In New York City, officials are hosting a summer program that includes swimming pools made out of dumpsters.
This is the kind of creative thinking that many cities could benefit from. Of course, it only sounds like there are a few of these pools being run by the city and they are each quite small. However, it is a clever reuse of a common object to bring some joy into summer life in the city. And the designer suggests they are cheap to put together.
Chicago Breaking Business reports that Walgreens is about to unveil expanded food offerings in a South Side store in Chicago. The expanded food line at 10 Walgreens stores is part of an effort to help combat the city’s food deserts:
The stores will offer more than 750 new food items such as fresh fruits and vegetables, frozen meat and fish, pasta, rice, beans, eggs and whole-grain cereals. The Deerfield-based drug store chain said it was approached by Mayor Richard Daley last year to bring more healthy food to areas that the city has identified as food deserts, namely neighborhoods that lack supermarkets.
Large American cities often struggle with this issue: low-income neighborhoods that have little or no access to fresh and healthy food. If the only options available are buying food from a convenient store or gas station, it is more expensive and less healthy. In the long run, this has consequences for building wealth and public health.
Reuters reports on “smart growth” initiatives across the United States with Rockville, Maryland as a prime example. With a weakened economy, more buyers seem to prefer locations closer to downtowns where they can walk, more easily access amenities, and avoid some of the pitfalls of suburban sprawl.
From the article:
Rockville’s renaissance over the past four years shows how the shift toward urban-style living has reached the suburbs. And urban planners insist the trend has legs.
Dubbed “smart growth,” the movement favors the development of a mix of housing and businesses in and near existing cities. At the same time, it discourages the Topsy-like growth of peripheral suburbs, known disparagingly as “sprawl.”
“Sprawl” is a term commonly used to describe the suburbs. It implies automobile dependence, spread out houses, strip malls, big box stores, and a lack of open space. In contrast, “smart growth” offers something different: more dense development, mixed-use development, more thought-through development principles, and a lessened reliance on automobiles.
More suburban communities seem to desire “smart growth,” particularly to help revive their downtowns. This translates into certain development goals: building around existing transportation facilities (like railroads), constructing condos and more dense residential units, and seeking to attract dining, retail, and entertainment uses that can expand a downtown from just a place to errands in during the day.
h/t The Infrastructurist
A British man recently completed an impressive walk: the entire length of the Amazon. The journey took two and a half years and he is supposedly the first human to make the entire hike.
I am slightly amazed that there are still feats like this left to accomplish. Even as we often think of ourselves as very modern people, there are parts of the Earth that we still know little about or few people have ever seen. The journey drew the attention of another famous explorer:
His feat earned the praise of no less an adventurer than Sir Ranulph Fiennes, a fellow Briton whom the Guinness Book of World Records describes as the “world’s greatest living explorer.”
“To do all this in more than 800 continuous days with just a backpack puts Stafford’s endeavor in the top league of expeditions past and present,” Fiennes wrote on Stafford’s website.
Remarkable – and it sounds like he had many interesting experiences along the way.
The heat of the summer is often equated with positive things: sun, outdoor activities, the beach, and driving with the windows open or convertible top down.
But the heat can also cause and expose issues in a society. In Russia, there has been record heat and a staggering number of deaths:
On Monday, Moscow health authorities announced that the number of deaths each day in the capital had nearly doubled to 700 as most of central Russia entered the seventh week of a heat wave. The high temperatures, hovering around 100 degrees, have destroyed 30% of the nation’s grain crops and triggered massive peat bog and forest fires that alone have killed more than 50 people and devastated dozens of villages.
Andrei Seltsovsky, chief of Moscow’s health department, said the city’s morgues were filled almost to capacity, with 1,300 of the 1,500 slots taken. He suggested that residents, instead of following Russian Orthodox tradition of holding burials on the third day after death, bury loved ones sooner.
This sort of event is not isolated to Moscow. Something similar happened in Chicago in 1995. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg wrote about the summer in the book Heat Wave: Social Autopsy of a Disaster in Chicago. In an interview, Klinenberg discussed the book. There were some controversy over the “official death count.” Cook County’s chief medical examiner reported 465 deaths related to the heat for the hottest week but the numbers were disputed by Mayor Daley.
