An image from an ad that caught my eye… human systems

Kent Larson: ‘Brilliant designs to fit more people in every city’

From TED Talks via YouTube:

How can we fit more people into cities without overcrowding? Kent Larson shows off folding cars, quick-change apartments and other innovations that could make the city of the future work a lot like a small village of the past.

Resilient Communities: ‘Brixton in Transition’ (Video)

From Al Jazeera English:

In the last part of earthrise’s economics special, Russell Beard travels to the inner-London neighbourhood of Brixton to meet a community trialling an alternative economic model - one that values people and planet, as well as profit. Brixton is part of the growing Transition Town movement - a worldwide network of people who are re-shaping their local economies to cut carbon emissions and build stronger communities.

Residents have started a local currency - the largest in the UK - to stimulate sustainable, local production and help make their economy more resilient to financial shocks. The Brixton Pound can only be spent with independent businesses in the area and is now accepted in around 200 outlets.

They have also begun to generate their own energy through the UK’s first inner-city renewable energy co-operative. So far Brixton Energy has installed 152 solar panels on the roof of a council estate, funded by over 100 local people. Profits from the electricity generation are shared between investors and a community energy efficiency fund for residents of the estate.

Check out the rest of the article here.

Related:

• ‘Planting the Seedstock, Vancouver’s New Currency’ (The Tyee)

A quote from the FT article, ‘The app of life’.

(Image credit: FT) 

From The New York Times:

Suppose you don’t need your car today. And suppose, as it happens, that a stranger in your area does need a car. Would you be willing to rent yours out?

Several car-sharing start-ups, including Getaround, RelayRides and JustShareIt are eager to connect car owners with renters this way. The companies use different formulas, but participating owners receive, generally speaking, about two-thirds of the rental proceeds. RelayRides says an owner of a midsize, late-model sedan who rents out a car for 10 hours a week could expect to clear about $3,000 a year.

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The newer start-ups say peer-to-peer sharing is an environmentally friendlier option because it allows an existing car to be used more fully. 

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Car sharing is just one form of “collaborative consumption,” the clunky catchphrase that encompasses Airbnb’s space sharing and is commonly used to suggest an ideological or moral imperative to share more things. Who knows? In the future, car sharing may become so accepted that we can eventually return to that bygone age when licensed drivers actually outnumbered licensed vehicles.

Check out the rest of the article here. You can also check out an animated infographic about car sharing here.

(Image credit: New York Times)

Changing Paradigms: New vs. Old Thinking

Last week I went to a talk on “leadership and creating a sustainable future” out at UBC’s brand new and ultra green Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability. (I’ll post some shots of the building in another post).

Above is a slide from Göran Carstedt’s presentation highlighting the “new logic” central to creating large-scale, transformational change. If it’s the type of thing that floats your boat check out his 2010 TEDxAthens talk, which covers much of the same territory. 

Urbanization: ‘Thinking Cities, Networked Society’

From Ericsson via YouTube: 

The documentary ‘Thinking Cities’ deals with one of the most dramatic societal trends happening today: urbanization. The world population is expected to soar to more than 9 billion people by 2050, with roughly 70 percent living in cities. At the same time, information communications technology (ICT) is extending its reach.

These parallel trends are intersecting at a time in which the world faces serious economic, environmental, and social challenges in achieving a more sustainable development. Thinking Cities explores the challenges and opportunities of urbanization in the Networked Society.

More here.

(‘The World at 7 Billion - Urbanization’ Infographic’: Reuters)

A  Presentation from the 2011 Eco-City World Summit: ‘Networked Urban Sustainability: Breaking the Integration Barrier’

Here is a presentation from urban sustainability researcher and planner Alex Aylett at the 2011 Eco-City World Summit. On his blog, he explains that:

This presentation is something I put together for a general audience. It’s jargon free, and aims to get across a few key points that have emerged in my research over the past four years.

It all centers around one question: “How  can we go from small scale changes in  urban processes, to large scale sustainability shifts that take place across a city as a whole.”

Check out more on his blog or over at Sustainable Cities.

A Fascinating Talk: Geoffrey West on ‘Why Cities Grow, Corporations Die, and Life Gets Faster’

From the Long Now Foundation: 

As organisms, cities, and companies scale up, they all gain in efficiency, but then they vary. The bigger an organism, the slower. Yet the bigger a city is, the faster it runs. And cities are structurally immortal, while corporations are structurally doomed. Scaling up always creates new problems; cities can innovate faster than the problems indefinitely, while corporations cannot.

These revolutionary findings come from Geoffrey West’s examination of vast quantities of data on the metabolic/economic behavior of organisms and organizations. A theoretical physicist, West was president of Santa Fe Institute from 2005 to 2009 and founded the high energy physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory.