Neighborhood Design

West Villageblog.
segd.org/2010/03/going-green-at-uc-davis/

        West Village is a new sustainable neighborhood project that has 6 main general goals that are ideal for a sustainable and successful developed area. They include type of building, access to/around the area, space, transit, mix use, and environmental strategies. Village Homes has similar goals, walking and biking, drainage, agriculture, nature, and community, but inevitably the way in which Village Homes was carried out is much more personal than West Village and really does create a community.
       Not only did tenants get to help build and put in their own time, but they were consulted during the creation, about land use expectations and ideal living characteristics. In terms of individual behavior, this community design was about the individuals behavior. In other words, it helped make individuals behaviors to be convenient, efficient, and aesthetically pleasing, while West Village is not catered to the individuals behavior, but more of a group behavior, which in turn could create a cohesive community. There is a bigger picture in West Village, one that is closer to other neighborhoods, while Village Homes takes to pushing boundaires and trying new things that haven't yet been done.

Both have the positive goal of achieving a sustainable living area, where we incorporate the knowledge we have learned about living in harmony with the ecosystem, but on different scales and catered to slightly different people.

Village Homes in Davis, California (photo by Wayne Senville, Planning Comm'rs Journal, www.plannersweb.com).
It goes to show that the individuals behavior is important if you are designing for an individual and their sustainable habits. It can be looked at the other way by shaping the landscape to encourage and potentially change behavior in numbers using design.

Transportation

When I go walking, an obvious thing to notice is smaller objects, such as the leaves on the ground, the bird poop, the rain drops on the grass blades. I also found that I had more interest in my surroundings, when i saw two squirrels playing, I could easily stop and watch them for a bit.
On a bike, I feel connected with nature on a different level, because the elements seem intensified. If it is windy, the wind seems more strong, if it is raining, it is raining harder while on my bike. I see things in an anticipated world, when I get to this tree, who will I dodge or hit or turn to miss, and is that squirrel going to turn and run or stay in the middle of the road.
In the car, I was not looking at nature so much, but I was distracted by the TV on the ceiling of the minivan in front of  us. I saw the lights change and the driveways to the parking lot entrance where I saw empty parking spots.
On the bus, I saw landscape, fast, but moving horizontally past, and lots of interesting people. The noise of the bus drowns out the outside and gives me the feel of a silent film, where I have to fill in the lines.

Cultural norms have a much stronger impact than we notice during the day. But the norms are decided by design, and convenience, they are not mutually exclusive. In Daivs, it is convenient to bike, the city and especially campus have lots of paths and parking, and driving is expensive and doesn't really get you close to class. In San Diego where I grew up, it was hilly and designed around the car. My high school was around 12 miles away, and the one time I tried biking to school I had to wake up 2 hours earlier than usual and didn't get home that night till dusk. I didn't do it again.
If we design the landscape correctly, we can practically choose the norms that people will carry out. True, I might need a plane to get home for the holidays and a bus to get to the airport, but I'm not doing them often, so the norm is what is most  convenient, and that is biking or walking.

Footprints

Last year at my work someone showed me the sight that we were suppose to look at that calculates your carbon footprint and puts it in perspective to the earth. I remember that living in Davis, my lifestyle had already changed a lot from basically never driving and only flying home for the breaks. That was were I differentiated myself the most from the average person, which I was again after going to coolcalifornia.org. Using coolcalifornia.org is not as easy to understand and things are a bit more ambiguous. But what I did understand was that if everyone could bike around most of the time, it would easily drop peoples percentages, but the only way to make it convenient for people to bike or take transportation is to design cities around the bike and public transit instead of the car and the over-implementation of free-ways. So it is hard to say if I will be able to stay below average in the transportation portion of the calculation, but that only means that people who don't have a lot of choices on how to get to work or school can and should make that active choice to be below average in another category, like shopping and eating.
Lately, after our waste discussion, I have already tried to reduce the amount of landfill items I am purchasing, and making the extra effort to re-use the things that can not be broken down easily by the earth. If everyone made an effort, it would become standard, just like seat-belts. All the car companies thought it would be more expensive and make them loose tons of money because they had to put in a seat-belt, but it ends up saving people more money since less people are less likely to get hurt, insurance stops having to spend as much, and the chain reaction may not be immediate but it is there, and when people decide that less wasting is standard, there will be an immediate chain reaction in a positive direction.

recycle, reuse.... does it reduce?

