Aug 12, 2008 6:22 pm
Unconventional Thinking on the Farm and in the City
Came across some innovative new thoughts about street design when I was on The Bostonist this morning. The article talks about redesigning Boston’s streets to be more amenable to pedestrians, by applying some rather subtle psychological tricks, which is encapsulated in the “Shared Space” philosophy of street design:
The curb is a big enemy in the Shared Space philosophy, because the curb is a separator, dictating what belongs to the pedestrian and what belongs to the vehicle. There are other enemies as well: signs, lines on the road, even traffic lights. Pioneered by Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman, who died earlier this year at age 62, Shared Space gets the street naked, removes all physical and psychological barriers, and forces cars and pedestrians to share. The concept makes the street safe by making it dangerous to proceed without paying attention. We have some elements of Shared Space here; in Downtown Crossing, Winter and Summer streets have no curb and, in the mornings, commercial vehicles mix with pedestrians.
[via Boston Globe]
On an unrelated note, this type of unconventional, wholistic thinking reminds me of a passage in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which I’ve just now managed to jump on the bandwagon and read. The book has chapter after chapter of enlightening–and sometimes shocking–stories about food, farming, industry, etc, but one of the most remarkable sections was about a agricultural (and political) radical named Joel Salatin and his “beyond organic” approach to farming.
[Joel] doesn’t spray any pesticides or medicate his animals unless they are ill…“doing it right” for Salatin means simulating an ecosystem in all its diversity and interdependence, and allowing the species in it “to fully express their physiological distinctiveness.” Which means that the cows, being herbivores, eat nothing but grass and move to fresh ground every day; and that chickens live in flocks of about 800, as they would in nature, and turkeys in groups of 100. And, as in nature, birds follow and clean up after the herbivores—for in nature there is no “waste problem,” since one species’ waste becomes another’s lunch. When a farmer observes these rules, he has no sanitation problems and none of the diseases that result from raising a single species in tight quarters and feeding it things evolution hasn’t designed it to eat.
["Sustaining Vision" by Michael Pollan]
The above excerpt is from an essay which is partly included in the book, but the book continues on to detail the various ways that Salatin achieves what seems to be a self-sustaining ecosystem on his farm, all the while producing extremely high quality food without using petroleum-based fertilizers. It’s all quite ingenious, although you might want to read some of Pollan’s other writings (which are also included in the book) on the “organic industrial” mode of farming to fully appreciate the challenges–and temptations–that Salatin’s methods have overcome. The elegance of the whole set up (which, yes, is probably exaggerated a little by Pollan’s own sympathies) is almost enough to make me want to try farming myself.
Here are some more essays by Pollan and a talk he gave at last year’s TED conference:
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