Green wall, green house.

Some more found images:

...goats optional

from Winter Street Architects

I'm inspired by the colours of these wildflowers carpeting a city roof, a delightful hibridity of soft clothing for the urban hardscape; a colourful coat for a building. Gentle, beautiful.

These images from the USA, from Green Grid Roofs

All images found images.

Where is the city square?

Does the city work as a place where public life is engaging, active, interesting, sometimes exciting, sometimes reassuringly familiar and always full of the ritual of the everyday that makes us feel part of a place, that makes us feel connected to this community, our home?

We need shared public places to sit, to engage, to be together.

We need shared places to sleep, to skate, to party, to protest, to plant, to grow, to argue and to bump into each other, to read, relax, stretch, breathe, perform, observe, survey, shelter, retreat...

A community needs spaces that all members of the community can use, young and old, parent and business person, cafe owner and graffiti artist, busker and builder, painter and procrastinator alike. We have to have places where we can engage the conviviality, the discussion and debate that forms the public life of a city. These are things that happen in the public square.

If I ask myself how are the spaces in this town organised? then I cannot help but answer: apparently without thought. Albany is an unplanned city. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say it is an overly planned and controlled city which lacks any sense of vision. Often it feels in this place that one enjoys it despite the built environment, not because of it.

How can we engage in the reformation of this city as a machine for living? How can we create a shelter that nurtures our community?

We can begin by playing, by experimenting with form and space, by imagining the possible, by messing around with ideas...

...by beginning from where we are.

AEC greenroof

For those of you have averted your faces, maybe it's time to take a new look at the Albany Entertainment Centre:

Water Feature

Yay! another little garden! A water feature this time: a bird bath. This is another one of those gorgeous "inefficiencies" that I love so much: someone stepped on the plastic sheeting cleaning the gutters, and left this indentation. The birds love to bathe here. High and safe.
It appeals to me as a lovely notion that "nature" is about that which takes advantage of opportunities, of niches, of inefficiencies in design or maintenance...therefore suggesting that such inefficiency are a really beautiful thing to plan into design.

Bruce Mau: an incomplete manifesto for growth

#5 Go deep.

The deeper you go the more likely you are to find something of value.

#8 Drift.

Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgement. Postpone criticism.

http://www.ludosabato.com/mau/

Taking Down the Fences

Keith Bradby: And what next for us was to work with the farmers on the origins of the Landcare movement, work with the ecologists and the concerned members of the community on the biological values of this place and what it needs, and I'll be honest, that after 15 years of that, I think we'd achieved a lot, but nowhere near as much as we need to achieve. So we start searching for what is the next big lift that this landscape and society needs. And it is being able to think across a thousand or two kilometres and across a thousand or two years, to what is health in this landscape, what is vitality in this landscape. And it's a lot more than looking after rare species or propping up farms with a few belts of trees. It is stitching the health back together and it is bringing it, and its values and its needs into our culture. Gondwanalink is the vehicle that we think helps us do that here, and helps us appreciate both the need and the ability to do that nationally.

from the transcript to the radio program, Taking Down the Fences.


This image from http://www.gondwanalink.org/


A great show for encounter on ABC Radio National.
Gondwanalink, as most Albany people know, is an amazing programme to regrow a strip from Kalgoorlie to Margaret river, the brainchild of Keith Bradby.

What excites me about it is that taking down fences and reclaiming farm land demands a rethink of entire social, cultural and community systems. And it proposes using nature as the infrastrucure through which human interaction with the land is controlled.

Keith Bradby: ... Again, at the risk of sounding either arrogant or facetious or some other rude word, we have formally apologised as a nation to the Aboriginal people of Australia for shall we say both our mistakes and our intentional wrongs. And I don't think we have yet formally apologised to the country as a whole for our clumsiness and our mistakes and our intentional damage. And I think when you work on something like Gondwanalink and you say 'Look, over 1,000 kilometres we've ripped it asunder and broken the essential links', at some point you do have to apologise to the land or at least do those things which help atone for those wrongs.

2008_7-12% deviation

2008_pre-major

I just realised how this relates to small gardens: another type of public parkland.

_Oops, just realised those labels are back to front. The verge is of course the public parkland - for now, anyway.

2006_flower tower

taking down the fences

Keith Bradby: And what next for us was to work with the farmers on the origins of the Landcare movement, work with the ecologists and the concerned members of the community on the biological values of this place and what it needs, and I'll be honest, that after 15 years of that, I think we'd achieved a lot, but nowhere near as much as we need to achieve. So we start searching for what is the next big lift that this landscape and society needs. And it is being able to think across a thousand or two kilometres and across a thousand or two years, to what is health in this landscape, what is vitality in this landscape. And it's a lot more than looking after rare species or propping up farms with a few belts of trees. It is stitching the health back together and it is bringing it, and its values and its needs into our culture. Gondwanalink is the vehicle that we think helps us do that here, and helps us appreciate both the need and the ability to do that nationally.

from the transcript to the radio program, Taking Down the Fences.


