urban

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:

Mission Bay Redevelopment

| Emily

After my pictures earlier this week, found some more info on the Mission Bay redevelopment in SF … here’s a link to some info about some of their parks. I was happy to note that I can continue my now ten-month tradition of collecting “do not … ” graphic signage:

I think that means you can’t do child’s pose in hexagonal shaped areas at Mission Creek 🙂 However, you’ll be glad to know they allow roller skating on the paved areas along the creek. I, for one, know that I’ll be seeing lots of native waterfowl from the cruizin’ 4-MPH speeds of my laceup roller skates. Heck yes! Here’s a little on the history, which explains why I thought it looked a lot like a bigger version of the end of Commerical Street in Portland, Maine – because it DID used to be shipbuilding and fishing. Now, the area has turned to the less odiferous and more pedestrian business of redevelopment, via condos, office parks, and lots of stragetically place pampas grass clumps. Still, it’s sunny and quiet and definitely worth a stroll!