Monday Mailing
Year 25 • Issue 15 17 December 2018 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 1.
Quote of the Week:
“We enjoy warmth because we have been cold. We appreciate light because we have been in darkness. By the same token, we can experience joy because we have known sorrow.” - David L. Weatherford
Oregon Fast Fact #17
In 1858 the richest gold find in the Cascade Mountains was discovered in the Bohemia Mining District at Sharp's Creek near Cottage Grove.
The Hard Truths of Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy Building Real-World Community with Minecraft (Corum Ketchum) Exploring Solutions: ‘Wildfires as a Fact of Life’ SimCity In Stumptown: Portland To Get Model Powered By Cellphone Data For Planning Climate change: Where we are in seven charts and what you can do to help Reconsidering Single Family Zoning (Michael Walker) How One Indigenous Nation is Reclaiming Their Food System – One Breakfast At A Time Appetite for Deconstruction Inclusive Networks Are Shaping Our Lives Right Now – Are They Governance? RESOURCE – National Opportunity Zones Ranking Report (Bayoán Ware)
The Hard Truths of Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy
Can rural America be saved? There are 60 million people, almost one in five Americans, living on farms, in hamlets and in small towns across the landscape. For the last quarter century the story of these places has been one of relentless economic decline. This is, of course, not news to the people who live in rural and small-town America, who have been fighting for years to reverse this decline. But now, the nation’s political class is finally noticing. The election of Donald Trump, powered in no small degree by rural voters, has brought the troubles of small-town America to national attention, with an urgent question: What can be done to revive it? To access the full story, click here.
2. Building Real-World Community with Minecraft Can a video game help bring landscape architecture to the masses? According to Deirdre Quarnstrom: absolutely. Quarnstrom is the general manager for Microsoft’s Minecraft Education program, which promotes the popular video game’s use as an educational tool. She is also a director at Block by Block, a nonprofit partnership between Microsoft, Minecraft-creators Mojang Studios, and the United Nations that uses Minecraft to broaden community engagement around public spaces in the developing world.
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At the ASLA 2018 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, Quarnstrom was joined by Lauren Schmitt, ASLA, and Anaheim parks manager Pamela Galera, ASLA, to discuss how landscape architects can use Minecraft to expand and deepen the community engagement process. To access the full story, click here.
3. Exploring Solutions ‘Wildfire As a Fact of Life’
Wildfires are burning hotter and faster, taking more lives and destroying more property. Climate change and human development patterns are only making the problem worse. So what can forest communities do to reduce their risk? Or, as one conservationist asks, how much fire can we live with?
Driving in to California, the check-point sign flashed, “Warning. Road closed. Fire ahead.” An officer at a check point motioned for me to stop. I was worried. My plan for the day was to take photos of the blackened area from the summer’s immense Carr Fire near Redding before heading to Weaverville. The point of the trip was to visit a rural community that, instead of waiting to fight wildfire once it started, is trying to do something to reduce the threat of wildfire in the first place. To access the full story, click here.
4. New SimCity in Stumptown: Portland To Get Model Powered By Cellphone Data for Planning
For the first time, Portland’s transportation planners could get access to the powerful insights companies glean from tracking the location, moment by moment, of millions of cellphone users. On Wednesday, after little debate, the Portland City Council voted unanimously to approve an agreement between the Portland Bureau of Transportation, TriMet and the regional government Metro to pay for a pilot test of a powerful new program called Replica. To access the full story, click here.
5. Climate change: Where we are in seven charts and what you can do to help
Representatives from nearly 200 countries are gathering in Poland for talks on climate change aimed at breathing new life into the Paris Agreement. The UN has warned the 2015 Paris accord's goal of limiting global warming to "well below 2C above pre-industrial levels" is in danger because major economies, including the US and the EU, are falling short of their pledges. But scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the leading international body on global warming - last month argued the 2C Paris pledge didn't go far enough. The global average temperature rise actually needed to be kept below 1.5C, they said. So how warm has the world got and what can we do about it? To access the full story, click here.
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6. Reconsidering Single Family Zoning
As policymakers, builders, and the market work to solve the housing supply issues, a key question everybody asks is what type of housing do we need? Aren’t millennials always going to be renters? [No] Should we grow up, or out? Our office’s simple answer is yes. To accommodate recent and expected growth we will need to see housing supply pick up across the spectrum. This includes both an increase in the effective (buildable) land supply and redevelopment opportunities on lands within our existing communities. This is especially true for areas with good access to employment centers, stores, restaurants, transit and the like. To access the full story, click here.
7. How One Indigenous Nation Is Reclaiming Their Food System – One Breakfast At A Time
For the Wampis Nation in the Peruvian Amazon, protecting their territory and living well go hand in hand with reclaiming and strengthening their own ancestral knowledge, wisdom, practices and customs. Nowhere is the connection between territory, well-being, culture and autonomy more clear than in the efforts of Shinguito, a Wampis community on the Kankaim river. In Shinguito, the community is working to reclaim their food system by moving away from a reliance on imported foods provided by State-led school meals programmes, to provide their children with tasty, nutritious and culturally meaningful food from their lakes and forest gardens. To access the full story, click here.
8. Appetite for Deconstruction
To battle blight, builders must imagine at the beginning of a structure’s life what will happen at the end of it. Detroit has been demolishing about 200 vacant houses per week since December 2014, with a goal to take down 6,000 houses in one year. Much of the demolition work is concentrated in about 20 neighborhoods where the blight removal is projected to have immediate positive effects of improving remaining property values and clearing land for future development.
While Detroit may be an extreme example, economic decline, disinvestment, racial segregation, and natural and human-made disasters have left other American communities with unprecedented amounts of structural debris, abandonment and blight, too. To access the full story, click here.
9. Inclusive Networks Are Shaping Our Lives Right Now – Are They Governance?
Increasingly, networks that embrace diverse sectors and stakeholders are working together on shared issues and goals at all levels of society. They are having real impact on the ground all over the world. While the nature of their relationship to We the People is unclear and evolving, it is clear that they are an emerging form of actual governance. How can we enhance their functionality, wisdom, and benign impact on how we organize our collective affairs and determine our collective destiny? To access this resource, click here.
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10. RESOURCE – National Opportunity Zones Ranking Report
With the creation of the federal Opportunity Zones incentive program, trillions of dollars in new private investment will flow into pre-designated low-income communities around the country. But will this investment benefit the people living in these communities now, or will they be displaced as new interest and development brings increased property values and rents? And what kind of development will result —unsustainable, car-dependent sprawl (the dominant growth paradigm in the United States today) or walkable, mixed-use communities with a variety of housing options for everyone? This new LOCUS report—National Opportunity Zones Ranking Report—identifies which Opportunity Zones are positioned to bring positive social, environmental, and economic returns, by ranking all Opportunity Zones by their smart growth potential and current social equity. Second, the report includes policy recommendations for communities to ensure that development results in more walkable places that are healthy, prosperous, equitable and resilient. To learn more, click here.
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