China Sunergy Announces 22-MW Deal with Solarwatt AG
December 30th, 2008 Posted in Green News | Comments Off China Sunergy Co. Ltd. announced that it has entered into an agreement with Solarwatt AG, to provide 22 megawatts (MW) of solar cells over the course of 2009.On the trail of Dell’s carbon footprint
December 30th, 2008 Posted in Green News | Comments OffThis was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.
Dell has declared itself carbon-neutral, but good luck defining and auditing what that means exactly.
Assembling PCs at Dell's Hortolandia, Brazil, facility.
(Credit: Dell)The Wall Street Journal has an interesting story on Dell and its carbon-neutral efforts. ...
Mapping: Infrastructure and Flow
December 30th, 2008 Posted in Big Systems - Global Institutions, Governance and Histo, Green News | Comments Off
I love airline route maps. I’ve fallen asleep staring at the tangle of possible journeys so often that I sometimes confuse the capillaries I see with my eyes closed with the red paths of Northwest flights hubbed out of Detroit and Minneapolis. I love the questions the maps raise: why is there a direct flight on Air Canada from Halifax to Fort McMurray in Northern Alberta? (Lots of Nova workers in the oil sands, I suspect, but I never would have asked the question without the map.) Why is Chengdu such an important Chinese air hub? Why does MIAT (Mongolia’s airline, affectionately known as “maybe I’ll arrive tomorrow” by regular customers) fly to Berlin, and no other western European cities? Does a direct Air Madagascar flight to Milan imply a strong Italian-Malagasy connection, or was Malpensa just one of the few airports where they could buy a landing slot?
These maps are deceptive in a way. They let you know what’s possible, but not what actually happens. The Northwest map will show you flights from Detroit to both Albany and Bozeman. While it’s good to know that it’s possible to get between those cities by flying Northwest, it doesn’t tell you how easy or difficult it might be to make that trip, how often those flights run, or how many people choose to make that trip. That’s okay - the job of maps is to tell a traveler where she can go, not where other travelers choose to go. But trying to extrapolate too much from a map of infrastructure may be a mistake - is the Ulaanbataar/Berlin link the sign of close governmental and trade ties between Mongolia and Berlin? Or an accident of history, airport capacity or other factors?
This lovely video gives a different picture from the route maps. It’s a simulation of global air traffic from the fine folks at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. The map uses data from Flightstats.com, and overlays their position on a Miller cylindrical projection. Compared to some of the other flight data porn the folks at ZHAW have churned out - like their amazing Radar mashup of flights over Zurich, using live transponder data from aircraft - this was a pretty simple hack.
I’ve watched the video half a dozen times today, getting different insights each time. Popular routes become apparent - the arc of travel from the Northeastern US to London, Paris and Amsterdam runs west to east as night falls, and reverses as morning breaks. The popularity of that ocean crossing vastly outpaces traffic across the Pacific, connecting Tokyo, Manila and Beijing to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. There’s more traffic from Brazil to western Europe than I would have guessed, and virtually no traffic across the southern Atlantic or Pacific. Domestic traffic in the US, India and China, and intra-EU travel is vastly more common than trans-oceanic travel. As the US is covered with yellow dots representing airplanes, international travel looks like a rounding error in comparison to domestic flights.
It’s not a map you’d want to use in planning your vacation, perhaps, but it would be a useful one to turn to if you were tracking the spread of an epidemic, for instance. If you’re studying SARS, it’s useful to know that you can, theoretically, get from Guangdong to Johannesburg - it’s lots more useful to know that most of those travellers are heading to Hong Kong, Toronto and New York City.
It’s a map of flow, not of infrastructure. It reveals infrastructure - the location of airports, the preferred air routes followed - because they appear as bright spots, places where lots of flow originates. A map of infrastructure - a map of potentials - shows every airport as co-equal; a map of flow shows you which airports are heavily used, which are pivotal nodes in a network. If you’re an executive at a fast food company, an infrastructure map of highways is moderately helpful - it’s obviously wise to place your stores in places where drivers could theoretically reach them, rather than in the middle of a desert. (No one told Pacific Bell this, obviously, before they erected the legendary Mojave Phone Booth.) But a map of flow is what you really need, showing where drivers are likely to go, and where they’re likely to come purchase your grease-laden wares.
