Writing is a vehicle. And it continues to drive me, from the place I began, to where I am heading today. Hard to believe, but six months have passed since I began my blogging position with The Grid. Just a few months ago, I was a senior in college, interested in pursuing a path that [...]
An overgrown parking lot clings to the fringe of an urban center. Rundown school buildings wait for a sorely needed upgrade. Somewhere outside of these places, sleekly dressed design students stay up late with their rulers and tricked out software in hand. How about combining the two? This type of collaborative thinking has become increasingly [...]
Garden designer? How about ecological warrior? Landscape architects may be due for a new reputation, and for good reason. As a field, landscape architecture has changed rapidly over the past two decades. It is too simple to assume that architects focus only on floral gardens and upscale stone walkways. As human environmental impacts become more [...]
Classifying neighborhoods has always been more art than science. Despite an urban planner’s best intentions, the original vision of a few city blocks doesn’t always pan out. As populations tend toward urban living and countries invest money into the construction of new cities, it’s important to shift attention not just towards infrastructure, but community building [...]
Food talk is hot these days. Urban planning councils and governments now implement sustainable food mandates, and city revitalization projects transform old buildings into gourmet mixed-use shopping centers. It’d be easy to assume that food producers have an easy time getting their products to city consumers. Yet even with a growing appetite for their goods, [...]
It’s July 2012, and new saplings and shrubs at Roger Williams Park hover around three feet tall. But in five years, the site will sprout tubers and leafy greens – even offering medicinal herbs free of charge to visitors. In 30 years, the small pocket of land will provide nuts, mulch, fruit, and fuel to [...]
As map-making software grows in popularity, more people than ever have cartography at their fingertips. In response to the growing trend, many mapping projects have begun distinguishing themselves as radical cartography, choosing to highlight, not hide, the process and politics associated with map-making decisions. At Rhode Island School of Design’s (RISD) Digital+Media graduate program, the [...]
In light of recent coverage on the value of a design education, organizations across the country have begun to open up the field to a more unlikely population – middle and high school students. As the contemporary education system faces continued criticism, alternatives like Citizen Schools and Afterschool Alliance have developed student programs to supplement [...]
With the growing popularity of crowdsourced funding platforms like Kickstarter or IndieGoGo, many urban planning professionals have begun to explore the potential of a good web-based brainstorm. In 2011, the development firm Renaissance Downtowns partnered with the city of Bristol, Connecticut to solicit feedback on the piazza feature of its mall redevelopment plan. After receiving [...]
In 2011, Providence, Rhode Island (R.I.) demolished I-195, a section of interstate highway that had bisected the city for half a century. A new stretch called the Iway had already been built for $446 million, helping to reconnect the city’s Jewelry District to the rest of the downtown and open up 40 acres of land. [...]
College lawns are not just for Frisbees anymore. The UMass Permaculture Initiative snagged top honors at the White House Campus Champions of Change Challenge this March 2012, beating out 1,400 applicants and 15 finalists in a social media voting campaign. The project, founded in October 2010, is just one of many efforts in a growing [...]
The podium microphone could not quite reach Will Allen, standing six-and-a-half feet tall and in front of a sold-out lecture hall in Providence, Rhode Island. Allen, a former professional basketball player and MacArthur Genius Award recipient, was speaking on behalf of his work at Growing Power, a Milwaukee-based environmental non-profit focused on sustainable urban farming [...]
In Providence, Rhode Island, farmers huddled up alongside students, scribbling on Post-it notes, and throwing around phrases. Efficiency. Integrated design. Awareness. The event was FarmHack, a collaborative design charrette and open-source sharing platform started by the National Young Farmers’ Coalition. The event’s aim, while simple, has big goals – what happens when you bring together [...]
