Publication: Harvard Design Magazine
Thesis: Recent urbanization and development in New York city has resulted in a wholly environmentally unsustainable city with questionable power sources, construction waste, and poor resource utilization all posing major threats to the health of the city.
Abstract:
Questionable power sources, construction waste, and poor resource utilization are just some of the more vexing issues facing the city. These are problems echoed across the country but exacerbated by the volume of people and the proximity within which they live. Things that seem natural to a town have washed away in waves of urbanization and skyrocketing prices for a square foot of rent. The urbanization of New York has been crippled by its piecemeal growth and small scale projects resulting in an incoherent patchwork of an environmentally unsustainable city. While an occasional project will address these issues, there is an ignorance of the need for green that shoots straight to the top. There have been reports of the ideal scenarios for decades from now, but little legislative legwork to keep things moving along the allotted path (Office of the Mayor, 2007). Environmentally conscious architecture and planning isn’t merely a supplementary certification to boast about but rather, urgently needed. As cities draw more and more people from an ever wider range, their scope of drawing for resources grow too. This ever expanding radius and, in turn, impact per person is putting a strain on the country as a whole and its beginning to show. California’s drought, crop shortages, and landfill zones running out of space are just a few of the symptoms of this national epidemic, and some of these problems are affecting the big apple as well (WBEZ, 2015).
Now more than ever there is a need to return to the basics, the lifestyle possible hundreds of years ago is still relevant today. I do not mean to imply by any means that horse and buggies are the new Prius, but rather that using what you have and conserving your resources are a way of life, not a choice. For architects this means designing buildings that are adaptive and designed for their location to use a reasonable amount of energy and attempting to gain some through renewable resources. For urban planning this may mean more green space and better regulation of zoning. The citys’ planning commissions have consistently approved larger and larger projects with disregard for environmental impacts, or based on a set of standards that only address a specific set of issues (Smith, 2002)(NPR, 2010). This has an impact on everyone, from the individual to the largest corporation, and means its time for everyone to take a stand too.
Residents of the city are beginning to take notice of the changes all around them, affecting everything from air quality to even how much sun they see (Hughes, 2015). Some people are becoming inspirited but often times don’t know how best to execute this newfound sense of duty towards the environment. A still smaller group is finding a way to become as small as possible, in an ecological impact sense (Owen, 2004). This article seeks to point out the problems currently extant in New York City and propose a solution on varying scales for the individual and the corporation.
Works Cited:
“Not It!’ This American Life. NPR. WBEZ, Chicago. 10 April. 2015. Radio.
Hughes, CJ. “The Stress of New Construction.” The New York Times. 25 September 2015. Online. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/27/realestate/the-stress-of-new-construction.html.
plaNYC: A Greener, Greater New York. New York, New York: Office of the Mayor of the City of New York. 2007. Online. http://www.nyc.gov/html/planyc/downloads/pdf/publications/full_report_2007.pdf.
“Critics Say LEED Program Doesn’t Fullfill It’s Promises.” NPR. NPR, 8 September 2010. Online. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129727547
Smith, Neil. New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 2002. Online. http://www.overgaardtonnesen.dk/TEKSTERNE/05-Smith-New-Globalism-New-Urbanism-Gentrification.pdf
Owen, David. “Green Manhattan”. The New Yorker. 18 October 2004. Online. http://www.davidowen.net/files/green-manhattan.pdf.
Hi Andrew and Justin,
Can you move your main photo into the “Featured Image” location (you can do this in the lower right corner of the “Edit Post” page) instead of having it in the main text? Though later I will love to have more photos within the text, this blog theme works best when you include a single “featured image” in addition to the ones in the text. This is also why I usually have photo credits at the end of the post since featured images don’t have that easy ability. Good job on the insertion anyway!!
Hi Andrew and Justin,
Try a searching in these resources for additional information on your topic. These resources target academic publications I’ve included some search strategies to try.
Type the search strategies as they are written below into the search boxes in the various resources.
AVERY Index to Architectural Periodicals
Locate this online database on the Databases tab on the Libraries homepage: http://www.libraries.psu.edu
“social sustainability”
“smart cit*
Once you’ve scrolled through a couple of pages of search results, you may want to narrow your results.
Go to Subject/Artist on the lefthand side of the page, click the + to open the dialog box; click More Options to open the dialog box further. Select a subject/artist entry.
“urban decay”
sustainable AND “urban renewal”
“urban design”
“urban design” AND “new york city”
environment AND “urban design”
Go to Subject/Artist on the lefthand side of the page, click the + to open the dialog box, and choose ‘urban design – environmental aspects’
“urban ecology”
pub(Harvard Design Magazine)
The ‘pub’ ahead of the magazine title in parenthesis tells the database to search for any articles that were published in Harvard Design Magazine.
Narrow the search results by:
1. Go to Subject/Artist on the lefthand side of the page, click the + to open the dialog box
2. A couple of good choices would be ‘sustainable development’ or ‘urban design’
LionSearch
This is the University Libraries’ online card catalog and contains both full-text online materials as well as listings of the Libraries’ books and paper-format journals.
sustainable AND “urban renewal”
On the search results page, find Discipline in the far lefthand column and select ‘architecture’
“smart city” OR “smart cities”
On the search results page, find Discipline in the far lefthand column and select ‘architecture’
Google Scholar
Locate this online database on the Databases tab on the Libraries homepage: http://www.libraries.psu.edu If you enter Google Scholar from within the Libraries, Google Scholar will recognize you as Penn State-related (we gave them all our IP addresses) and you will have access to most of the full-text materials you find. Those articles that you can’t access full-text, you can request for free using InterLibrary Loan.
(“smart city” OR “smart cities”) AND “urban design”
“Urban form and social sustainability: the role of density and housing type”
1. This is the title of something that I found in Avery. The authors are Glen Branmley, etal. The item looked very relevant to your research topic. One thing you can do with Google Scholar is to find out who may have used this article in writing their own article. It’s a great way to locate other relevant articles on your topic.
2. Click on the ‘Cited by’ link underneath the title to the article. 3. Re-sort the results by date to bring the newest articles up to the top of the results list.