It’s hard to map flow. Infrastructure tends to stay put. But people, cars, and shipping containers move all the time. To build accurate maps, you can’t simply plot the location of an airport once - you’ve got to map each plane that flies during some period of time. Things that don’t stay put aren’t always happy about being mapped. In simplest terms, maps of flow are a form of surveillance. Mapping your personal “flow” - in the way that the BBC is tracking a shipping container around the world - would likely be a gross violation of your privacy, as it would probably reveal more about you than you’re strictly comfortable sharing.
My friends Sandy Pentland and Nathan Eagle have been experimenting with something Pentland is calling “reality mining“, using surveillance of individuals via their mobile phones to extrapolate information about social networks, individual health and events in the news. Eagle tells me that the system was so effective, it could determine which of the anonymous participants were dating, and was able to correlate behavior to events like the Red Sox World Series victory, during which cellphone users clustered in bars and crossed the river to celebrate near Fenway. Unsurprisingly, a lot of sponsors are interested in this research, including mobile phone companies and advertisers - it’s not unrealistic to believe that mobile phone companies might, at some point, offer you free basic phone service in exchange for your behavioral data (collected by tracking your phone) and the opportunity to target ads to you based on your location. (See Blyk, a free mobile phone service in the UK, targetted to young people and ad sponsored…)
The maps Pentland and others are making tend to make us the most nervous when we place ourselves in them as individuals. We wonder what a map of our actions will tell others. We’re generally more comfortable with them in aggregate. Leaving the Berkman Center, I look at Google Maps to see whether the traffic heading west on Route 2 or I-90 is lighter. This is a useful thing and I’m very glad that someone is monitoring road conditions and letting me make intelligent decisions about which way to drive. On some level, I realize that my beat-up black truck is part of the overall picture represented as a green, yellow or red line. But that map generally doesn’t make me uneasy in the way that a map that allowed you to click on it and see “1999 Toyota Tacoma, 27 mph, heading west on Massachusetts Ave, MA license plate 345 GDF”. The former reads to me as mapping of flow, the latter as surveillance, but it’s not entirely clear to me where the line should be drawn between the two ideas.
The map above is called “In Transit” and is part of the Cabspotting program run by the Exploratorium, using data from Yellow Cab and visualisations by the folks at Stamen Design. All yellow cabs in San Francisco are equipped with GPS and report their location to dispatchers, automatically, once a minute - they’re being surveilled so that dispatchers can respond to requests for cabs or deploy cabs to another part of town. In this visualization, those minute-by-minute accretion of data points are blurred into lines, showing the paths that cabs take. And these paths can reveal some interesting things about how people flow through the city of San Francisco.
Those who know San Francisco will immediately pick out the major highways - 101, 280 and 80 - and the paths across the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate. It’s not hard to intuit where downtown is, to get a sense for the comparative popularity of various routes in and out of the city. The blank spots, on the other hand, are a little confusing. The area near #5 on the map is the Presidio, a former military base that’s now a park… which helps explain why there’s not much cab traffic through it. The areas just south of #4 and #7 aren’t parks - they’re Potrero Hill and Dogpatch, neighborhoods that are better known for industry and low-income housing than for tourist attractions or dot.com startups. To their southeast is a large blank patch on the map: Bayview and Hunter’s Point, a predominantly African-American neighborhood that surrounds a former naval shipyard. In other words, some areas are blank because there’s no good way to drive a taxi there. In other cases, they’re the neighborhoods where few people call for a taxi… or where the taxi drivers aren’t willing to go. The street map helps you figure out how to get from 3rd Street and Evans Avenue to Union Square, while the flow map makes it clear that you probably shouldn’t count on hailing a taxi to make the trip.
Maps of infrastructure visualize what it’s possible for people to do. Maps of flow show what they actually do. The two may diverge sharply.
A few years ago, if you wanted to send an email to a friend across the street in Accra, there’s a good chance the message would travel through the US or the UK on the way. Ghana had several competing internet service providers, and each provider bought internet connectivity from a different vendor. The vendors’ networks connected, just not in Ghana. So sending email across town meant sending a message on one ISP, to the US, transferring over to the other ISP, and back to Ghana, a journey that involved two satellite hops to cross the Atlantic. This is called “trombone routing”, and it’s generally something to be avoided.
