landscapes

| Emily

New parklet outside of Devils’ Teeth Baking Company three blocks from Ocean Beach – within minutes of taking this photo, a fire truck pulled up and soon the parklet was filled with firemen drinking coffee and moms with kids enjoying a snack. 

Check out my recent piece on parklets (ignore the icky interface and load time and focus on my photos and content, if you can!) in SF. Found out from the Planning Dept that there are dozens and dozens of interested businesses, groups, and individuals on the waiting list!

While some are clearly better designed and more popular than others, isn’t it fun just to see a different use for public space? It will be interesting to see where this program goes in the next several years. And hey, who hasn’t noticed that there’s nowhere to sit in the city anymore? 

| Emily

See how few people there are in that picture? That’s where I’ll be this weekend and I can’t wait. It’s going to 90 degrees, dry, dusty and desolate. The perfect antidote to cold, damp, windy and crowded with people who couldn’t be bothered with me unless I paid them to. Did I mention I’m going camping – or shall I call it “crutch-camping”? If I’m brutal enough to go camping when I can’t even walk, I can probably handle sitting at a desk and typing on a computer. It’s no big deal. (That’s a hint – you know, in case you have a job for me.) 

Wow – those SF sidewalks are actually EIGHT pavers wide!

| Emily

I was walking on Baker Street today and after yesterday’s rant about better use of sidewalks, pedestrian zones and permeable surfaces, I was surprised to notice that the sidewalk was even wider than I thought. I counted eight pavers from the edge of the buildings to the street. I don’t know for sure, but if I remember correctly, it looked to be about 30 inches per paver – making that a almost TWENTY FOOT WIDE sidewalk! Imagine what a boon for non vehicular traffice and pedestrian public space/street usage this would be if you could do anything but walk (or slog, if it’s raining) on it! Baker is already a pretty wide street with a bike lane too! Of course, there was a requisite expensive, oversized car pulled into “their driveway” – AKA the ENTIRE sidewalk – because they couldn’t fit in their garage. I had to literally climb onto the kerb to get around it (there were two twenty-somethings inside giggling over their iphone who didn’t even see me or a previous pedestrian…gag me).  In any case. I was so surprised to see all that unused sidewalk space!

Wide Sidewalk (courtesy SF Citizen)

This is a photo of Masonic Avenue, a few blocks away from Baker courtesy of SFCitizen – I didn’t have my phone on me.

I wonder if anyone can tell me what was the motivation behind the wide – but completely underutilized – sidewalks? There is only one “sidewalk cafe” at the corner of MacAllister, a coffee house that usually has a good group sitting outside enjoying the sunshine and their books. Why can’t we have more places to sit and enjoy outdoor space? Seeing all that paved over space – impermeable, heat absorbing, ugly – in a city with such a space premium, is such a shame. Especially for all those poor renters who aren’t privileged enough to enjoy access to a personal yard, deck, patio or garden. There’s hardly any pedestrian traffic on this street, it usually looks fairly clean, and I can’t see any reason not to tear up some of those pavers and try something different. sf I look forward to finding out more soon, and hopefully doing something better with some of those “extra wides”! Hope to engage with Plant*SF soon and meet some folks there. Here’s some examples of their work, but we need WAY more!

Slow Food or Slow Cities – or both?

| Emily

Picture credit – KQED San Francisco Blog

I can’t decide which topic I’m more interested in as a focal point/lens through which to view sustainability issues – cities or food! I love that the “food movement” has now coalesced to the point where it encompasses not only issues of flavor and gourmet cooking, but also fossil fuel use, transport, food heritage, health, school lunches, “food deserts”, botany, home gardening, food science, and economics. If you can get past the more extreme viewpoints and move past the elitism of some arguments, I find that looking at a food is a wonderful focal point through which to look at a lot of important contemporary issues surrounding, health, income disparity, and culture. I’m also passionate about the idea of sustainable cities – how they can look and how we can get there – which is a similarly all-encompassing way to view issues of urban planning, public-private partnership, transit, health, climate change planning, international partnership and gardening. I also love how both of these issues overlap when you look at how food and cities interact – not just in the high concentrations of great restaurants, markets, and the burgeoning street food trend – but also in terms of getting more plants into the ground and balconies of American cities, and cleaning up the water and surface runoff so that flora and fauna around our urban areas aren’t full of bioaccumulated toxins. I already love to cook and ready about city history, but how much happier would I be if I could rip up half of the sidewalk pavers in my neighborhood and plant some gorgeous edible herbs and even set up some picnic tables so neighborhood residents could escape their dark little apartment boxes to sit outside on a sunny day and enjoy a homecooked meal?

Re-Creating Nature

| Emily

Is it really “sustainable” to spend millions of dollars and consume fuel/resources (human, powered, or otherwise) to “re-create” nature? At what point did we decide that a certain landscape should remain in that desired state forever? Are many of our coastlines really any more natural than a grown-over parking lot anymore? If left to their own devices, they would shift and flux…and probably destroy our expensive real estate and roads, of course.  I’m interested in exploring the idea that certain landscapes have more cultural value to us, and those are the ones we spend a lot of money “preserving” even though no landscape is static: it may not have looked like that one hundred years ago, and it won’t in another hundred years – unless we spend a lot of effort “preserving” it! What do you think? Did you know San Francisco originally had virtually no trees? Check out this photo of the Sunset district (undated – but pre-1920s) from the San Francisco Public Library’s online historic photo archive: