Seeking Partners: Waste Note, A Segment of the New York City (Steady) State Project

Recognizing the importance of waste as a global issue, Waste Not, a forthcoming volume of the New York City (Steady) State project, investigates the creation of a system without waste. Beginning in New York, we are trying to imagine a world without waste.

Looking systematically at the city’s styles and outputs of waste, our study focuses on changing consumption habits that are based on disposability, on the creation of products and practices that induce a looping, “cradle to cradle” approach, and on the potential morphological changes in the city that will be the outcome and support for this vision.

We are looking up and down the waste chain, seeking to clear streets from piles of garbage bags, to eliminate the need for landfills and disposal, to end the toxic processes of extraction, manufacture and delivery and to radically reduce the pernicious “externalities” of the global net of negative production.

As part of this study we are “crowd-sourcing” solutions at every scale with applicability to New York. How, for example, might a city block function if one lane of every roadway were to be taken from the automotive realm and devoted to new forms of sustainability. What apparatus could be designed and added to support recycling and re-use, composting, assembly and distribution, education and broader forms of environmental management. How might such systems be scaled up to neighborhoods and down to buildings and apartments? How will the post-waste urban landscape look, feel, and perform? We welcome visions both modest and extensive for the encyclopaedia we are compiling.

Waste Not: Crowdsource: We invite contributions in the forms of texts, designs, and documentations that address issues at the intersection of cities, design, urbanization, and sustainability. 

New Project, Second Growth, Calls for Ideas & Contributors

As the world’s cities are expanding exponentially and new growth is visible everywhere, Second Growth is a project to think about patterns of succession for these ubiquitous environments, whether found on the vast peripheries of the cities of China, in new developments in India, or in the mass housing projects that checker Europe and America.

We all know the pattern: the disengaged, uniform, towers, employment at a distance, a life without streets, no culture, minimal infrastructure, boredom, estrangement, the concrete denial of neighborliness. Therefore, we focus in particular on those that are the legacy of modernist writ, spaces of single use, designed for cars, often standing in alienating isolation, and informed by the powerful fantasy of individual buildings afloat in fields of green.
 
Second Growth is a speculation about strategies for transforming these places into sustainable, humane, equitable, and beautiful environments. The ambition of the project is not to investigate this too general condition but to propose–with aspirations both practical and polemical–forms and directions for its transformation.

Second Growth Crowdsource: We invite contributions in the forms of texts, designs, and documentations that address issues at the intersection of cities, design, urbanization, and sustainability.