Susan Dieterlen
  • Home
  • Bookshelf
  • City Wild Blog
  • Workshops and Classes
  • About Susan
  • Connect

City Wild
Unraveling Urban Life and Space

Fast Garden: Homegrown Produce. Right. Now.

4/17/2020

 
Picture
Fast salad growing in a sunny window: spinach, arugula, bok choy, and cress. These sprouted in a mere three days in this warm sunny spot.
Picture
Mini shelters over early tomato seedlings. These are heavy row cover fabric wrapped around hayrack-style hanging pots.

Weeks-long delays, everything out of stock, bizarre substitutions - supermarket deliveries are not meeting this moment. Time to plant a garden. But growing your own takes time: 85 days for a tomato from seed, 66 days for green beans, 60 days for zucchini. Who has that kind of time? 

You need a Fast Garden. That’s: 

Fast crops: The fastest crops are those that just have to produce leaves. Radishes, mustard greens, several of the Asian greens like mizuna, and some salad greens like arugula are the real sprinters. Even more speedy are sprouts and microgreens, which you eat long before they are mature. 

Speedy varieties: You want the fastest of the fast crops, look at days to harvest on packets or descriptions. I’ve got arugula that’s 40 days to harvest and arugula that’s 20 days to harvest. That’s salad in half the time.

No limits: Don’t check your plants’ growth, meaning make sure they have enough of everything they need to grow as fast as possible. Water, light, soil nutrients (aka fertilizer). Don’t forget heat: seeds sprout faster in warm spots (like the top of the fridge) and plants grow faster in the greenhouse-like shelter of a milk jug cloche or other mini-greenhouse-like shelter. Containers get things going earlier in the season because the soil in them warms up much faster than the soil in the ground does. You can also position containers for maximum sun or for warm spots, like next to a south or west facing wall.
But: not too much water - don’t drown those plants! Overwatering and underwatering both kill plants. The soil surface should feel like a wrung-out sponge, more or less all the time. Very important aid in this: any containers need drainage holes. 

Stay inside: Unlike you, your plants are happy to shelter at home, as long as there’s enough light. Your sunniest windowsill might work, if artificial lights aren’t an option. Starting plants indoors, then moving them outdoors as soon as it’s warm enough is a classic fast garden technique. 

Materials Right Now: Since you’re self-isolating at home, a big garden shopping trip  is not on the agenda. The bare essentials you need are soil, containers, and seeds, and they all just need to be good enough for the pandemic moment. Whatever soil you have in your yard is probably fine. Plants that will only be inside for six weeks or so don’t need specialty grow lights - regular fluorescent or LED fixtures are fine for a while. Temporary containers don’t have to be ideal. Even household plastics from the recycling bin will work, as long as you add a hole or two for drainage. 

“But wait,” you say, “Something-something plastics something toxins!” My take on this: if you’re not living on what you grow in that plastic as your main food source for an extended time, don’t worry about it. Whatever might come from that plastic in that short time in the limited quantity that you eat will be very small, as long as it’s food-grade plastic to start with. Also worth considering is the enormous amount of plastic used in the production of the supermarket produce you usually eat, especially if it’s organic, and the various pesticides and herbicides used on it, especially if it’s not.

Some pithy statement about gardening as an intrinsically hopeful and forward-looking activity would be a great way to wrap this up, but who has time for philosophy? There’s a fast garden to plant. 

Also on Medium.

Teacup in the Deluge: Climate Change and your Yard

9/12/2018

 
Picture
I'm writing a section for my next book about climate change predictions for the US by region. Wanna know what those predictions are? Look out the window. 2018 has been a real preview of the future, with above-average temperatures everywhere, soaking rains in the East, and drought and fire in the West. What matters is the long-term trend, not any individual year, but still, 2018 gives us a chance to see which everyday systems are not going to work for the warmer world. Ordinary things we take for granted. Like what happens in your yard when it rains.

Although I started my career as a landscape architect, full disclosure: I have always found stormwater management a little dull. These days precipitation of all kinds has become way more exciting, in the worst way, due to the increasing frequency of seriously scary storms. I write this with one eye on updates about Hurricane Florence inundating the Carolinas. My house up here in Connecticut has weathered nearly 50 years of coastal storms, including Hurricane Irene, in 2011, and Superstorm Sandy  just a year after that. Average annual precipitation here is about 47”. In recent decades, the Northeast as a whole has seen a marked increase - more than 70% - in the amount of rain falling during storms. This is a surprise/not a surprise, because these more frequent, rainier storms are part of climate change predictions for the region. And climate change, as you know, is a show already in progress. 

My house is in the woods between two seasonal creeks, with a walkout basement.  The whole property is sandy soil full of New England rocks, so drainage would seem to be a no-brainer. The previous owners of the house certainly thought so, since this house came to us with its sole drainage strategy as standard gutters and downspouts. This utterly predictable set-up is supposed to catch the water as it runs down the roof, funnel it through to eight points around the base of the house, and dump it out on the ground there, at the end of the downspouts. Those downspouts? They end 8” from the foundation of the house. A few have splash blocks that carry the water 24” from the foundation, if they don’t overflow. An absolutely typical setup, found on countless houses, maybe even yours.

What’s wrong with this? It works as intended, which means all the water captured by the gutters is dumped right next to the foundation, at the end of those downspouts. There the water can infiltrate into that rocky, sandy soil and go on its way through the hydrologic cycle and out of my life, and that works fine - most of the time. The walls of our basement testify that it didn’t work fine once, maybe twice, in the life of the house, when a flooding event marked the walls a few inches above the floor. Hmm. 

So we extend the downspouts, which is ugly, easy, and temporary. We need something more permanent, which would, in the past, have meant running those downspouts into a set of pipes to take that water, underground, to one of our creeks. The easiest way to route those pipes is across the driveway, which a landscaper suggested we do. You don’t really know what’s under a 50-year-old gravel driveway, but it’s probably not solid bedrock, a distinct possibility anywhere else in the yard. 

But wait: think about that tried-and-true set of underground pipes and the gutters in 10” (Irene) or 20” of rain? (Sure, 20” is a lot of rain, but Hurricane Harvey (2017) dumped up to 60” of rain on Texas, so…) Simply: everything overflows, and everything backs up. Only so much water can fit through those pipes at once, then water starts to pool. Water coming from the house and backing up means way too much water around the house’s foundation, and that means way too much (ie any) water inside the house. 

If you don’t want a lake in your basement, you need drainage meant to handle a deluge-worth of water. Yet it’s overkill to run the LA River through your yard. It’s hideous, and it’s right outside your house, and also: groundwater recharge is a thing. Sure, Connecticut’s had two badass storms in the last seven years, but it’s also just emerged from a two-year drought, because climate change is about weirder weather, not just warmer weather. Who wants to spend the next drought staring at a yard built for floods? 

A layered system seems to be the answer: a normal rainy day system to work all the time, with a gullywasher system for the next epic storm. The gullywasher layer doesn’t have to work very often, but when it’s needed, it really has to work, because it’ll be that epic storm. When the deluge comes, you’ll need to get in and out. Maybe that’s the classic supermarket run for bread and milk, but it could be for emergency services to rescue you. It could even be for you to evacuate. It’s important, that rare thing in home landscaping that actually is life or death. So nope, keep that pipe away from the driveway, aka the sole route in and out. Look around and imagine a foot or two of rain, and give it somewhere to flood that isn’t where you’ll be or how you’ll get out. 

My strategy is something like this: some of those underground pipes attaching to the downspouts, but with the ground surface sloped to form swales that will move the water away from the house and into the creeks when all hell breaks loose. An old idea, the dry well, may come into play here, too, as a way to provide a place for water to pile up, so to speak, in the epic storm, and a place for water to infiltrate the rest of the time. Circling back to that recent drought, this also could be a good place to install a cistern, if the next drought or the one after that is worse. 

If climate change affects simple home landscaping to this extent, it really does affect everything. The strategy of layering everyday systems with ones for catastrophic events is a good one, and maybe one that can work elsewhere. Your yard seems ridiculously trivial, but aren’t you likely to shelter at home if/when the big one hits? A little planning can create a lot of resilience, or at least more than you’ve got now, exactly where you’ll need it when the storm comes. 


