agro-housing and cars that fold

(via ASLA's The Dirt blog)

The building above is the proposed concept design for Agro-Housing, Knafo Klimor's winning entry in the the 2nd International Architecture Competition for Sustainable Housing. (Here's the write-up, more illustrations, a pdf presentation and a video tour.)

Basically it's a 12-story residential building with apartment units wrapping around a vertical greenhouse core. Vertical farming is not a new concept but previous proposals were basically industrial farms in skyscraper forms. There are though, very good reasons for moving agricultural production into vertical formats.

This is the first proposal that mixes housing with agriculture. (How's that for mixed-use?)

From the website:

Advantages of this innovative building typology:

• Produces food for tenants and the surrounding community.
• Produces organic and healthy food that is disease and fertilizer free
• Creates an abundance of crops for self-consumption and sale for the neighbors.
• Requires no special skill set for greenhouse operation
• Allows for flexibility and independence for the greenhouse working hours.
• Creates extra income and new jobs for the inhabitants in the building.
• Creates a sense of community and softens the crisis of migration to cities.
• Preserves rural traditions and social order.
• Creates sustainable housing conditions and reduces air and soil pollution.
• Improves the building’s microclimate and reduction of its energy usage (cooling and heating)
• Uses water from the existing high water table and recycles grey water for gardening.

The proposal intrigues me and I wonder if this can help finance vertical low-cost or affordable housing in Metro Manila? Can the greenhouse produce commercial quantities of organic produce, enough at least to provide shared income for the apartment residents (perhaps as a cooperative)? If this was replicated on a large scale (like EcoBlocks), would it be viable enough to interest an investment from agro-industry?

Meanwhile, those crazy kids from MIT have proposed a carbon-free, stackable rental car.

"The Smart Cities group at the MIT Media Lab is working on two low-cost electric vehicles that it hopes will revolutionize mass transit and help alleviate pollution. Next week, the group will unveil a prototype of its foldable electric scooter at the EICMA Motorcycle Show, in Milan. A prototype for the team's foldable electric car, called the City Car, is slated to follow next year.

The MIT group sees the vehicles as the linchpin in a strategy that aims to mitigate pollution with electric power, expand limited public space by folding and stacking vehicles like shopping carts, and alleviate congestion by letting people rent and return the vehicles to racks located near transportation hubs, such as train stations, airports, and bus depots.

"We're looking at urban personal mobility in a much more sustainable way than the private automobile provides," says William Mitchell, director of the Smart Cities research group.

This will be fantastic paired with Zipcar's model of shared-car ownership (read: car membership plans). I've been a Zipcar member for the last 4 years and I find it indispensable. I get to use cars without having to worry about parking or maintenance. All for a reasonable hourly rental rate that covers gas and insurance.

I've wondered if a model like this could work in Makati and Ortigas. The big worry of course is carnapping, but the technology actually tracks the vehicles which could be a bit of a deterrent. You can also price in the cost of theft insurance into the business model. It could work. Plus, if MIT's cars finally get to market, then you have the added insurance of easy to spot cars not available in the retail market. (e.g.- no place to sell the car -unless, of course, you break it up).

nice map

Found this Time population map via the Signal v. Noise blog on 37Signals.



It warms my map geek and data visualization heart. (See the original -and bigger version here.)

TIME Graphic by Joe Lertola
From US Census Data

growing metro manila

The animation above shows the rapid growth of highly urbanized areas (areas in yellow) in the National Capital Region from 1948 to 1999, and, as estimated, by 2015.

The growth is nothing short of spectacular.

Starting with just 83 square kilometers in 1945, the metro grew thus:

• 1948 =83 km2
• 1966 =221 km2
• 1975 =323 km2
• 1996 =788 km2
• 2015 =1,512 km2 (projected)

  (Click on the year to see a snapshot for that year.)

So, in 48 years -from 1948 to 1996 - the highly urbanized core of the metropolis grew by an astounding 705 square kilometers or 849%. That means the development grew by an average of 14.6 square kilometers every year (18%). That's like adding an area half the size of the city of Makati to the metro every year.

The rapid urban growth, coupled with an equally explosive population growth pretty much explains why we went from the idyllic urban scenes of the 60s to the current chaos of Metro Manila.

Greater Manila's population was about 1.5 million in 1948. It hit 10.8 million by 2000. Which meant we added about 180,000 people to the metropolis each year.