Additionally, the death rates differed by race:
The actual death tolls for African Americans and whites were almost identical, but those numbers are misleading. There are far more elderly whites than elderly African Americans in Chicago, and when the Chicago Public Health Department considered the age differences, they found that the black/white mortality ratio was 1.5 to 1. Another surprising fact that emerged is that Latinos, who represent about 25 percent of the city population and are disproportionately poor and sick, accounted for only 2 percent of the heat-related deaths.
So heat can help expose the disadvantaged in society, those who have no or little access to air conditioning, are often alone, and have no one to check in on them. Since that summer in Chicago, the city has opened “cooling centers” (which are available now all over the state of Illinois) to provide a place for those who don’t have other options. Measures like these have cut down on heat-related deaths in Chicago – it remains to be seen what Moscow will do to help with this current and future heat waves.
Farming is not a common occupation in the United States today. According to these figures from the EPA, less than 1% of Americans claim farming as an occupation and about 2% of people live on farms.
Yet the Boston Globe reports that farming is on the upswing in Massachusetts. According to the figures:
From 2002 to 2007, the number of farms in Massachusetts jumped by about 27 percent to 7,691, according to the US Department of Agriculture census. That’s a reversal from the previous five years, when there was a 20 percent drop in the number of farms and, presumably, farmers, many of whom sold land to developers.
But the start-up farms are smaller than the family enterprises of the past. The average farm in Massachusetts, 85 acres in 2002, was 67 acres five years later.
American society experienced such a shift away from agriculture from the late 1800s to today that I wonder if this is part of a shift toward a slightly more balanced world between agriculture and other sectors of society. There are plenty of books and pundits talking about how we are disconnected from the land and our food – perhaps a new generation is listening (and the article does make it sound like many of the new farmers are younger) and charting a new course.
(Even after an upswing, the number of farms in Massachusetts is still small. A lot more people would need to go into agriculture to become a movement.)
The Financial Times reports an increased number of Americans are looking to turn in their American passports at the UK embassy. The waiting list is growing apparently because Americans are looking to avoid paying taxes on worldwide income and capital gains. As the article notes, the main disadvantage is that a person may not be able to reverse their choice.
It would be interesting to know how many people do this each year. Switching allegiances from one particular country to another seems like a weighty decision.
The New York Post reports on a man “selling grilled cheese on the black market.”
Vanity Fair comments on the story and concludes: “It goes without saying that this seedy sociological phenomenon, like many others, will likely be optioned into a David Simon–HBO series.”
My wife and I recently visited the Field Museum in Chicago. She had never been there and while I have been there a number of times, my most recent visit was about 10 years ago. We didn’t see everything but there was a lot of variety in our five hours. Some quick thoughts about one of the major museums in Chicago:
1. The museum has a range of exhibits, from ancient Egypt to modern Africa to animals to dinosaurs to gemstones to plants. There is a lot to take in and hold the interest of a variety of people.
2. We both agreed on the best exhibit: a temporary exhibit titled “Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age.” While the main attraction here was a recently discovered young mammoth named Lyuba, the whole exhibit was informative and interesting. We saw plenty of tusks, video presentations about different kinds of research involving these animals, bone and tooth casts we could touch, and more. This exhibit it well worth seeing.
3. We both felt some exhibits were much more interesting (and modern) than others. The exhibit “The Ancient Americas” was great from early peoples through Northwest and Arctic peoples. However, the displays for Native Americans was stuck in the 1960s (or perhaps earlier) and is lacking compared to the others. The gemstone exhibit had been updated since I last saw it and both the modern Africa and Pacific Spirits galleries were interesting. The stuffed animals on the first floor from Africa and Asia look dated plus a number of the animals are in local zoos. Overall, it looks like the museum has worked hard to update a number of exhibits but some still need some work.
4. The price seems to be getting out of hand. We paid $22 a person for the Discovery Pass, a ticket that allows you into one special exhibit (and we choose the Mammoths and Mastodons). Even the Basic Admission is $15. If one were taking the family of four to the museum, it would cost at $60 for tickets (up to $116 for four All Access tickets) plus $19 for parking in one of the museum’s lots. Add in a quick meal at the Corner Bakery or McDonald’s (both inside the museum) and this is an expensive day at the museum.
For those looking to learn more about other cultures, animals, and nature, the Field Museum is an enjoyable place to visit.
President Obama spoke in Detroit on Friday and The Atlantic examines four viewpoints about whether recent policies helped save the auto industry. Opinions are mixed.
The two more negative opinions are from Detroit journalists.
