Ah, the effectiveness of graphics, from the socially innovative folks at GOOD.

Top diagram: The number of pedestrian and biking trips, with each, uh, person representing a billion trips. That last image representing 2009 is starting to represent Manhattan.

Lower diagram: DOT (U.S. Department of Transportation) budget for pedestrian and bicycling programs. More evidence that government (and private sector) investment will follow the crowd, especially when the crowd makes itself known. The

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Wouldn’t cities be a lot greener (literally and figuratively) with more trees and solar energy? Those are two very big ticket items, and exactly the kind of scope where purpose-driven collaborative crowdsourcing is most effective.

One Block Off the Grid tackles the solar energy Catch 22 where solar panels are too expensive to install for one home, and significantly more affordable only if produced for hundreds. They aggregate interested buyers. Notice the chart above is a long tail diagram,

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If a cell is defined as the smallest structural and functional unit of an organism, if a building were an organism, its rooms would probably be its cells (‘cellula’ is Latin for a small room). For a city though, it may be more helpful to associate cells with its blocks, fitting perhaps since a cell is often described as the building blocks of life. From the air, a city’s blocks resemble cell structure more than its buildings.

Anyway, accepting this analogy to make a point, this is what makes

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Unlike many so-called ‘green’ buildings built in greenfields that require driving to get to, LEED standards rating of 66 out of 69 points, the highest rating ever achieved by a commercial building, it’s justifiable in aspiring to be called the world’s greenest building.

As a sign of the times that driving is considered less and less a right than a privilege, the newest LEED standards (Version 3) have

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When it comes to crowdsourced placemaking, it’s very difficult to do if the crowd doesn’t have a concrete goal in mind. This is especially the case when it comes to ‘green development’, which can have thousands of interpretations. Thankfully, via the County of San Francisco’s partnership with Cisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom launched Urban EcoMap pilot in San Francisco, which provides neighborhoods and citizens with defined benchmarks to crowdsource to. Announced on Earth Day 2009 (April 22), the

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Back in 2005 we featured Ben, Naomi and Josh, founders of the next generation real estate development firm, Sustainable Community Associates (SCA) in this article, Developing a community for their peers, whereas their peers were recent college graduates. At the time they were in the planning stages of a mixed-use green development, which in fact was profiled by Ben on this site as far back as 2004 in A CoolTown block in Ohio.

Well, here’s a message from Josh with some rather exciting

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What cities are the easiest and most convenient to be green in? That’s what the Least Wasteful Cities Study ultimately discovers, sponsored by bottle-maker Nalgene as they seek to make amends for their BPA setbacks.

The study ranked 23 wasteful or non-wasteful habits of 3750 urban Americans with a score of 10, weighted by multiplying those numbers by the following criteria:
1 - Low impact behavior (e.g. Reusing wrapping paper)
5 - Moderate impact (e.g. Turning water off when brushing teeth) …

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Amsterdam, The Netherlands already has a global reputation for being a biking city (within a biking country), which is fast becoming a poster child for a 21st century infrastructure that isn’t reliant on automobiles. Not coincidentally, a walkable built environment is much more conducive to a digital infrastructure replacing an asphalt one, which is allowing Amsterdam to also now lead the world in raising the bar for what being green is.

Some of the green programs that will be completed by

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Going green is of central importance to ‘creatives’, thus this first entry centering on renewable energy. However, if The Graph (as it is known in the solar industry) pictured above is to be believed, then the question becomes, ‘What does a city that runs predominantly on solar energy look like?‘  Before addressing that question, here’s some evidence for the data above:

- In the past 50 years, 10 gigawatts of solar power (equivalent to 10 standard nuclear reactors) have been produced

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If you’re looking for a reliable green resource regarding placemaking and design, take a look at architect Michelle Kaufmann’s blog, as well as her firm Michelle Kaufmann Design. It’s long on practice and real world examples without getting bogged down in theory and lecture.

For instance, her blog is like a green placemaking combination of Apartment Therapy and the one you’re reading right now. She recently published Embracing Thoughtful, Walkable Neighborhoods: Housing Collapse Reveals

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