For the past year, South African photographer Pieter Hugo has been photographing Agbogbloshie, a dump of obsolete technology in Ghana. It’s a wasteland, where people and cattle live on mountains of motherboards, monitors and discarded hard drives, is far removed from the benefits accorded by the unrelenting advances of technology. It’s a haunting and dismal glimpse at what becomes of the 50 million tons of digital waste produced each year in the Western world. The exhibit, called Permanent Error, opens tomorrow at the Michael Stevenson Gallery in Capetown, South Africa and runs until September.
Ross Ching shows how attractive L.A. is when you get rid of the cars in Running on Empty. Ching was inspired by a similar project of still photographs, Empty L.A., from L.A. photographer Matt Logue.
Interesting series from Brooklyn writer Ryan Bradley, where he chronicles a 70-mile walk roundtrip across the L.A. Basin. And he’s not the first to try this stunt. In 2007 British novelist Will Self walked from LAX to his downtown hotel 17 miles away.
You think times are tough for you? At least you don’t own a mall. Once a bulwark of American economy, culture and probably its soul, the shopping mall has fallen on hard times. And to see the decline close up you should check out the site deadmalls.com. So what should we do with this new surfeit of empty big boxes surrounded by oceans of asphalt? There are a few good ideas submitted to Reburbia, a design competition to re-imagine suburbia. One suggestion from the Alabama-based architecture firm Forest Fulton suggests that perhaps the mall should see a reversal of a function and go from being:
Where y’at New Orleans? Four years after Katrina, architects, planners and builders have made messy, heterogeneous efforts at rebuilding the Crescent City. There’s a great article in the recent Atlantic Monthly profiles some of the approaches to rebuilding that are underway.
In the absence of strong central leadership, the rebuilding has atomized into a series of independent neighborhood projects. And this has turned New Orleans—moist, hot, with a fecund substrate that seems to allow almost anything to propagate—into something of a petri dish for ideas about housing and urban life. An assortment of foundations, church groups, academics, corporate titans, Hollywood celebrities, young people with big ideas, and architects on a mission have been working independently to rebuild the city’s neighborhoods, all wholly unconcerned about the missing master plan. It’s at once exhilarating and frightening to behold.
For those workplaces, there’s no longer a need to turn on the lights, elevators or computers on Fridays—nor do janitors need to clean vacant buildings. Electric bills have dropped even further during the summer, thanks to less air-conditioning: Friday’s midday hours have been replaced by cooler mornings and evenings on Monday through Thursday. As of May, the state had saved $1.8 million.
With less people commuting on Friday, the state estimates the new hours have reduced air pollution by an estimated 12,000 metric tons of CO2. And after surveying workers over the past year, there were other surprising findings: 30 percent surveyed said they exercised more, took fewer sickdays, and increased volunteerism.
Walking down the cramped, narrow sidewalks, a visitor could never get a feel for the vastness of the place. Now, standing in the middle of Broadway, you have the sense of being in a big public room, the towering billboards and digital screens pressing in on all sides.
Spend some time exploring the amazing map of the Mannahatta Project. If you zoom in and click around, you can explore every damn block on the island of Manhattan and see what was there before 1609. After nearly ten years of research, landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson, working through the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo, has used old maps and modern spatial analysis techniques to map every hill, valley, stream, spring, beach, forest, cave, wetland, and pond that existed on the island of Mannahatta. It also lists all possible animals, humans, and plants that could have been in there– on every damn block! The project claims the GIS database for the project is the most complete description of a landscape ever attempted. This year marks the 400th anniversary of of Henry Hudson’s arrival in New York Bay and other coinciding history goodness includes the exhibit Mannahatta/Manhattan: A Natural History of New York City, at the Museum of the City of New York and the publication of Sanderson’s book, Mannahatta: Natural History of New York City.
A Twelve year-old boy has solved the earth’s energy crisis. William Yuan, a seventh-grader from Beaverton, Oregon, has developed a new 3D solar cell which provides 500 times more light absorption than commercially-available solar cells. Yuan’s design increases the efficiency of electron movement through carbon nanotubes and enables light absorption from visible to ultraviolet light. He was awarded a $25k scholarship from the Davidson Institute and got on local Portland TV.
And then Google took over the road too. Working with PG&E, Google has launched an initiative to add extra batteries to store energy from the power grid and get double the mpg.
That 60mpg you’re getting from your Prius just not good enough? Then slap some solar panels on it. SEV, a Southern California solar company has developed a system that improves the fuel economy of Toyota hybrids by up to 29% by putting high efficiency mono-crystalline photovoltaic cells on the roof of the car. The SEV system also qualifies for Federal renewable energy tax credits of up to $2,000.
For the past year, South African photographer Pieter Hugo has been photographing Agbogbloshie, a dump of obsolete technology in Ghana. It’s a wasteland, where people and cattle live on mountains of motherboards, monitors and discarded hard drives, is far removed from the benefits accorded by the unrelenting advances of technology. It’s a haunting and dismal glimpse at what becomes of the 50 million tons of digital waste produced each year in the Western world. The exhibit, called Permanent Error, opens tomorrow at the Michael Stevenson Gallery in Capetown, South Africa and runs until September. 
