"Arising out of mutual interests in urban agriculture, community engagement and a belief in social value of sharing food, Mount Dennis Community Kitchen has joined forces with Masters of Architecture students at the University of Toronto to design and build a mobile community kitchen for the historic Mount Dennis neighbourhood."

Students at the University of Toronto Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design (full disclosure: my Alma Mater) built the mobile kitchen from recycled materials.

We have shown quite a few emergency shelter designs, but Rafael Smith may have come up with the first high-density multi-storey one. "This project is a shelter solution that meets the needs of emergency response but also provides victims with a more personal place to live; a base unit that can serve as a very basic shelter but also have the capabilities to upgrade and implement modern infrastructure. This shelter is also stackable. Many alternative housing solutions deal with small scale but can’t cope with large scale displaced populations."

photo by racineur

Fully 77% of the garbage pulled out of municipal street bins is fast food waste, much of it labelled with the name of Canada's dominant coffee chain. Councillor Gord Perks noted last year: "the city of Toronto, both in households, in street cleaning and in our parks, is paying for the fact the province will not regulate packaging and will not make the manufacturers and producers of that waste pay the cost of cleaning it up."

Now the City is considering some radical moves. According to the Star:

Triptyque has built an office building in Sao Paulo that proudly wears its services on the exterior with a very industrial aesthetic, but is also full of planted "pores", complete with a misting system. They write:

"Like a living body, the building breathes, sweats and modifies itself, transcending its inertia. The walls are thick and covered externally by a vegetal layer that works like the skin of the structure. This dense wall is made of an organic concrete that has pores, where several plant species grow, giving the facades a unique look."

Recent Comment by liz : "i agree... but i do like those shutters...." [read]

I am a big fan (and used to be a big user) of Sketchup, the easy-to-use drawing software that Google now gives away. They teamed up with Dwell Magazine run a design competition encouraging designers to "think about your idea of a comfortable and sustainable dwelling, and to share it with the world."

The winner is Drew Wilgus, whose entry "stood out for its sustainable elements, integration into the local landscape, keen material use, and striking aesthetic."

Last week, we noted the excellent Sustainable Schoolyards installation at the One Planet--Ours! Sustainability for the 22nd Century exhibit at the United States Botanic Garden, just a stone's throw from the Capitol in Washington, DC. The enlightening exhibition is showcasing a wide variety of garden and home-oriented solutions for sustainable living.

This week we'd like to highlight the very cute straw bale house, sponsored by Builders Without Borders. At 12 feet by 16 feet it's snug but solidly built for a mere $620. On the exterior, the bale walls are protected by a traditional lime plaster and a long-lasting standing-seam metal roof. Nearby is a bamboo shade structure and an adobe arch.

Builders Without Borders is an international network of ecological builders who advocate the use of straw, earth and other local, affordable materials in construction.

We have all seen the pictures of Galveston under water because of Hurricane Ike; The last time this happened six thousand people died. Instead of moving to higher ground, they moved higher ground to Galveston. Back in May, landscape website Pruned posted on Cornelia Dean's Against the Tide: The Battle for America's Beaches:

"Rather than retreating from the shifting sands to points higher elsewhere, the city instead decided to fence itself off from future disasters with a seawall; raised everything inside — houses, churches, offices, trees, gardens — by as much as 17 feet; and then flooded the revealed negative stratum with silt.

It was a “plan that even in an era of engineering daring stood out for its size, cost, and audacity.”

Recent Comment by liz : "Galveston is primarily a tourist destination. kids on spring break, families going to p..." [read]

We often hear the complaint that it cost too much to ‘go green.’ This is, of course, a blatant untruth. Those that spend the least, by and large, consume a lesser amount of the world’s many precious and finite resources.

We know that for developed countries, the money spent on essentials like food has been steadily dropping, as their spend on short-lived fashion, energy greedy gadgetry and exotic holidays increases. For example, in figures just released by the the US Department of Agriculture, the average US citizen was found to spend less than 10% of their total income on food, during 2007..

Now the New York Times has put up a remarkable graphic, which clearly indicates what countries spend in the categories of clothing, electronics, recreation, household goods, alcohol and tobacco. The chart shows the per capita consumption of many ‘western’ countries. It is kinda obvious who the big spender is.