Reimagine public uses of flood-prone lots

Van Alen Institute, in collaboration with the City of North Miami, announced … KEEPING CURRENT: Repetitive Loss Properties design competition. The competition, which launched in April 2019, invited architects and designers from around the globe to submit proposals that reimagine public uses of the City of North Miami’s current and future portfolio of flood-prone vacant lots, known as repetitive loss (RL) properties.”

Keeping Current: A Sea Level Rise Challenge for Greater Miami is a project of Van Alen Institute that encompasses a series of initiatives seeking innovative solutions to protect South Florida’s 6 million residents from the potentially catastrophic consequences of sea level rise. To fund the initiative, Van Alen raised $850,000 from The Rockefeller Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, The Miami Foundation, Target, and Terra. Van Alen employs its expertise and network to help South Florida residents gain a better understanding of sea level rise and new ways to respond to their changing environment. This initiative builds upon Van Alen’s leadership in organizing projects that generate innovative solutions to complex climate change problems. After Hurricane Sandy, we worked with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to develop nearly $1 billion worth of infrastructural improvements in the Northeast region. We also recently worked in Lower Mississippi River Delta, where we collaborated with dozens of stakeholders to make the New Orleans region more sustainable over the next 100 years.”

Van Alen Institute – Keeping Current, Climate Design Lab (with University of Miami), Repetitive Loss (with the city of North Miami), Resource Guide (“designing to live with water” – pdf)

The Right To Plant Veggies In Front Yard

NPR reports “After 6-Year Battle, Florida Couple Wins The Right To Plant Veggies In Front Yard”

a Florida law went into effect that nullifies local bans on vegetable gardens at residential properties.

She lamented that the fight even had to happen. “We had a beautiful, nutritious garden for many years before the Village went out of its way to ban it and then threatened us with ruinous fines,” she said.

Why would she lament?

Morant Bay, Jamaica

“The events at Morant Bay in 1865 followed on the heels a period of public meetings known as the Underhill Meetings, and peaceful expression of grievances through petitions. Complaints included a series of economic issues related to wages, land tenure, access to markets, and labor rights; political issues related to unfair taxation, no justice in the courts, and elite-biased government policies; and civil issues that included voting rights, and access to healthcare, education, and land. In that sense it was not a riot so much as a social movement, which was rejected by the Governor and finally turned to violence against the representatives of the local government.”

via Graphic Arts, Princeton University Library. Research for future works.

AG2019_MG_7568a or found on a known peripatetic circuit

AG2019_MG_7568a

Downtown Miami, 062619, 6:40 pm.

“I like being able to stop when I like, to lean against a building and make a note […]. Walking, paradoxically, allows for the possibility of stillness.

Walking is mapping with your feet. It helps you piece a city together, connecting up neighbourhoods that might otherwise have remained discrete entities, different planets bound to each other, sustained yet remote. I like seeing how in fact they blend into one another, I like noticing the boundaries between them. ” Lauren Elkin, in her wonderful Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London via BP

One more quote from Elkin,

“[…] walk[ing] […] confers — or restores — a feeling of placeness. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says a space becomes a place when through movement we invest it with meaning, when we see it as something to be perceived, apprehended, experienced.

I walk because, somehow, it’s like reading. You’re privy to these lives and conversations that have nothing to do with yours, but you can eavesdrop on them. […]

You walk in the city side by side with the living and the dead [my emphasis].”