Sustainable Everyday Practices

Interboro Partners: In the Meantime, Life With Landbanking

via www.interboropartners.net

Supporting bottom-up commerce within post-consumerist dead assets.

Livable Neighborhoods Program – The Municipal Art Society of New York

MAS hosts the Livable Neighborhoods Training at least two times a year. The full training is held in the spring, while a half-day training is held in the fall. If you’d like information on targeted or advanced trainings, please contact Joel Kolkmann, Project Manager, Policy and Advocacy at jkolkmann@mas.org.

via mas.org

Some commonalities with the toolkit concept!

Participatory Urban Planning: Crafting Democratic Cities in the Digital Age - GreenspaceNYC (New York, NY) - Meetup

A discussion on participatory urban planning through digital connectivity. Our project clearly fits, though it's looking alternately at participatory suburban re-planning or even 'suburban hacking'...

Join us on May 9th for an interactive panel discussion about the role of citizens, urban planners, and technology in the shaping of cities, lead by Urban Planner, Designer and Educator - Mike Ernst.

Doors upon at 5:30 pm.

Today, more people worldwide live in cities than not. The need to make smart, well-informed decisions about how and where people live, work and play is more important than ever. As technology develops at a rapid pace, allowing decision-makers to have access to more information than ever before, inequality can limit the voice of those without digital access.

Join us in a discussion about participatory urban planning: how do we shape our built environment in ways that are democratic, sustainable, and equitable? What are the technologies out there that can allows us to make better-informed decisions, and what the barriers to their use? How do we make cities that are both economically robust and inclusive?

Also see this summary: http://www.greenspacenyc.org/blog/detail/participatory_urbanism

via www.meetup.com

How Mobile Technologies Are Shaping a New Generation - Tammy Erickson - Harvard Business Review

The cohort I like to call the "Re-Generation" began to take shape around 2008. Individuals at the formative ages of 11 to 13, those born after about 1995, were part of a substantively different world than the one that had shaped 11 to 13 year olds over the preceding fifteen or so years. In an earlier post, I discussed the impact the Global Financial Crisis had on the formation of this new generation.

...

Two-thirds of 4- to 7-year-olds have used an iPhone or iPod

6% of 2- to 5-year-olds have their own smartphone

50% of 11 year olds have own cell phone

10% of households with children aged 6-12 have iPads (compared with only 3% of other households); 35% of these households with young children plan to buy some brand of tablet computer in the next year

72% of the 100 top-selling education apps in Apple's iTunes App store this year were aimed at preschoolers and those in elementary school

One of the first products aimed at putting an iPhone into a baby's hands (Fisher-Price's oversize case, providing coverage against drools and tantrums, while doubling as a rattle), rapidly sold out on Amazon; the three apps designed for the case have been downloaded more than 700,000 times

via blogs.hbr.org

BC's Transportation Transformation

via vimeo.com

Social Networks Goad Greenies Into Good Behavior – ecomagination

“Understanding the full context of one’s action—that actually is the motivating factor. Day to day, I think all of us want to feel we’re part of something bigger.”

via www.ecomagination.com

136 million - 96%

Green Parking Council - About Us

Green Parking Council panel May 2

via www.greenparkingcouncil.org

May 18 talk- Connecting the Dots: Future Housing Development in Post-recession America

Friday, May 18th, 2012
Baruch College Conference Center
151 E. 25th Street, 7th Floor, New York, NY
9:30 am - Breakfast & registration
10:00 am - Seminar

According to trends, many of which began before the financial crisis, the public is increasingly demanding more walkable, community-oriented, and diverse residential areas. However, any distaste for car-dependent development does not directly translate into demand for high-density, mixed-use, and downtown-type living environments. Moreover, most of the supply-side constraints still favor suburban, car-dependent development.

This presentation will argue that the US housing market will increasingly focus on the infill, retrofit, and redevelopment of inner suburbs and neighborhoods, where the new demand for walkability and urban amenities can be better combined with the latent demand for single family homes, while at the same time being less likely to encounter opposition by local officials, homebuilders, and current neighbors. This new form of development, which we call 'Pedestrian-oriented development', or POD, will constitute the largest opportunity to shift the pendulum back towards higher densities and more responsible urban forms and to prepare urban areas for high-capacity transit service in the future.

via utrc2.org

Talk this Friday morning: Wider economic benefits of transport investment and the role of agglomeration economies

Friday, April 27th, 2012
Baruch College Conference Center
151 E. 25th Street, 7th Floor, New York, NY
9:30 am - Breakfast & registration
10:00 am - Seminar

Speaker Daniel Graham Reader in Transport Economics and Statistics, Imperial College London

Dan Graham is Reader in Transport Economics and Statistics in the Centre for Transport Studies at Imperial College London. He specialises in the statistical modelling of transport systems. His main research themes are concerned with the implications of transport investment for productivity and economic growth; modelling efficiency in public transport provision; and with the wider consequences of travel demand patterns particularly in relation to safety, congestion, and environmental impacts. His modelling of the impacts of accessibility on the real economy forms the basis for the assessment of wider economic impacts in transport appraisal internationally. He is currently engaged in projects on Bayesian inference for road traffic accident prediction, mixed model propensity score approaches for causal inference, and semiparametric double robust estimation for continuous treatment effects.

Dr Graham also holds the post of Research Director of the Railway and Transport Strategy Centre (RTSC), a research group incorporating 15 full-time staff members at Imperial College. He teaches Masters courses in Statistics for Advanced Transport Modelling and Microeconomic Theory. Dr Graham provides advice to UK government departments, including the Department for Transport and the Treasury and was appointed Specialist Advisor to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Transport.

This talk will provide an overview of the measurement of wider economic impacts in transport appraisal focusing in particular on the role of agglomeration economies. It will describe how agglomeration effects can be estimated and included within a standard Benefit Cost Analysis framework to assess the productivity benefits of investment. Examples from around the world will be used to illustrate the potential significance of agglomeration externalities. The talk will discuss limitation of the existing approach, particularly in relation to econometric modelling, and will suggest future areas for research.

via utrc2.org