29 AM | Comments (0)