This image from http://www.gondwanalink.org/


A great show for encounter on ABC Radio National.
Gondwanalink, as most Albany people know, is an amazing programme to regrow a strip from Kalgoorlie to Margaret river, the brainchild of Keith Bradby.

What excites me about it is that taking down fences and reclaiming farm land demands a rethink of entire social, cultural and community systems. And it proposes using nature as the infrastrucure through which human interaction with the land is controlled.

Keith Bradby: ... Again, at the risk of sounding either arrogant or facetious or some other rude word, we have formally apologised as a nation to the Aboriginal people of Australia for shall we say both our mistakes and our intentional wrongs. And I don't think we have yet formally apologised to the country as a whole for our clumsiness and our mistakes and our intentional damage. And I think when you work on something like Gondwanalink and you say 'Look, over 1,000 kilometres we've ripped it asunder and broken the essential links', at some point you do have to apologise to the land or at least do those things which help atone for those wrongs.

sustain 7

a collection point for ideas, processes, plans and actions to create a sustainable community in the south west of west australia, with an underlying principle that what we do will make a positive contribution to place in the year 2220: seven generations in the future.

what's the difference?

From: http://www.ufodigest.com/news/0508/images/versaille.jpg

Here's a little puzzle for you...what's the difference between the formalist garden at Versaille, and this little garden in Brunswick?

design a city

group exercise.

characteristics of moments from our everyday:

	DOG	Free roaming
	ROLLING CHAIR	Directed roaming
	GUMBOOT	Protective roaming
	TRAIN	Directed
	CUP	Delivery
	COMPUTER	Free roaming	Free roaming	Delivery
	DISHES	Cleanliness	Place
	AFTERNOONS	Chill time	Other time Own time	Sunny	Relaxed
	iPOD	Free roaming (not fixed)	Delivery	Transportation	identity
	JUMPER	Warmth	Wind protection
	TIN ROOF	Shelter	Phenomenological	Experiential	sound

Use these characteristics to design a city.

Afternoon: what are the material properties of an "afternoon" site?
Where would you put the afternoon?
If this is a plan of a street, then:


Put the afternoon on top of a hill so it gets lots of sunlight. Then the morning is down the bottom, so you don't have to walk so far, and the evening is on the south side, away from the sun, because there isn't any then. Move between the different times of day.
A localized delivery system at the bottom of the hill for internet access, might become a transfer station: cold water moving down hill might capture heat produced by an internet service provider hub, and use that warm water to...warm a green house: transfer of enegry from isp to growing plants. Localised energy production at these sites, related to needs for each part of the day.


Move between days of the week. A circle of hills is a city layout, so that you move gradually from one day to the next.
Hill Friday might have a longer profile to accomodate the larger number of people there, and the delevery systems needed to supply what constitutes Friday, like alcohol, comfy couches, dance music...

Transition Towns

Caught this guy, Andrew Lucas, talking on Bush telegraph this morning, about changing suburbs away from fossil fuel dependency, growing food locally, etc.

If you go to the end of the article and click on the listen to this link, you'll hear some really inspiring ideas.

http://www.foe.org.au/resources/audio-centre/2009-sustainability-convergence/m_Andrew_Lucas_Transition_Town.mp3/view

Kinjarling Walk Trails

I'm not in Albany, but I can't stop thinking about getting back and how great practicing there as an embedded landscape architect will be. My latest excitement came when Sarah Toa told me there are moves afoot to establish Kinjarling walking/story trails around Albany. I think "through" Albany. Lines that cut across York street, through the middle of Woollies, lines that walk you next to the war memorial on Mt Clarence...
How to show these on the ground? A bit of dirt where you least expect it, a section cut through the asphalt, a tiled pattern meandering past the deli counter that reminds you of a songline that still exists, and will still exist long after honey ham is no longer sold there.

Connect this image with parks and gardens breaking their boundaries and getting smeared across streets and through corners of buildings.

Maybe a paving type like this


in a 20m wide strip across York street, just at the cross walk:



Alison Hartman Gardens breaking free from her confining edge.

internialities

some thoughts going through my head tonight:


embedded practice_working directly in the community in which you are living
hold the whole system in the mind; is this future a system small enough to fit?

intensity_of settlement.
(what is a city?)
regarding settlement patterns as areas of intensity and dispersal how can we reconfigure our settlement patterns in a more effective, creative and sustainable way?
on a continuum most least intense dispersed
moments of intensity within boundaries which limit geographic spread.
boundaries in time, boundaries in space.
without boundaries, but within "zones" of intensity. i don't like that word here, sounds too geographically deterministic, but moments is too ephemeral. it is geographic, it is fixed in a place for a time, and it reflects temporal opportunities
refiguring the urban/rural binary as moments of intensity in a field of possibilities.

all to the purpose of allowing other species to flourish for their own sake.

maintenance is the most import pattern information we can use to define the use and uselessness of the landscape.

what is landfill but an opportunity for life, an intensity of potentials, millions of potential sites for organisms so flourish?