If you mapped the network traffic of Ghanaian internet users - the flow - it sure looked like they were sending a lot of bits to and from the US. This might have been a result of trombone routing of emails between Ghanaians. Or it might have been because many websites are hosted in the US, and Ghanaian users wanted to read cnn.com, espn.com, etc. Knowing which it was mattered - if lots of traffic was local, it would make sense to construct an Internet Exchange Point (IXP), a crossing point for local ISPs to exchange traffic. If it was mostly requests to US webservers, the IXP wouldn’t save much money and probably shouldn’t be built. An infrastructure map would be no help - almost all traffic needed to go through the US, even if the intent was to communicate locally. To build a map of flow, Ghanaian ISPs would need to monitor their traffic, distinguish between domestic and foreign requests, share this information with fellow ISPs and make a decision regarding the utility of an IXP.
Ghanaian ISPs made the decision to build the Ghana Internet Exchange not based on understanding their own flow, but by looking at the behavior of other African exchange points. When ISPs in Johannesburg started exchanging traffic directly, they discovered that roughly 50% of their traffic was local to South Africa. The administrators who set up an exchange point in Nairobi saw roughly 25-30% local traffic. The disparity? There’s a lot more web servers hosted in South Africa than in Kenya, and hence more local traffic. To make the decision to build an IXP on a rational basis, you need to know not just the flow of internet traffic, but the flow the traffic would take if it were routed via an IXP. You need to know not just what users are doing, but what their intention is. This is a tough enough mapping challenge that you end up guessing, not analyzing.
The distinction between maps of infrastructure and maps of flow matters to me because I think it can help explain certain misconceptions and misunderstandings about our connected world. My contention - with very little to support it, frankly - is that we tend to assume more connections than actually exist. We see a map of infrastructure that shows it’s possible to fly from Antananarivo to Albania and assume, on an unconcious level, that the connection is routine, frequent, common. We look at maps of the internet - a near-worldwide tangle of undersea cables - and assume that data flows everywhere, connecting every one of us.
A map of flow would help us understand a more complicated reality. You can fly from Antananarivo to Albania, but you might be the only person this year to make the trip. Traffic flows between Ghana and the US via the Internet. We can see a cable - SAT-3 - that connects West Africa to the global internet through Europe and India. A map of flow could tell us whether that connection is symmetric, whether Americans are looking for information from Ghanaweb as often as Ghanaians are looking at ESPN or CNN. If we could see flow, we might detect the dark spots, the places reached by infrastructure but disconnected - through language, economics, or force of habit - from global flows.
This piece originally appeared on Ethan Zuckerman's personal blog, My Heart's In Accra.Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!
(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Big Systems - Global Institutions, Governance and History at 8:35 AM)
Year in Review 2008: Best in Business
December 30th, 2008 Posted in Features, Green News | Comments Off
As we look forward to the new year, we've also reflected on the old, and rediscovered some of the great events, innovations, interviews and debates that 2008 had to offer. For the next week, we will be sharing our picks from the Worldchanging team's best work from the last 12 months. Come back each day for a new collection of posts on topics from climate change to transportation, energy to health and society.
Today's Topic: Business
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In 2008, we saw more businesses than ever before asking how they could improve their bottom lines while decreasing their negative environmental and social impacts. Companies producing everything from automobiles to iPhones are reassessing their business models as sustainability continues to prove itself as the new shrewd tactic for making business better, improving the lives of millions around the world, and building a better future where companies can thrive. And as smart entrepreneurs search for this elusive balance, the way the world does business will be forever changed. Below is a collection of our best posts on business from 2008:
Nau: An Elegy
By Alex Steffen
May 2, 2008
"B" is for Beneficial: The B Corporation
By Sarah Kuck
May 22, 2008
Proudly Made in China: NEST Collective
By Erica Lee Schlaikjer
May 25, 2008
Missing the Market Meltdown
By Amory B. Lovins
May 30, 2008
From Sampling to Monitoring to Gulping Data Down in Great Big Chunks
By Alex Steffen
June 9, 2008
The Problem with Big Green
By Alex Steffen and Julia Levitt
June 24, 2008
Interview: Kavita Ramdas, Global Fund for Women
By Britt Bravo
July 2, 2008
The iPhone, Now in Green(er)
By Nancy Scola
July 25, 2008
Could Globalization Be Going In Reverse?
By Alex Steffen
August 4, 2008
PIG 05049, a Conversation with Christien Meindertsma
By Regine DeBatty
August 12, 2008
Alternative Trade Networks and the Coffee System
By John Thackara
August 12, 2008
Advance Market Commitments: Bringing Medicines to Developing Nations
By Lori Williams
November 11, 2008
Is 'The Old Economy of Car Dependence' Over?