Resilient Power is the New Black

2/23/2018

 
Picture
Image from author's collection
​Now that America’s great again, the Clean Power Plan  is in limbo, we’ve got a brand-new tariff on solar panels, and clean coal will save us all. Or something like that. When policy and regulation aren’t your friend, there’s still the market, erstwhile darling of conservatives. The story goes like this: If your product is any good, people should want to buy it, and government should get out of the way of that. 

Since unfettered capitalism also produced child labor and sweatshops, the market is less panacea and more unreliable ally. Nonetheless, plenty of people are discovering that resilient power - renewables and distributed systems - can in fact outcompete conventional systems, in US markets and elsewhere. 

The market is supposed to be rational decisions based on cost and benefits, but I bet you can look around your house and see things you bought even though they weren’t the most benefit for the least money. Why do we buy these things? Two big reasons are status and style, to look good or to impress the cool kids. We don’t outgrow this. We just buy bigger cool things.

In research terms, this involves peer effect. In terms of resilient energy, peer effect means that the more exposure a person has to renewable generation, the more likely s/he is to install his/her own system, specifically with photovoltaic (PV) systems. This produces clusters of PV installations. Peer effect can be one of the most influential factors in deciding to install a PV system. You think it’s weird, until you see it enough. You see it some more, and you start to want it. 

This implies a tipping point: eventually enough people live near solar panels to change the average perception of solar generation from oddball to normal. Same with home standby generators, seen and marketed as desirable in higher-end homes. This presents on-site power generation not just as normal, but  desirable. Higher-end homes that feature generators (or PV) make resilient power an aspirational home feature, advancing even farther from normal to trendy, a feature to covet. 

Fashions tend to start at the top of the income scale and spread downward; tastemaking trickles down. Fashion has the power to really increase adoption of energy systems. Only environmentalists (who can afford it) want eco-friendly systems, but everybody wants the next hot trend. Once it stops being weird, it can start being desirable, and once it’s cool, it’s a whole new landscape, energy-wise. 

Speaking of landscape, do these dynamics work just anywhere, or can the location stack the deck? I recently moved from upstate New York to Connecticut, one renewable-loving, overburdened grid blue state to another. Upstate New York is famously gloomy, but solar is still worthwhile there, and New York does a good job of making it worth your while with incentives and policies. You wouldn’t expect a difference, and yet there is: Connecticut loves rooftop PV. Property listings include an index of solar energy potential, with “Good!” in the description where appropriate. Connecticut home listings also feature home standby generators. Generator-ready homes are not at the bottom of the price range, either - this is a selling point to buyers with means.

Why? It could be Superstorm Sandy (2012) or her predecessor Irene (2011) or Connecticut’s pioneering Green Bank (also 2011). Power is no bargain in Connecticut, which makes alternatives appealing. But Connecticut also is ideal for peer effect’s effect. It’s dense, in number of people per square mile. It’s also dense with people with means, or enough means to be in the market for rooftop solar, whole house generators, and the like. It’s in constant competition with New York City and Boston for people and businesses. This tiny state with all the people and the coastal storms could be poised to cross the threshold into resilient power being… cool. 

Style has a price tag for places. A few years ago, every city wanted to lure the Creative Class. These days, that’s evolved into places for innovation. Amazon’s HQ2 competition is a new iteration of this same idea, with the criterion “potential to attract and retain strong technical talent.” Could resilient power belong on the list of magic factors that make a place cool? Obviously, it does a lot for your business to keep the lights on, but it’s much more than that for some energy-intensive businesses, like data centers. For them, the extra assurance of a microgrid can make the decision about where to locate.  

If you want to add cachet to practicality, installations have to be visible and recognizable, not just to the trained eye of an electrical engineer, but to the public - the  property-buying, disposable-income-spending public. People who don’t know a watt from an amp have to recognize resilient power installations to know they want one - peer effect can’t work if you can’t see what to want. Rooftop PV has the edge here, because it’s readily seen and recognized by the non-expert. Rooftop PV and on-site wind are like driving a Prius, an immediately recognizable statement of eco-consciousness, and the affluence that goes along with being able to spend to make that statement. Contrast that with geothermal, microgrids, or weatherization, all of which are legit green, but invisible to the layperson passing by. These are like driving a Hybrid Civic. Only you, your pocketbook, and your carbon footprint know for sure.

