blog4jen » projects

thurwatcher bridge

jnatali — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:28:23 +0000

sycamore pool on big chico creek

jnatali — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 23:26:06 +0000

The concrete pool is the creek, a prime example of integrated urban and natural resource. Could this be a repeatable practice for removing sediment and providing recreation? Or is it a management intensive imposition on the creek?

San Luis Obispo: Urban Creek Restoration

jnatali — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:35:04 +0000

San Luis Obispo Creek, originally uploaded by CookiiHoney.

I need to find out details of this creek restoration and design, especially how all the urban hardscaping holds up during floods. Do they remove the steel fish sculpture during high flows? Do the bridges back up with debris? The channel does not look very wide, although it is deep. I think that the city unearthed a culvert to daylight this creek. This area near the historic Mission and plaza seems like the center of human activity.

DIY Living Roof

jnatali — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 21:56:26 +0000

http://www.baylocalize.org/webgallery/thumbnails.php?album=11

Prague’s flexible floodwall

jnatali — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 21:55:19 +0000

NyTimes Article: Prague’s emergency floodwalls held up during Summer 2002 floods. From the article:

“I thank God and the wall,” said Rabbi Sidon as he looked up at his temporary sanctuary, the 19th-century Jerusalem Synagogue. The wall, which rescue workers named the Wall of Hope, is a fence of interlocking aluminum slats that was hurriedly put into place on the bank of the Vltava as floodwaters began to rise on Monday.

By today, the local tabloid Blesk had crowned its builder, a Moravian businessman named Ladislav Srubek, as “the man who saved Prague.” Foundations for the $2,000,000 wall, designed by a German firm after floods hit the city of Cologne a decade ago, were put in place several years ago. “It’s not a miracle, it’s just a smart piece of engineering,” Mr. Srubek said in a telephone interview. He said plans and permits had been in place to extend the wall to other parts of the city, but it had not been a
priority for the local government.

The substantial costs of flood walls can be justified by the value of commercial property thus protected from damage caused by flooding. Flood walls are almost solely used in cities, notably:

Cologne, Germany
Nijmegen, the Netherlands
Deventer, the Netherlands
Kampen, the Netherlands
Huntington, West Virginia
Portsmouth, Ohio
St. Louis, Missouri
Louisville, Kentucky
Cincinnati, Ohio
Morgan City, Louisiana
New Orleans, Louisiana and
Richmond, Virginia.
Williamson, West Virginia
South Williamson, Kentucky

Walkable Neighborhoods

jnatali — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 21:49:51 +0000

Owning a home in walkable neighborhoods saves residents $300 to $400 a month, up to 4,800 a year, on gas expenses alone, according to research by the Congress for the New Urbanism.

A recent Forbes article focuses on access to mass transit as a major factor in America’s Most Fuel-Efficient Neighborhoods. You can rate the walkability of any neighborhood via walkscore.com, just enter an address. While public transit is tremendously important, walkability seems critical to reducing our carbon footprint.

Blogs to keep an eye on:
http://www.livablestreets.com/
http://neighborhoods.org/

San Antonio Riverwalk

jnatali — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:07:20 +0000

San Antonio Riverwalk, originally uploaded by NutsyFagan.

In the 1920’s, the Architect Robert Hugman proposed, “The Shops of Aragon and Romula,” a beautification and flood-control plan for the city of San Antonio, and kept the proposal alive for seven years until its eventual adoption through 1938 when funding became available from the Works Progress Administration. According to local historian Vernon Zunker, Hugman designed 31 unique staircases for the River Walk and many other features. Hugman established his own architectural office at the River Walk, next to the restaurant Casa Rio established in 1946, despite popular opinion which held that he would be ‘drowned like rat’.

The riverwalk winds through downtown as a former bend in the river and lies one floor below street level. Shops and walkways are protected from flooding via a bypass channel and a 24 diamter flood control tunnel that runs under the city. More history available from:

safety vs unease on the levee trail

jnatali — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:21:53 +0000

During my solo reconnaissance mission on the Pajaro River levee trail, where I biked and walked the urban and coastal reaches, I consciously noted my sense of safety and comfort versus vulnerability and unease. I wanted to test areas where design might help improve safety in order to attract recreational use.

When I felt safe, I was usually within view of other people or an actively used road where chances were high that someone would pass within a few minutes. Being within a reach of alternate escape route also lowered my anxiety.

