All Posts Tagged With: "green urban planning"

Living almost anywhere you’re probably familiar with at least one or two abandoned buildings, left unattended for years and years. Here in Baltimore you can scan whole blocks of vacancies. These sore-spots have become the inspiration for small and large efforts to revitalize some of the staggering 40,000 vacant homes and abandoned lots through innovation, idea building and conversation. One such project called Baltimore Infill Survey has just sent me a notification by email this morning. Their idea is, if you had it your way, what would you do with an abandoned lot or vacant space? This project originally came out of an idea which was presented at the 2008 Bioneers Conference this past November. Organized as a breakout session called Urban Economic Development and Visionary Green Design and Development, the project brought together architects, developers and urban critics. They came up with a pre-fab building concept called The Plant which would serve energy needs of the surrounding residents, within a mile radius. Read more about what I wrote in November here or here at Urban Palimpsest.

Make your claim and join the project . Really, what would you do!??

It was an exciting weekend at the 2008 Baltimore Bioneers Conference, held at the Maryland Institute Collage of Art. Julie and I were able to screen our video first thing Friday morning to open the event. A short 8 min. animated slide presentation of the transition from some of the issues Baltimore faces, socially and environmentally, as a post industrial city, combined with inspiring solutions that are cropping up all over town. I’d like to thank everyone for the positive response and we hope to upload a version to the website as soon as we can.
Some personal highlights from the conference came from a keynote by mycologist and author Paul Stamets, and two breakout sessions on Urban Agriculture as Urban Economic Development and Visionary Green Design and Development.

Read more about each one… Continued