Other resilient power components need visual signatures as distinctive and universal as rooftop solar. As long as no one sees your geothermal, only environmentalists (and engineers) will buy it. Once everyone can see it, and see it as something the richer neighbors have, in the house, the subdivision, or the city next door, everyone who wants to impress someone will want one. And that’s all of us.


 



Community Microgrids and Urban Revitalization

4/7/2017

 
A new guest column out today in Microgrid Knowledge, featuring the big story from the microgrid-revitalization-replicability study I did last year at Syracuse University. Read the whole thing here.

Changing architecture's climate 

11/1/2016

 
Picture
​A post in response to The World in 2050: Creating/Imagining Just Climate Futures, an online conference organized by the University of California- Santa Barbara Environmental Humanities Initiative 

I am inundated with climate change talk this week, the sea-level of information rising past my ears. An online conference, the brilliant idea and no doubt laborious undertaking of UCSB’s EHI program, can be described, with misleading simplicity, as a collection of YouTube-like videos and online discussion forums. In no way do I wish to downplay the work involved or the sophistication of the organization of this event, but for those fresh to the idea with this post, that’s a pocket description good enough to go on with. For the real thing, see here or my earlier post about the conference here.

New perspectives beget more new perspectives. Naomi Klein's “this changes everything” implies that climate change and its impacts are too big to affect only the usual suspects in environmental issues. Participation in climate change is not voluntary. Its impact is coming for you, even if you don’t believe in it or if you’ve elected to do something with your life that has nothing to do with climate change - or so you thought.  

If this changes everything, it changes your field, your career, your day-to-day. How will it change environmental design fields? Bill McKibben’s conference keynote gave me his idea of “changing the zeitgeist,” as he says that’s what movements do - they spur this change in spirit and that makes their impact much bigger than it would be otherwise.

What would it mean to change the zeitgeist of architecture and related fields?

It would mean changes in the technical, practical craft that lies at the heart of these professions; changes to the daily grind of practice and course curricula of degree programs; shifts in the skill sets we own as our core, regardless of where we as individuals stand politically or geographically.

It would mean changes like: 

The rise of reuse
Dig very far into conversation about climate change impacts, mitigation, and adaptation, and you find population decline or shifts. This ranges from the radical and apocalyptic - massive population declines due to disaster or choice - to the moderate and incremental - people moving back to the city core from suburbs. These scenarios share the image of a built environment grown too large for its current residents, the footprint of a former age profligate with square feet and asphalt. What will happen to these redundant buildings and parking lots and sidewalks and so on? A large part of what we do as architects and what we learn in degree programs is about construction - how to build, how to detail, how to communicate to others how we want these things done. That emphasis should shift from use to reuse, flipping the script of new construction as the norm and adaptive and material reuse as the specialty. New construction and manufacture of materials takes energy and resources, as does demolition. What’s needed is greater thrift with materials and  existing conditions.
​
Transportation after cars
You saw this coming when you saw the huge carbon footprint of transportation in this earlier post: that’s 25% in transportation alone. Others have noted that this is a promising place to cut; Erik Assadourian's conference keynote goes farther and calls for essentially no private cars, part of the One Planet Lifestyle. “No private cars” is a tangible goal, and it’s also a firm foothold to imagining the design implications of the coming world. We know how to do this; it’s how cities used to be, and how many of our older city cores still are, really, imperfectly adapted to the age of the automobile. Without cars, does your city look like the 19th century, or is it something different - an update or a new creation? We’ve spent a long time and a lot of ink mourning the passing of a host of other characteristics of that 19th century pre-car city, the collateral damage of our love affair with combustion: the front porch, the walkable city, street life, neighborhood social ties, etc. We could put those pieces back together with our 21st century necessities and preferences. What’s your neighborhood without the car? Your subdivision? Your house? (That’s a great studio project - someone make a note.)

