From the Streetfilms site – “The first time you visit Portland, Oregon, the gaggles of cyclists streaming over the Hawthorne Bridge during rush hour is a sight you will never forget. It’s something other cities need to see and be inspired by.”
USA Today reports that Germany has increased new-car registrations in Germany by more than 21% to 277,800 in February compared with the same month last year. These sales were achieved by the German goverment’s bonus to people who scrap older cars and buy new ones, an amount of $3,134 at Tuesday’s exchange rate. A buyer has to trade in a car at least 9 years old and agree to let it be scrapped. America, take note.
Some people just aren’t shopping at all and it has nothing to do with the recession. GOOD Magazine has just profiled five groups of anti-consumers that includes:
1. The Amish: With an estimated population of 232,000, they have a strong commitment to simplicity that includes traveling by horse and buggy, sewing their own clothing and cooking on wood-fired stoves.
2. No Impact Man: Blogger Colin Beavan has vowed to produce no trash whatsoever. Even more amazingly, he pulls this off in New York City with his wife and daughter in tow. A life without toilet paper sounds challenging….
3. The Church of Stop Shopping: 20,000 members strong, the church has members in every continent but Antarctica. They have vowed to do anything to stop ‘The Shopocalypse’ including marching down Disneyland’s Main Street and even releasing a documentary called What Would Jesus Buy?
4. The Compact: A group of friends from San Francisco teamed up and vowed to buy nothing new for an entire year. They allowed themselves to buy food, health and safety items (and underwear), but everything else was off-limits. Now close to 10,000 people strong, The Compact hosts monthly meetings.
5. Freegans: Most freegans are middle-class and well-educated, but choose to dumpster dive instead of contributing to an economic system that holds profits above everything else.
Read more on these groups here.
The house slide above Terwilliger
Hyper-local can be summed up easily as ‘all the news in your zip code.’ Wired Magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson captured it nicely too in a post titled The Vanishing Point Theory of News. The idea of hyper-local is further validated by the success of sites such as Yelp and Outside.in; they drill down to the zip code level to bring us all the news that’s fit to print, or not as the case may be.
I was hiking with my dog in my Hillsdale neighborhood yesterday and some thoughts percolated to top of mind – one being that hyper-local is an awesome idea yet that thought was immediately tempered by the next; hyper-localized information means having easy access to all the news in our communities, we are made aware, therefore we have to accept responsibility for what happens in our communities. There will be no excuses.
I could have stopped right there, it would have been a good Twitter-esque moment. But no. I have actually been paying attention to what goes on in my neighborhood and it’s not always pretty..
From tragedy and despair to new thinking.
My regular hike leads from my home in the residential neighborhoods of Portland’s West Hills, down narrow musty lanes and streets to Terwilliger Boulevard [known to locals as the Terwilliger Highway - you may already sense where this is going...]. Where Terwilliger crosses the SW Capitol Highway the road is now closed to vehicles but not to hikers and bicyclists. A few weeks ago a house slid down the hillside that I can see ahead of me taking two others off their foundations as it cascaded toward Terwilliger. Road closed. Despair for the families involved but thankfully no injuries.
The house collapse has created a chain of events that can be seen as an opportunity.
First and foremost, as vehicles can no longer drive along the boulevard it is possible for hikers and bikers to enjoy the serenity of walking Terwilliger’s tree-lined curves without inhaling exhaust fumes or having to be constantly vigilant of motorists speeding to work. Remove the automobile from the equation and we are suddenly back on the path to nature. Of course the traffic has to go somewhere; the detour funnels it through Hillsdale along the increasingly congested Capitol Highway, up through the dangerous cross-section at Sunset Blvd and the Wilson High School entrance, and on back down to the severed umbilical that is Terwilliger where commuters, one to each car, can speed off toward OHSU.
Here’s the opportunity for Hillsdale as I see it: make things difficult for drivers.
Two fairly recent developments in Hillsdale [in the last 4 years] changed the character of the neighborhood – one positively, one negatively. The Hillsdale Library, completed in 2004, is both architecturally and holistically a perfect example of how Hillsdale should be developed. The Watershed building on the other hand is just the opposite. And yet the library, as good as it is, is not perfect.
(more…)
Recently, the 70s underground classic novel Ecotopia has had a resurgence in popularity. The wide range of Ecotopia fans (ranging from hippies and new agers to religious conservatives) believe that it is a blueprint for the future and with its eco-concious themes, more relevant than ever.
In Ernest Callenbach’s book, residents of the Pacific Northwest recycled, took public transportation and ate local foods long before it was the norm. And perhaps the most interesting of all, the NY Times is claiming that much of the novel directly resembles current-day Portland, Oregon…coincidence?