By David Goldberg
November 14, 2008
This piece is part of our Year in Review series. Use the following links to view more of our favorites from 2008:
Best in Climate Change
Best in Cities
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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Features at 7:08 AM)
University of Michigan & Fraunhofer Researching Energy Innovations for Transportation
December 29th, 2008 Posted in Green News | Comments Off A new program undertaken by the University of Michigan (U-M) and Franuhofer will award seed money grants of up to US $200,000 annually for two years to projects that explore alternative energy innovations for transportation.SunRun & OCR Introduce New Rooftop Solar System
December 29th, 2008 Posted in Green News | Comments Off SunRun and OCR Solar & Roofing announced a new partnership that will expand solar service and bring roof-integrated solar electric systems to more homeowners throughout Northern California. OCR is SunRun's first partner to specialize in roof-integrated solar applications. Through this partnership, OCR will now offer its residential customers SunRun's full-service solutions in conjunction with its roof integrated solar panels.Solar Works & SolarWrights Complete Integration: Now Called Alteris
December 29th, 2008 Posted in Green News | Comments Off Solar Works Inc. and SolarWrights Inc. announced the new name of their united enterprise: Alteris Renewables Inc. The name change is intended to better convey the company's expanded offering of renewable energy solutions that include solar electric, solar thermal and wind energy systems, the company said.2008 Wrap-up: What Will A Financially Disastrous Year Mean for Renewables?
December 29th, 2008 Posted in Green News | Comments Off This year was dominated by bad financial news – very bad financial news. Renewables have certainly had their fair share of troubles associated with the financial crisis; yet somehow they've seemed to fare better than most industries. It's still uncertain how a financial hangover will impact development in 2009, but most analysts agree that any global slowdown will be moderate, especially considering how drastic and far-reaching the credit crisis has been thus far.Lazy Dystopias
December 29th, 2008 Posted in Green News, Imagining the Future | Comments Off
Recently, I've been buried in a bumper crop of lazy dystopias.
Now, I'm not against dystopian fiction as a means of social critique. Not at all. I think showing how present intentions may come to grief is necessary art. Not every creative act needs to embrace the politics of optimism.
But I am bored by imaginings of collapse that follow tired patterns. I am even more bored by futures that refuse even to invent a new visual aesthetic.
Just to pick (no doubt unjustly) on one example:
Why is the dystopian future always literally dark? Why is it always raining or overcast? Why is the architecture always a mix of hyper-modernism, brutalism and squatter slum? Why is the politics always so transparently totalitarian, so fascist-plus-rebels? Why is it so retro and abstract?
Why doesn't the dystopian vision ever include sunshine and children playing in its ruins? Why does it not include the constant, untiring efforts of most people to do what they can with what they have to improve their situations? Why are most people in the dystopian future always powerless to change anything? I could go on, but you get the point.
The biggest problem with dystopian fiction is not its pessimism. I do think there's a serious issue about who's interests are best served by making people fear the future, but I think the biggest problem with most dystopian fiction is its laziness and derivative quality. Lazy futures act like visionary static, crackling and dirtying the signal-to-noise ratio, making it harder not only for truly insightful futures to be found, but corrupting the ability of normal people to see why those visions are worth understanding.
Better by far to not envision the future at all, than to make a lazy dystopia.
Give us the new stuff!
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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Imagining the Future at 9:02 PM)
The Street as Platform
December 29th, 2008 Posted in Green News, Leapfrogging | Comments Off
I realize now that I've been delinquent in recommending Dan Hill's truly excellent speculative essay The Street as Platform, which explores a cross-section of all the ways that urban environments have become suffused with data. It's one of maybe 25 things I read this year that actually changed the way I see things in daily life:
We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street....[T]his is all everyday technology - embedded in, propped up against, or moving through the street, carried by people and vehicles, and installed by private companies and public bodies. Each element of data causes waves of responses in other connected databases, sometimes interacting with each other physically through proximity, other times through semantic connections across complex databases, sometimes in real-time, sometimes causing ripples months later. Some data is proprietary, enclosed and privately managed, some is open, collaborative and public.
Those who are paying attention already know that the information richness of urban environments is already changing what's possible within them, even spurring new forms of entirely urban innovation. I can see no reason why this trend will not accelerate, and very few reasons why it might decelerate.
I think the implications for sustainability and social innovation could be profound.
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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Leapfrogging at 7:45 PM)
What if Climate Change is Not an Energy Problem?
