TED talk on building with clay and ...community

Once again, a very inspiring TED talk, now by Diébédo Francis Kéré, who was educated as an architect and looked for a way that his community in Burkina Faso could benefit from his education.

Container gardening

Another untraditional form of gardening or farming, apart from urban farming, is container gardening or vertical gardening. There are many initiatives and some are less sustainable than they seem, as is shown in the Low-tech Magazine. But on this blog, the Belgian honorary professor Willem Van Cothem, who is a specialist in desertification, poverty and dryland gardening, tries to collect all kinds of interesting and useful information on container gardening.

The Blue Economy

The Blue Economy is going a step further than the Green Economy. 
According to Gunther Pauli, founder of Ecover and author of 'The Blue Economy', the Green Economy leads to green solutions that are more expensive than the traditional ones, thus only feasible for the happy few (the rich ones).
The Blue Economy aims at looking for solutions that are both sustainable and affordable.
The Zero Energy Research Institute (ZERI) has been set up as a world wide network of researchers and entrepreneurs searching for this kind of solutions. Already 99 cases have been collected and every week a new case is presented.

 

Studio H and the student-built farmer's market pavilion

Farmer's market pavilion (source: The Smart Planet)

Studio H tries to use design and construction of public architecture by high school students as a way to educate these students and at the same time to empower the poorest rural communities in America.
A nice recent example of what they realise is the farmer's market pavilion in Bertie County, North-Carolina.
The curriculum concept of Studio H is freely online available.

I posted earlier the inspiring TED talk with one of the founders of Studio H, Emily Pilloton.