Infrastructure off the coast
McKibben also noted the spatial correlation between the location of a majority of US infrastructure and coastal areas that will be inundated as sea levels rise. Even without the private car, that still leaves energy, utilities, water, wastewater, and other transportation - and remember, that’s more important without that car. Interconnection is a basic characteristic of infrastructure, so if you lose a large proportion of it, no guarantee that what’s left will work on its own. Decentralization is the way of the moment (the zeitgeist?) because of calls for greater resilience to events like Superstorm Sandy, but we need to push that further. The bottom line seems to be that the center of the country will need infrastructure to serve more people (one of those population shifts), and it will need to be more modular and decentralized, and of course, we need to accomplish this with a minimum of GHG production. Meanwhile, in the developing world, improvement in services in some places has come through a kind of leapfrogging approach that skips development of large centralized 20th century installations (eg the interstate highway system, the electrical grid) in favor of the direct adoption of current decentralized technologies (eg: cell phones, portable solar chargers for devices, water sterilization pens). This kind of lighthanded, individual service provision is a new model for us here in the US, but we’re tiptoeing toward it as smartphones replace land lines. Maybe it’s time to borrow back some of that technology and mindset for our own country.

Whether these are the right new emphases or not, we environmental designers need to lead our own change in this, because the world is changing and we need to change with it if we’re going to keep shaping it. We are, by nature, doers more than dreamers, people who chose the practical route over art school (or after art school). People like us, who aren’t professional advocates or activists for the environment, are exactly what the fight to grapple with climate change needs. This is your problem, not just someone else’s, because…this changes everything, and everything includes you.

Studio|Next Project 2: System Restart

2/2/2016

 
Cities are systems, systems within systems. Government, infrastructure, food, healthcare, education, taxes, ecosystems - these are just a few examples. We live in a time characterized by dysfunction and lack of investment (#neglect) in many of these systems. Some of these are spectacular - the levees failing in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina - while others are mundane - a crack in the sidewalk.
​

Understanding the systems operating within cities lets us understand functioning cities and how to accomplish tasks (change, built work, permit approval) within them far better. In this project the systems of the city become more visible to us through the places where they break down.
 
What design opportunities are created by dysfunctional urban systems?
 
Project site: The city of Syracuse. Some systems may include areas beyond the city or even its suburbs (eg: watersheds).
What to do:
  • Brainstorm as a class the systems of the city - social, economic, ecological, physical (infrastructure) - natural or constructed. Which of these are functioning and which are not?
  • Choose a system or related group of systems to investigate from the list.
  • Educate yourself about your chosen system in Syracuse: how it functions, what's involved in it, why it matters to a functioning city. How is it supposed to work? How do you know it's working well or measure success (#data)?
  • Identify failure within the system. What does failure look like? How do you know it's occurred (the opposite of measuring success; #data)? What are examples? Real-life case studies or profiles of failures? These could include maps of local failures or depictions of examples from other places.
  • Add space into the process: where are these failures located? How do they relate spatially to the rest of the system? What do you learn about the system and its failures by looking at it spatially?
  • Learn/hypothesize about causes of dysfunction in the system. Failing urban systems typically have multiple causes, which makes them complicated to fix (#wickedproblem). One way to think about causes is as pre-existing conditions, which set the scene (#neglect), and as “last straw” events, which provide the last step needed for failure to appear.
  • What other site analysis information is missing from your dossier? Track it down and find it.
 
 

 
Project schedule:
M 2.01             Project brief posted via @susandieterlen and on City Wild (blog)
Tu 2.02            Guest lecture by Syracuse I-Team’s Andy Maxwell and Sam Edelstein (CoE 508); go over project brief; begin Part I
Tu 2.09            Flint water crisis panel (Room 203, Syracuse Center of Excellence; noon-1:00)
Th 2.11            Part I finished; in-class presentation, posts to social media, tagged with @samedelstein and @Andrew_Maxwell, #iteams (+other hashtags at your discretion) Part II begins (see separate project brief)
Th 2.25            Poster Session with Syracuse I-Team (location TBA)
M 2.29            5:00 p.m.: Parts I and II due in pdf to class Google drive folder.
Tu 3.01            Post final boards to social media, tagged with @samedelstein and @Andrew_Maxwell, #iteams
 