December 29th, 2008 Posted in Columns, Green News | Comments Off
Here's a thought I've been kicking around, and I'd like your ideas. What if, contrary to conventional wisdom, climate change is not actually primarily an energy problem, and by thinking of it as an energy problem, we risk making huge mistakes in the coming years?
What do I mean by energy problem? A problem caused by our choice of energy sources.
Given that a large percentage of greenhouse gasses comes from the burning of fossil fuels, it seems odd to contend that climate change is not a problem created by our energy choices. Certainly, no one with any credibility denies that coal, oil and gas use is changing the climate, and I don't mean to suggest that at all (though it is also worth not losing sight of the considerable emissions that come from farming, forestry, the chemical industries and other sources).
What I mean is that when we look to address the central challenge presented by climate change -- creating widespread prosperity while lowering, and then eliminating, emissions -- changing energy sources might play a much less important role than we've been trained to think. The kind of energy we use, in other words, while important, may not be anywhere near as important as three other considerations: whether we use the energy we create at all; how we use it; and how we live.
Whether we use the energy we generate: much of the energy we generate is wasted in the process of generation or transmission (56.2%, here in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration). As I understand it, by wasted we don't mean that it's used, but not used effectively. We mean that it is not used at all. It is the current dumped into the ground by power plants whose generation exceeds demand and other generated energy that accomplishes no task.
Based on what I've been told and read, much of that systemic waste is an attribute of badly-designed big systems, and could be eliminated through a variety of different new approaches, from smart grids to more efficient turbines to the harvesting of waste heat in industrial processes. As I understand it, no system can be perfectly effective at eliminating wasted energy, but if we managed to slash energy waste in half -- all other things being equal -- it'd be like eliminating roughly 25% of our energy-related emissions.
How we use energy -- what I've heard described as energy efficiency at end use -- is equally important. Amory Lovins has consistently pointed out the myriad ways in which our current uses of energy are extremely inefficient. We all know about the energy savings of a compact fluorescent lightbulb over an old-fashioned incandescent light bulb. Well, on a metaphorical level, our society (especially here in the U.S.) is nothing but old-fashioned light bulbs, nothing but opportunities for improvement. As has been pointed out again and again, not only are large energy savings immediately possible, but many of these energy savings pay for themselves or already profitable, while many others would become profitable with even moderate carbon pricing and/or green tax shifting.
How we live may be the biggest nut to crack. As we've discussed before, where we live has more to do with the amount of energy we use -- and the amount of energy we could save -- than almost any other factor. We can save huge amounts of energy by stopping sprawl; encouraging smart growth, good design and transit; using density to promote green building and green infrastructure; and emphasizing a prosperity based on experiences rather than stuff and product-services rather than products. These are steps that eliminate the need to use energy in the first place, while delivering the same or better quality of life. To extend our light bulb metaphor, it's like not needing to turn on a light in the first place, because you have a window through which sunlight is streaming.
In fact, if what we're committed to is prosperity, rather than a particular suburban SUV-and-McMansion vision of wealth (I, at least, am convinced that vision is a doomed project over the medium-term no matter what path we take), then a big shift towards bright green living might be possible even with only modest shifts in the sources of energy -- if the shifts in the uses of energy were large enough. A radically more-efficient society of compact communities with a variety of transportation choices, green buildings and smart infrastructure, run off an only slightly-improved mix of energy sources might be more sustainable than a society that continues on our current path of increasing sprawl and waste but uses twice the proportion of clean energy that it does today.
Obviously, we want both. We want renewable, low-carbon energy fueling a compact and efficient society. But attempting to meet the increasing energy demands of an essentially unchanged (and rapidly spreading) vision of suburban prosperity (whether in suburban Atlanta, suburban London or suburban Shanghai) through the provision of more and more and more clean energy seems pretty much guaranteed to fail. And in a society with limited resources and attention, pushing a strategy based primarily on clean energy may in fact reduce our ability to go after other, more important systemic solutions. (For instance, here in America, I would rather see a national smart growth agenda than a national clean energy subsidy.)
So maybe it's time to stop calling climate change an energy problem?
What do you think?
(Image: K2D2vaca, Creative Commons.)
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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Columns at 2:57 PM)
Green tech year in preview
December 29th, 2008 Posted in Green News | Comments OffHow bright is the future for green technologies in the coming year? On the whole, the picture appears positive but still susceptible to swings in energy prices and political sentiment.
With an incoming administration that intends to spearhead a comprehensive energy policy and reduce carbon emissions, many expect to have ...
