CNY ecoBlog

I happened to catch a little of our favorite urbanist, Richard Florida, on talk of the Nation yesterday. In case anyone is interested here is the NPR link- Why ‘Where’ Is More Important than ‘Who’ or ‘What’ – this contains a link to the radio stream and some other content.

Florida’s contributions to urban planning [...]

From The Post Standard news site (by Tim Knauss):

Syracusans contribute more per person to global warming than the residents of any other major city in New York, and far more than people in smog-filled Los Angeles, according to a study released today by the Brookings Institution.

Residents of the Syracuse metropolitan area—including Onondaga, Madison and [...]

EcoVillage at Ithaca (EVI) is a local “ecovilliage” in upstate New York where residence live share in a variety of community responsibilities, attempt to maintain a sustainable, low-impact lifetyle, and present an alternative vision of suburban living. The “village currently includes two 30-home cohousing neighborhoods, an organic CSA vegetable farm, an organic berry [...]

The need to cultivate a “creative class” in a region has become a recurring theme in discussions about economic development and planning in Central New York – and elsewhere. The organization “40 Below” is certainly an outgrowth of this thinking; and here is a recent article in the Albany Time-Union, “How to turn Albany [...]

Albany’s Times-Union has an interesting blurb on the seminar “Can Upstate Cities Save Themselves?” at the Albany Institute of History and Art. Of course it boils down to redesigning our cities, the young are fleeing upstate (oh dear!), economic development, blah blah blah. Anyone even remotely familiar with the upstate blogosphere should be [...]

A number of newspapers are reporting on a State comptrollers report on Special town districts. Statewide there are 6927 special district and 4200 local governments while New Yorkers pay some of the highest property taxes in the Nation. The implication of course is that these special districts and other inefficiencies in local government [...]

This Newsday article, Interest in sewers no longer buried, discusses the role sewage plays in limiting development in Suffolk county; not specifically related to Upstate New York, but it has some interesting facts about development, public works and planning that are interesting.  The take-home message:
The mathematics of sewage…trumps all zoning. The greater their output, the [...]

From the Rochester D & CThe Big Boxes are getting a makeover.

Developers and municipalities are working more closely together to create buildings that blend in with the community.
Good enough. But as I’m reading this article, I’m realizing that this supposed national trend is about changing “facades”. Is good design really just about aesthetics?

A [...]

Using satellite data, aerial photography and other GIS technologies researchers from the University of Toronto analyzed the phenomena of sprawl at a continental scale. This research was reported earlier this month at Terradaily.com.

Though urban sprawl is widely regarded as an important environmental and social problem, according to the authors, much of the [...]

ESF hosted the NPR program Science Friday yesterday. The first segment discussed alternative energy in upstate New York and the second focused on the decline of Upstate, Green Urban Renewal and Destiny. If you missed the program you can listen to the broadcasts on the NPR website: renewable energy and Mega Mall. [...]