After watching the two videos on trash, I was shocked at how little I really understood about recycling. The idea is great, but its effectiveness is only relative and in many cases has a tragic outcome that is only found if you are looking for it. To reduce our waste, it is going to take more than separating paper and plastic into containers when we throw out our "trash." Its going to have to mean using LESS OF IT; "it" being man-made materials that realistically only humans can reuse, and creating more "trash" that is of natural/biodegradable components that can re-enter the circle of the revolving ecosystem of our planet.

Unfortunately, my idea of recycling has changed, and while in my mental dictionary it no longer has a positive connotation, it is none the less more accurate and true to its nature. Recylcing simply means re-using.
That is it.
It does not mean reusing ALL of something, or even re-using that object in the best way possible. It does not mean that there is less "waste" involved, in fact, the movies show that sometimes it can be harmful to re-use the things we throw away and just makes more waste in lots more little pieces.

The contrasting points that the videos had complemented each other visually and metaphorically. The first video about recycling gone wrong has visual elements of clutter, of piles and piles of rubbish and small scraps of unwanted objects. A visual picture of how much we end up not using in our consumption loving economy.
The second film is just the opposite, with gaping wholes of places where humans have become greedy and taken so much from the earth that we can change the topography of the land. Large empty spaces that were once untouched are now somewhere else, somewhere "unnatural." (probably in those big piles)


It is like comparing an obese person to a starving person, neither of them are good because they lie at both extremes, and one inevitably causes the other. Didn't our parents teach us to share? I guess we dont consider nature one of our friends.

Shopping for Food

Talking to a farmer versus talking to a grocery store employee is like talking to your mother and talking to your twice removed seconds cousins mom whom you've never met.
The farmers know everything about what they are selling because they tend to be more specialized, they know best about there product because there isn't as many different things that distract them from their attention to detail. They were friendly and give you samples, which I think is a strategy that says, if you don't believe me that mine is better, see for yourself, and it always is.
While a grocery store is "convenient," its employees and its products show the affects of big businesses and more steps between the food and the consumer. The grocery store employee I talked to was doing the job not because they loved or cared about food, but just to make money. It was not the job that they "dreamed of" or were passionate about, and therefore while being very friendly and a good customer service worker, the position had little to do with the products they were selling.
In whole, buying directly from a farmer makes you feel good because you know you are supporting a hard worker who sells honest products, while buying from a grocery store is so distant and there is no personal connection with the person who is taking your money.
My parents always said that getting a home-made card means more, no matter how it looks, because it is always better, and I think the same goes for food.
Farmers market food may not have the poster board consistency and perfection, but it has more personality, flavor, care and thought when going from the ground to my basket.

Kale

A hearty winter plant that seems to thrive in the cold, kale is a popularly known to be very healthy but not so tasty. Apparently, however, with increasing temperatures the plant leaves become sweeter, something that is always appealing to our taste-buds. It contains calcium, Vitamin C and K, lutein, and helps prevent vision loss with age.
Traveling to the outskirts of the campus was a delightful bike ride. Once at the Mondavi center, I easily found the gardens and was pleasantly surprised at the size of the garden in relation to the space it occupied between buildings. Why didn't all office buildings have gardens in their courtyards? It was just as beautiful as any other botanical garden I have seen, but it also looks great year round since planting can be seasonal. So even now in the winter, things are beginning to creep up out of the ground and provide food to the surrounding community.

I would highly suggest this Mondavi center garden as an example of combining beauty with function for other locations that have a similar layout or any open space, but also for others to visit it and enjoy what is there now and appreciate the progressiveness of our school.