Headlines from Worldchanging Seattle (12/29/08)
December 29th, 2008 Posted in About Worldchanging, Green News | Comments Off
The recent snowfall here in Seattle, and its impact on all of the city's neighborhoods, has helped us see many of the things we take for granted in new ways. It's easier, for example, to imagine no cars when there are barely any in sight, letting pedestrians and people using alternative forms of transportation (like snowshoes, toboggans and cross-country skis!) own the roads for a few days. In addition to speculating on the snow, we've seen some new developments in sustainable building design, innovative use in public space, and more. Though our Seattle staff is out of the office for most of this week, here's a roundup of the recent work that has appeared on our local Seattle blog that we hope you'll enjoy:
Eco-Laboratory
As Justus Stewart puts it, we now live in an era where the
"living building" level of green building should be the norm. A team of exceptional young designers here in Seattle is pushing this vision with an award-winning concept.
Incentive Zoning: A Good Plan For Affordable Housing?
There's been a lot of buzz in the news recently about the City of Seattle's draft incentive zoning code provisions, a piece of legislation designed to promote the creation of affordable housing. Here's how it works…
Snowbound Community Building
The break in routine was also enough to help envision a different kind of downtown, where most of the noise in the air comes from people, and where crowds walking down the street are the norm.
Local Business Profile: Lighting Design Lab
Jennifer Power sits down with Jeff Robbins, lighting specialist, to find out more about the history and goals behind this energy-savvy Seattle lighting resource.
Burien/Interim Art Space
On January 24, Burien will unveil a project that transforms a vacant construction site into a public gathering place for community members of all ages. Ashley DeForest reports.
Alex Steffen to Ron Sims: The Viaduct and the Seawall
To support the surface/transit option and to underline the key reasons for repairing and enhancing the seawall, Worldchanging Executive Editor Alex Steffen sent the following letter to King County Executive Ron Sims.
Are you here in Seattle? We'd like to hear from you! Check out the local blog and leave comments, or contact editor[at]Worldchanging[dot]com if you have ideas or would like to write.
Photo credit: Photo credit: flickr/arycogre, Creative Commons license.
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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 8:37 AM)
Year in Review 2008: Best in Cities
December 29th, 2008 Posted in Features, Green News | Comments Off
As we look forward to the new year, we've also reflected on the old, and rediscovered some of the great events, innovations, interviews and debates that 2008 had to offer. For the next week, we will be sharing our picks from the Worldchanging team's best work from the last 12 months. Come back each day for a new collection of posts on topics from climate change to transportation, energy to health and society.
Today's Topic: Cities
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By enabling solutions like bus rapid transit, district heating and product service systems, the dense, compact communities found in cities allow us to pool our resources and work together to collectively improve our quality of life. In the past year, we saw lots of new solutions for making cities even better with the help of inventions that help us live well while living close together. Below is a collection of our best posts on cities from 2008:
Design and the Elastic Mind
By Matthew Waxman
April 14, 2008
Highlights from the 7th EcoCity World Summit
By Holly Pearson
April 28, 2008
Cities of the Future, Today
By Alex Steffen
May 2, 2008
Unclogging the Water and Sanitation Crisis
By Robert Katz
May 5, 2008
BIMstorm: Honing Bureaucracy, Giving Urbanism an Edge
By Justus Stewart
May 6, 2008
Recovery Parks, Free Geeks and Plasma: Vancouver Debates Zero Waste
By Julia Levitt
July 1, 2008
The Future of Shopping Malls: An Image Essay
By Morgan Greenseth
August 6, 2008
Eric Lombardi's Zero Waste Park
By Julia Levitt
August 25, 2008
Connected Urban Development: Green Tech for Cities
By Scott Smith
October 6, 2008
Using ill-fated buildings for art in Seattle
By Sarah Kuck
October 15, 2008
Urban ReVision: Envisioning a Sustainable City Block in Texas
Worldchanging Team
December 10, 2008
This piece is part of our Year in Review series. Use the following links to view more of our favorites from 2008:
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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Features at 8:36 AM)
‘CBS Early Show’: Don’t take out the trash, live with it
December 29th, 2008 Posted in Green News | Comments Off
Dave Chameides shows off some of his trash, along with one of the worms that help him keep volume and odors under control. For a photo gallery of Chameides and other trash-tracking bloggers, click on the image.
(Credit: Elsa Wenzel/CNET Networks)How far would you go to demonstrate your ...