Assignment 12 Richard Dalton

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601130&sid=aOiCpp9Xi1pk&refer=environment

Article 1, “NYC Opens 1st Building-Mounted Wind Turbine at Brooklyn Yard”

By title it appears that this article would focus on a $25 million building, which is powered by wind turbines at Brooklyn Yard. However, the real focus is on a plan that Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City unveiled to create a model sustainable industrial complex, which could lead to the creation of 1700 permanent jobs including construction sector and green collar employment.

What is demonstrated in the article is the City’s buy-in to the sustainable planning process through cooperation and financial backing of the greening of buildings in the Brooklyn Yard Complex. The city is implementing a $250 initiative that will add more than 1.5 million square feet of space that will foster a multitude of diverse development. In addition, the city has earmarked $2 million dollars to convert and redesign a 30,000 square-foot building, which is slated to be awarded a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating of platinum.

LEED is a mechanism to incorporate sustainability into the planning process at the design stage by establishing technological benchmarks to gauge sustainable practice. As Wheeler points out, often times protocol, such as LEED, can be prohibitive (Wheeler, Pg. 94), but in this application it facilitates the project form that Bloomberg is trying to achieve, which is city commitment to the sustainability process and goal.

The article concludes by expanding the scope of the Mayor’s intent through announcing that the wind power concept will be expanded to the common area street lights, which will result in a cost savings and reduced carbon footprint through less electricity generation. The term carbon foot print was not stated in the article, but I contend that it was not an accident to conclude with the tone of money and energy. These subject hit home to, and the wallet of, everybody. The savings cited in both sectors may have been a subtitle way of public consensus building.


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/business/worldbusiness/27iht-sustain.html?_r=1&sq=sustainability%20&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=print

Article 2, “Luxury-Goods Makers Embrace Sustainability”

This article discusses the incorporation of sustainable practices and social responsibility into various markets of luxury goods. The article starts citing the implied oxy-moron of the term sustainable prefacing luxury. This distinction correctly illustrates that the presence of most luxury items are sustainable in design, and ultimately have led to global resource depletion. Since a number of luxury goods are often produced by resource and labor pools of developing countries for sale and consumption in the developed world, this can be classified as an issue of international planning.

Sustainability from the context of the developed and developing have two completely different connotation. Yet, as Wheeler cites, from a planning perspective there are common goals (compact urban form, control sprawl, employment, resource use etc...)(Wheeler, pg. 112)

This article implies and taps into the commonalities between the developed and developing world from the stand point of luxury goods. The ideas of fast and slow in a market context are applied to the fashion and food industries. The fast concept suggests quick, cheap, and perishable production of goods, which are designed to be consumed to completion quickly and then discarded only to be replaced by different goods. The slow concept suggests efficient production designed to last, which is cited to be based on the slow food idea that embraces slow cooking process, and the use of seasonally produced local resource stocks. The fast food concept is not sated, but certainly an implied metaphor.

Also referenced is the construction of water wells by the Ermenegildo Company to in Mongolia and Peru. The intent of the wells was to improve the wool harvest, but yielded a positive externality to local farmers in these traditionally water parched regions.

The conjoining interest of a market demand for socially responsible production can be attributed to education and outreach campaigns in the developed world to be sustainable and the well production and slow methods cited in this article give a conceptual viability to meeting this demand while recognizing that some of the affected countries are still addressing some of the basic challenges in the planning process.