9.09.2011
For the 3rd time, here is what you need to know about Oakland's Energy and Climate Action Plan
8.11.2011
Goodbye from the Bay
8.09.2011
Good TED talk about cities - "The Shareable Future of Cities"
8.08.2011
Bill McKibben in Oakland
Oakland, CA: Bill McKibben at The Chabot Science Center | |
September 9, 2011 6:00 PM | |
10000 Skyline Boulevard Oakland, California |
8.05.2011
The Air We Breathe
8.04.2011
Oakland in Action!
Oakland is bustling these days. Community pride and solidarity are on the rise. The green scene is quickly evolving and has a very different look and feel than Berkeley's. This event is quintessential of early 2010s era eco-consciousness, homegrown in Oakland. The list of service projects below should give you a taste of the Town... Check out the map at
Throw Down for the Town: The Oakland Service Festival
On August 13, the Ella Baker Center will lead Oakland in the first Oakland Service Festival and we hope that you will join us! We've confirmed over 20 service projects throughout Oakland that need your help to succeed.
Sign up for a project now
From urban gardens to beautifying Lake Merritt, sign up for a project to help our city thrive. Click on the map pins below for sign up links (or scroll down to the list).
Oakland Service Festival Schedule
- Saturday, August 13, 2011
- 10:00 AM - 2:00 PM, 20+ service projects throughout Oakland
- 2:00 PM - 6:00 PM, Mosswood Park Celebration
After four hours of people-powered community service, join the celebration at Mosswood Park. There will be food for volunteers, dance, and a solar paneled hip-hop concert. This is a family-friendly event and an opportunity to build community after a hard day's work.
We hope you will join us for this exciting event as we Throw Down for the Town.
Oakland Service Festival Projects - Mapped:
Oakland Service Festival Projects - Listed
- Beautify Jefferson Park with First Unitarian Church of Oakland, Jefferson Square Park, Oakland 94607
- Beautify Lafayette Park with First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 635 11th St, Oakland 94612
- Beautify Laney College with the Gammas, East 10th Street and 2nd St, Oakland, 94606
- Beautify the Bus Stop, 14th Ave and E 15th St, Oakland 94606
- Book Room Setup with East Bay Children's Book Project, Mosswood Recreation Center, 3612 Webster, Oakland, 94609
- Community Market with City Slicker Farms, 16th and Center Streets, Oakland, CA
- Courtland Creek Beautification with ACE Arts, Courtland Creek, Oakland 94619
- Create a Dog Park with ODOG, 5144 Broadway, Oakland 94611
- Deep East Deep Clean with Youth Uprising and TransFormCA, 8200 International Boulevard, Oakland 94621-2234
- Library Overhaul with GO Public Schools, Garfield Elementary School. 1640 22nd ave, Oakland 94606
- Senior Service with Piedmont Gardens, 110 41 St, Oakland 94611
- Urban Garden Project, Acorn Woodland Elementary. 1025 81st Ave, Oakland 94621
- Urban Gardening at St. Columba, St Columba Catholic Church. 6401 San Pablo Ave, Oakland 94608
- Bringing Back the Community Garden, 9600 Sunnyside St, Oakland 94603
- Canvas to Take Back Oakland Block by Block, 18th and Adeline, Oakland 94607
- Honor the Hungry with Alameda County Community Food Bank, 675 23rd Street Oakland 94612
- Build Day with Habitat for Humanity, 970 81st St, Oakland 94621
- Lake Cleanup with Lake Merritt Institute, Boating Center. 568 Bellevue Ave, Oakland 94610
- Re-greening Cesar Chavez Park with the Unity Council, 3700 Foothill Blvd, Oakland 94601
- Senior Bingo with Convenant House (FULL), 5636 Bancroft Ave, Oakland 94605
- Survey Collection with EBASE, Mosswood Park. MacArthur blvd and Broadway, Oakland 94611
- Tree Planting with Urban Releaf, Market St & Mead Ave Oakland, CA 94607
- Urban Gardening with People's Grocery, The California Hotel. 3501 San Pablo Ave, Emeryville 94608
- Urban Gardening with United Roots, 2781 Telegraph, Oakland 94612
- Wetlands Restoration with Save the Bay, Martin Luther King Jr Regional Shoreline, Oakland 94621
7.28.2011
Greywater and Garden Parties
7.22.2011
Bikes 4 Life! Community Ride this Saturday!
A fun way to get to know Oakland's 'greening the ghetto' movement... by bike! This ride never fails to impress...
The Green Tax Shift
Enjoy Stuart McMillen's popular communiqué of the green tax shift. Does this paradigm have potential as one of a smart planner's strategies to realize new urban outcomes within current structures?
Through popular advocacy, working with movers and shakers, and more than a little strategic thinking, perhaps a new paradigm may emerge that harnesses market forces to internalize costs of production and to respond to climate change.
