In a desert climate, such as Tempe, Arizona, rain is sparse. At only 4.5 inches per year, it is a very dry place. The city gets water, nevertheless, as is demonstrated by the unusual amount of lawn-grown grass surrounding the suburban and urban sprawl. The question then is how? How do residents get the water [...]
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 [...]
Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial for the success of many websites. No matter how often you may tune your site for a better ranking with major search engines, it may still not be enough if the right keywords or keyphrases are not being selected. This is because search engines decide how relevant a site [...]
During rainfall and snow storms, 27 billion gallons of raw sewage and stormwater are released into New York City’s waterways. These discharges are called Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOS). CSOs occur when treatment plants are overwhelmed by water flows that are more than twice the design capacity. A number of sustainable methods of stormwater management have [...]
The sky is limitless, they say. So if there’s no space to your left, or to your right, or below, then look up! Land, limited in the City of Los Angeles, is slowly becoming a commodity. And as new land becomes occupied by never-ending construction projects, it’ll eventually vanish so we need start thinking straight, [...]
Buffalo, New York’s grand collection of architecture was generated by Buffalo’s grain elevators; its robust economy culminating as the largest grain transshipment center in the world in 1900. At that time, the city’s grain silos had become recognized as the great cathedrals of Modernity. Today, Buffalo is a shadow of its former grandeur, experiencing immense [...]
Taksim Square, in Istanbul, Turkey, is one of the liveliest public spaces in the city. It was a part of the modernization project of the newly-formed republic in the late 1930s. Like many other parts of the city, it was based on the plans of Henri Prost, the prominent representative of the French school of [...]
Being a current grad student at Arizona State and having an undergraduate history at Ohio State, I can say that I know both these university cities quite well. There are many differences between Tempe, Arizona and Columbus, Ohio. For one, the art and music scene in Columbus is far superior than Tempe. On the other [...]
A new urban planning and development scheme is being implemented in Cleveland, Ohio that will dramatically change the look and accessibility of the city’s underutilized waterfront. Located on the shores of Lake Erie, Cleveland Ohio’s lakefront has long been neglected with little commercial development and fewer public spaces. EE&K architects of New York, in conjunction [...]
Forget the typical grass lawn. When I first got to Olympia, Washington I went on a rain garden tour led by a local environmental non-profit and noticed that many of the residents that had installed these gardens were also replacing their lawns with alternative, lower maintenance landscapes that hardly contained a blade of grass. These [...]