When I felt vulnerable, I felt alone and out of earshot or sight of anyone. If I saw no options for escape, I was much more aware of places where someone might be lurking (such as vegetation, around a wall or a fence). If I saw a suspicious scene unfolding, I would not approach. Suspicious scenes included: a car parked under a highway bridge over a river crossing; illegal encampments; informal trails to the river that were recently trampled, highly vegetated and therefore easy hiding spots; a deserted and rundown building, trailer or vehicle along the river.

I did not even attempt to travel along the agricultural reach of the levee because of two major obstacles: (1) the strict agricultural function of the surrounding fields made me feel unwelcome as the sole recreational onlooker, and (2) it was isolated from escape routes. Once on the levee, you feel stuck up on the perch, looking out over vast agricultural fields. Although an occasional, private farm road might intersect with the levee, their destination was often unclear, especially when the levee swung away from the road to a point where it’d be difficult to race toward it. The farm roads rarely went straight between the levee and road, instead turning at right angles around huge fields with no clear path to a place where I might find help.

Creating a sense of safety on this trail presents a Catch-22 situation: more active users will help bring eyes and ears to the trail, acting as both a deterrent to crime and increasing the sense that help is within reach; however, in its current state the sense of isolation on the trail prevents its active use.

To combat this cycle, I suspect that we can work outward from actively used areas to gradually expand these safe havens and bring more users to extended areas of the levee trail system. In tandem, we need to increase visibility onto and from the trail while provided more open paths to and from the levee as options or “escape routes” that lead to actively-used public areas.

While riding the levees, I only saw people within one reach, along Corralitos Creek where it flows alongside a residential neighborhood. Here, I saw families both walking and riding bikes. I saw men walking and biking. I did not see any solo females, not even with a dog. I did not see any elderly, despite the proximity to a “senior village.” When a trail feels safe and inviting, it should attract all walks of life. As Clare Cooper Marcus writes in People Places, “The use and popularity of a space depend greatly on its location and the details of its design.”

everyday urban homestead

jnatali — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 02:39:31 +0000

Our yards contain vegetable gardens, decorative perennial gardens, sleek designer gardens, hippie reuse gardens…but what if our urban lots became an integral resource supporting our everyday life, serving local self-sufficiency, and providing residents with locally abundant and health-giving:

fruit and vegetables
water from conserved rainwater and reused graywater
animals for eggs/meat/dairy
plants for medicine, textiles, dyes
cyclic reuse of materials (compost, vermiculture, polyculture)
value-add food products: beer, bread, wine, pie
habitat
biodiversity

Outside of streets, residential lots comprise a huge chunk of our urban land. We live on these lots, we cook and eat, relax with friends and family and teach our children on these lots. Although I love community gardens, especially their enriching social environment, I prefer to save my intense gardening for my own backyard, even if it’s tiny. Lugging tools and materials and supplies seems onerous, especially when the tending and harvesting of resources becomes part of everday life. I can share resources, lessons, ideas with neighbors, friends and the community through various means, including community gardens, but I want my food to grow right along with me.

I’ve read about folks who offer edible landscaping services, sometimes integrated with urban permaculture principles. Often, the gardens look somewhat ragged, include token landscape elements of flagstone paving and wooden arbors, and do not integrate with the unique architecture of the house or the other multiple functions that a residential lot must serve. Sometimes, the installed gardens all about veggies, which is cool, but this ignores opportunities for efficient use and reuse of water, which is critical for these intensive gardens. Few offer services that include animals. Once installed, these gardens often go to waste as residents (who needed someone to design and install the gardens) don’t know how-to or don’t have-time-to keep the gardens moving through the season’s cycles or regenerate spent soils. One business in Portland seems to maintain the gardens over time and even share bounty between different urban lots, which begins to resolve some of these issues for their busy urban clients.

As we finish our own yard and help with work on Jeff and Tom’s yards, we will keep close tabs on time and materials requirements for the design, installation and maintenance of the gardens to understand how we might build a small business.

Resources

Path to Freedom homesteaders in Pasadena, CA
Petaluma Urban Homestead
Mother Earth News article (1980) on HUD homesteading program
Edible landscaping enterprises, article on sprig
Your Backyard Farmer, an urban distributed CSA in Portland
Homegrown LA edible landscape service in LA
Sustenance Design in Atlanta area
Stone Lake Farm, not-so-urban off-grid homestead
http://www.howtohomestead.org/
Farmer D in Savannah, GA

shed

jnatali — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 23:16:10 +0000