That's like moving the whole (current) population of Cebu City to Metro Manila every 4 years.

No planning department (indeed, no organization) in the world could have coped with that kind of explosive growth.

The pace of growth also explains the housing crunch that we currently face. To cope with that growth, we would have had to build at the pace of nearly a hundred houses everyday for the last fifty years. (No, we couldn't get time off for weekends, either.)

I'll discuss this more on my next post - which will also be my answer to Peter Angliongto's last comment.

We're not done yet! If the projections are correct, the highly urbanized core will nearly double in size by 2015.

This kind of growth though is par for the course of megacities worldwide and is a part of the global trend of rapid urbanization.

It's good to keep this frame in mind next time you get tempted to blame all of Metro Manila's woes on our our supposed lack of discipline, or the avarice of our oligarchs or the corruption of our local officials or even the (presumed) faults of our culture.

Remember, it's not the attitude, it's the (sheer) numbers.

Data for map image extracted from MMUTIS
from a presentation by Dr. Ricardo Sigua

manila by night

Google Earth has released several new layers, among them NASA sourced content including Earth By Night.

Seeing the human generated lights on the night time hemispheres is not only beautiful, but they also reveal the urbanization patterns across the landscape. (They also show how much light pollution we generate.) The screencap above shows how the megamanila urbanized region stretches from Clark in the North to Batangas City in the South along very strong corridors. It also shows the Metro Manila westward to reach Subic. You can also see how the corridor between the shores of the Laguna de Bai and Taal Lake are rapidly urbanizing -and will soon approximate the density you see between the Manila Bay and Laguna lake.

Additional images from Google reveal how Naga City is growing into Legaspi City. This one shows the cities of Cebu, Bacolod, and Iloilo. And this one Davao and GenSan.

With a little map algebra, you could deduce the relative density levels between those urbanized areas using the images. With a time sequence, you could also show the direction and intensity of the pace of urbanization.

the wind

with a hat tip to TechSnap

lakbayan

I got a C- in Lakbayan (by Eugene Villar).
How much of the Philippines have you visited?

UPDATE:

Eugene changed the scoring system and so I got
bumped up to a C+! So I just left the "almost failed" column.
Thanks, Eugene!

Judging by the google hits and the comments on the
post -this has got to be the pinoy blog meme of the year!

philipines = oklahoma

So says Map 131 from Strange Maps. The map renames the US states with the names of countries with the same GDP.

Yes, Oklahoma. (It's the state shaped like a cleaver, right above Texas.) Home of infamous global-climate-change-denier, Sen. James Mountain Inhofe. (How backward is that? And he's been in office since 1994!)

Of course, as Strange Maps rightly points out, the GDP equivalents don't account for populations:

The creator of this map has had the interesting idea to break down that gigantic US GDP into the GDPs of individual states, and compare those to other countries’ GDP. What follows, is this slightly misleading map – misleading, because the economies both of the US states and of the countries they are compared with are not weighted for their respective populations.

Pakistan, for example, has a GDP that’s slightly higher than Israel’s – but Pakistan has a population of about 170 million, while Israel is only 7 million people strong. The US states those economies are compared with (Arkansas and Oregon, respectively) are much closer to each other in population: 2,7 million and 3,4 million.

And yet, wile a per capita GDP might give a good indication of the average wealth of citizens, a ranking of the economies on this map does serve two interesting purposes: it shows the size of US states’ economies relative to each other (California is the biggest, Wyoming the smallest), and it links those sizes with foreign economies (which are therefore also ranked: Mexico’s and Russia’s economies are about equal size, Ireland’s is twice as big as New Zealand’s).

So, here's the tale of the tape:

	Oklahoma	Philippines
Area	181,196 km²	298,170 km²
Population	3,450,654	88,706,300
Density	30.5/km²	276 /km²
Largest MSA	Oklahoma City	Metro Manila
Pop. of largest MSA	1,225,084	11,289,368
GDP Per Capita	$ 34,286	$5,000 (PPP)

The original map, i think, is from Carl Stormer's blog ("Carl Talk"), and came to Strange Maps via The Big Picture.

Strange Maps is currently one of my favorite blogs. It pleases my map geek heart.

landcraft!

Very very addictive! Specially for mapgeeks.

Generate your own landscapes, ala SimCity's God Mode.

Try it here.


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