Credits: Image of Green Tax Shift from www.recombinantrecords.net.
What is Sustainability? A Reindeer Story
Harking back to the earlier discussion of sustainability, I thought of an illustrated reindeer story I came across a couple of months ago. This narrative captures what we, perhaps most brutally, mean by sustainability.
Click on the above picture to follow the link to the Stuart's blog, and then click on the picture again to read the story.
With the complexity and fragmentation of planning, financing, and development, what are the implications for our role in communicating and helping to realize the need to manage our and future generations' ecological footprint? For now, we too are on our own little island.
Credits: Image of St. Matthew Island from www.recombinantrecords.net.
7.19.2011
Intersection of problems
Graffiti in Cities: A Symbol of Economic Downturn??
7.18.2011
Better Work, Better Pay
While at [IN]City, I’ve been wondering why public city planners exist at all.
I'm definitely being a little naive here, but honestly one of the things I really hope to learn through the program is one great reason why cities need planners. For one, what do they do on a day-to-day basis? If they aren’t working on a development project, what could they be doing? Collecting data? Doing Research? Even if this is true, any kind of research probably needs at least 5 years before it becomes valuable or actionable upon. So I ask again, what do planners do on a day-to-day basis that makes them valuable to a city? It seems to me that when states and cities need to tighten their belts, the planning department would be an easy decision to cut.
Instead, what if all city planners graduated and took jobs in the private sector at engineering/design firms, or started firms themselves? The way I think about it, any planner that works for a city that has funds to develop a project probably needs to contract out to a firm like AECOM or Parsons anyway to get the site actually built. These firms easily attract design talent and thus have the expertise to probably take care of any prior research and surveying that the city planner does anyway. So why the need for a standing city planner within the city budget?
Cities should look to hire private firms and either keep them on a retainer to carry out all research, design, and implementation of zoning laws, development, and other duties planners are responsible for, or hire them on and off when needed. Not only will the private sector be more efficient in both quality, cost management, and time, but they will be able to provide end-user solutions that cities could only dream about.
For example, suppose New York wanted to map out pedestrian traffic volume flows to build a new pedestrian mall for the summer streets program. It could hire IBM to carry out all studies and oversee the installation of any infrastructure sensors and monitors. IBM could set up a web portal for the city to utilize and see real time data, something the city would never be able to achieve within any budget or timeline. IBM could then work with a private engineering/design firm that shares the same technological advantage to actual build the pedestrian mall. All the city has to worry about is cutting a check (or two in this case). In case there were privacy issues about either company having access to information, the city could purchase the entire system and hire these companies on retainer.
Think about the SFPark system we heard about today. That kind of system, while funded by a Federal Grant for $20 million, could have easily been funded by a VC in the Valley, Austin, or NY and formed as a "city planning startup" or something like that. In the VC industry, $20 million is change at this point (although some would argue that we are in a VC bubble at the moment). In any case, although the number of VCs has decreased, the overall funds being raised by funds around the country by unnamed millionaires and billionaires has increased by 70% since last year. Startups are not only good for the economy, but I think that a new batch of startups focused on public goods like city planning, but with the efficiency and profit motivation of private firms would be extremely beneficial to our industry. With investment money, any type of "city planning startup" would be able to attract the necessary talent and build systems like SFPark rapidly. And as we are learning quite quickly, being a good city planner means having knowledge of law, politics, design, geography, and a host of other subjects.
For those of you who follow the space industry, we are about to see a similar market environment evolve over the next few years.NASA, with its final launch of Atlantis, is pursuing a strategy of disbursing funds to private companies for space projects. All it has to worry about is the final dollar amount, not all the costs associated with it. Private Firms will surely fare better.
Some probably have a view that in the public sector, planners are more aware of low income and public good projects. But even these projects cannot be realized unless the city has funds to pursue them. Therefore, if the city has funds it is willing to spend, why not use a more efficient, better organized private firm to carry out all research and implementation. As long as there are funds for the project, any private firm would be interested. With the US about to lose it's perfect Triple AAA credit rating, and many states struggling to pay their debts, the big projects we've been talking and learning about are great, but at the end of the day there needs to be some kind of return generated for us to remain competitive. Another century of losses on highways and railways won't work. With a private dependence, projects would be sure to produce a suitable return for cities, states, and the country to get back on track to fund other projects depending on the profit split.
And with many boutique design firms out there competing with larger ones, and hopefully with the addition of some startups, the market will be saturated enough so that there will be reasonably competitive prices so cities don't spend more than they have to. It's becoming quite clear that you'll need to devote a good portion of your time to only a few projects at the public level, and there's a good chance a majority of them might not come to fruition. Is it worth it?
The private option seems like a win-win-win situation for cities, planners, and residents.