Globe Award 2010 – Leading Sustainability Awards Sustainable cities can be nominated for international award STOCKHOLM, NOVEMBER 23, 2009: Globe Awards will be presented for the fourth consecutive time at the annual gala at Nordiska Museet in Stockholm April 29th, 2010. The applications will be viewed in four categories: research, innovation, city and reporting. The [...]
I just followed a link to a beautiful musical creation. This is a very purple song to the core -- or maybe this way, produced by a mobile recording studio that spanned the globe -- maybe it's Turquoise??? The producer has recorded very talented buskers and a host of back-up musicians from around the world, [...]
Mayors need a framework appropriately complex to respond to the emergence of zoonotic diseases (ie. diseases that cross over from animal populations into human populations) (Sapient Circle, 2004). These threats make demands on emergency response systems that are not merely complicated, but are complex. This means that the interconnections of animal and human health systems, through diseases such as SARS, West Nile Disease, BSE, E-Coli and Avian Influenza, create exponential levels of complexity. It appears that zoonotic bio-emergencies are more dynamic and subject to sudden jumps in severity, than non-bio-emergencies, because the underlying viral/biological elements are capable of learning or adapting to their human environments/life conditions. Thus they require complex non-linear approaches to develop successful response strategies.
I've been watching the series on New York produced by Ric Burns (released through PBS but available as a DVD). It is an impressive revelation of the city's 400 years of history. Last week I watched the episode exploring the massive infrastructure creations of Robert Moses including his hundred of miles of turnpikes that decimated [...]
The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil is an intriguing film of an unintended case study. It chronicles the radical life condition change that was triggered in Cuba by the break up of the Soviet empire and Cuba’s loss of Soviet support, markets and imports in 1990-92. This was further exacerbated by the [...]
I've just listened to the Wisdom Radio interviews of Jim Garrison with Bill McKibben, (author of Deep Economy) and Lester Brown (author of Plan B 3.0). Both authors are talking about a decisive metric that has been scientifically confirmed (by IPCC and others) that creates a super-ordinate goal that cities need to subscribe to. It [...]
This article illustrates the twelve intelligences identified in Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive (Hamilton, 2008) through the work of architect Teddy Cruz. The author discusses Cruz’s socially responsible architectural practice in terms of each intelligence and demonstrates how he transcends and includes traditional, modern and post modern mindsets into an integral evolutionary paradigm.