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The suburb eating robot
Lindsay Patterson, EarthSky Blogs
Australian architect Andrew Maynard’s vision of the future is a highly urbanized world. Forced to abandon cars due to Peak Oil, apartment dwellers look out from dense skyscrapers to their decaying suburbs surrounding the city. And what to do with those suburbs? Trample them with robots.

Not just any robots, though. These are suburb-eating robots. They’re kind of cute, actually. They look like gigantic puppies - except that they’re mechanical beings set to destroy your former home, and they have six legs. According to Maynard’s blueprints, the sixth leg is the “liposuction leg” - sucking up the excess fat caused by the suburb’s sedentary lifestyle, which the robots convert to fuel. Other legs draw up the houses for recycling (leaving behind the footings for the benefit of future archaeologists) and leave a complete flora/fauna ecosystem in its footprint. And what looks like a double tail at the robot’s rear end shoots out now-thin urbanites, and complimentary bicycles. ...
(20 May 2008)
More about the project at architect Maynard's site: CV08 - the suburb eating robot
Interview and article (Architecture MNP)
Image from Maynard's site.

Intent Shapes Environment, Environment Shapes Life
Claude Lewenz, WorldChanging
... In order to have a significant effect, one needs to change the framework for large numbers of people, not simply those who understand the problem. One must remove the need for the product so that its damaging effects are reduced.

An example of this is what happens when one rearranges home, office / workplace, store, school, café and entertainment locations so all are within a 10-minute walk. The need to drive is eliminated, thus thousands of people who move there stop consuming all the direct and indirect products and resources required for daily driving. For people who live in such a place (we call it a parallel village) the loss of the car is painless. Health improves as the body gets exercise, the lungs need not filter the pollutants, and the young, elderly and distracted do not get run over by fast moving steel boxes. The thousands of dollars each person spends on vehicles and fuel becomes free for other purposes (or one can live well earning less). Time becomes available. One has time and proximity to meet people on the plaza, to enjoy a cup of coffee and a read of the paper in the time one would have been stuck in traffic. All these benefits to the natural environment come by changing the physical environment.
(18 May 2008)

Pedicabs a hit in Bellingham
Cat Sieh, Bellingham Herald
Tricycle rigs ferry passengers across Bellingham three nights a week
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BELLINGHAM - It’s 10 on a brisk Friday night, and in a small garage off Holly Street dubbed “the Batcave,” Levin Kegy is suiting up for work.

As he pulls up his striped socks and straps on a shiny gold fanny pack, he mounts a 175-pound tricycle and hangs a noisemaking children’s toy from the back of his belt.

“For the drunks,” he explains.

A moment later, Kegy, 24, and three others descend upon downtown astride formidable trike-and-chariot rigs owned by Cascadia Cabs, a pedicab service founded by Bellingham resident Ryan Hashagen.

Though Hashagen, 25, started the company riding a single pedicab in downtown Bellingham last summer, the local fleet now boasts four trikes, and the service has been launched in Seattle and Portland, Ore., with plans for service in Vancouver, B.C., by the end of the month.
(20 May 2008)

Rob Hopkins on Permaculture and the Kinsale College (interview)
Graham Strouts, Zone5
To mark the end of an era and the retirement of John Thuillier as director of the Kinsale FEC, Zone5 has managed to secure this exclusive and enlightening interview with Rob Hopkins who founded the unique 2-year course in Practical Sustainability 7 years ago. Thanks also to Rob for sending on some photos from the early days of the course which I have placed though the interview along with some recent ones from the past year.

...Rob Hopkins: It is often said that permaculture is about becoming a generalist, not an expert, and Transition is very much based on that too, so my time in Kinsale allowed me very much to deepen my generalism and to become, as Albert Bates puts it, a well qualified post-petroleumologist.

Q: In what areas do you think permaculture has proved itself in practice?

Rob Hopkins: My sense is that where permaculture is coming more and more to the fore is not as techniques but as guiding design principles. My thinking with Transition was to design a way of making those principles implicit but not explicit. David Holmgren’s book on permaculture principles makes clear that for many permaculture is about herb spirals or forest gardens, and many of those practical applications, such as edible landscaping, edible landscaping have become increasingly adopted although rarely credited to permaculture. I think permaculture has proved to have the insights in terms of design and how we pull together the disparate elements of a post oil society which are desparately needed at this time. I do think that permaculture hasn’t been great at documenting, testing and researching. Where are the good examples, what are the yields, what definitely works and what doesn’t? Why are there still only a handful of professional permaculture design consultancies out there? Goodness knows we need them…

Q: What is the most important contribution permaculture can make as we travel down the learning curve?

Rob Hopkins: It can retrain an astonishingly useless culture, it can help take the fear out of this transition by re-empowering people and showing them the energy that there is in working with other people, it can offer principles to underpin what we do and it can create tangible models, demonstrations of post-oil living. We should remember that permaculture first emerged in the first oil shocks of the 1970s, and it is now, as we enter the second oil shocks, that we will increasingly need it again, and that more and more people will see the relevance of it.
(21 May 2008)

Dmitry Orlov details the Collapse Party Platform
"Beyond Civilized and Primitive" (audio)
KMO, C-Realm Podcast Episode 98:
First, Dmitry Orlov details the Collapse Party Platform: a list of initiatives that acknowledge the danger of collapse and, if implemented, would make near-future America a more livable place than the destination that political business-as-usual will produce. After that, Ran Prieur shines a harsh but instructive light of reality on a few cherished neo-primitivist fantasies.
Show notes: kmo.livejournal.com/351975.html
(21 May 2008)