Deliverables:
1 – 24”x36” board (digital) OR equivalent in Prezi including:
  • Explanation and illustration of your chosen system
  • Infographics (Venn diagrams, timelines, flow charts…) as appropriate
  • Map of Syracuse and/or parts of the city as appropriate
 
Evaluation Criteria:
  • Product clearly communicates chosen system, and locates it in space within Syracuse.
  • System’s function or lack thereof is evaluated, with support for evaluation of success or failure.
  • Product identifies at least 3 specific failures in the system, and locates them in space.
  • Causes of system dysfunction are provided (OK if speculative, but provide evidence).
  • Product enables a classmate to start on Part II (identifying opportunities and sites)
  • Deliverables communicate well and at an appropriate level of detail (including how design resists and incorporates entropic process).
  • Deliverables demonstrate good graphic representation and craft.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Copyright © 2016  Susan Dieterlen

Urban Greening Resources

4/21/2015

 
Picture
These two resources were recently brought to my attention. Current students may find them very useful for those upcoming final papers and projects (including your paper for City Wild!); everyone else, feel free to browse!

Green Cities: Good Health 
University of Washington, College of the Environment
A comprehensive overview of benefits of urban nature, with many links to other resources and an extensive bibliography for further reading

The Nature of Cities
An online magazine/blog/community about all aspects of, well, nature and cities

Site visit to the Make It Right Houses

6/4/2014

 
Picture
This one's for City Wild 2014 alums, and Ely:

Last week saw me in New Orleans to present at EDRA 45, so my dear husband and I took the opportunity to drive by the Make It Right houses in the Lower Ninth Ward. Here's what I learned that we didn't get from the readings in class:
  • The houses aren't nearly as odd as they seemed in the readings, because there are a lot of them, far more than what I thought, blocks and blocks. They form their own context.
  • They also don't seem as odd because there's so little around them. The Lower Ninth has a vacancy rate like the neighborhoods we looked at in Detroit. In fact, in a presentation at the conference with aerial photos of the Lower Ninth, the person next to me said, "Looks like Detroit."
  • Some of the MIR houses are indeed in what seems to be the lowest spot in this notoriously low elevation neighborhood - they line the street closest to the levee - MIR houses, street, tall levee. It was mighty uncomfortable driving next to that levee...
  • The comments about the lack of infrastructure around the houses seems to be mostly about the really rough condition of the roads, potholes all the more impressive considering it doesn't freeze there. 
  • There's plenty of other neighborhoods that still have quite a few vacant buildings from Katrina - it's not just the Lower Ninth Ward. 

New Orleans is a fabulous city nonetheless. Don't wait for a conference to visit!

Don't hire a Dutchman - believe in angels

4/15/2014

 
Picture
From Ely:
How to Think like the Dutch in a Post-Sandy World

Full story

    Categories

    All
    Behavior
    Brownfields
    #citybynext
    Climate Change
    Design
    Design X Deficit
    Diversity
    Energy
    Graffiti
    Health
    Infrastructure
    Invasives
    Lectures
    #pandemic
    Planning
    Public Art
    Publications
    ReForest
    Resilience
    Ruins
    Shrinking Cities
    Student Work
    Transgressive Use
    Vacancy
    Wildlife
    Winter Places

    About

    Assorted drafts, previews, and outtakes from the book I'm currently writing about the impact of vegetation and neglect on urban life. I also take other thoughts for a test drive here, including nascent design and research ideas.

    City Wild carries on the discussions and spirit of my 2011-2014 class, City Wild Seminar. This began as a forum for websites, articles, and other intriguing stuff sent to me (Susan Dieterlen) by current and former students, colleagues, and other well-wishers.  

    Thanks for visiting! If you want to be notified about new blog posts and other publications, please fill out the form below and put "blog updates" in the Comment section. 

    RSS Feed

      Keep Me Updated!

    Submit

    Archives

    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    January 2020
    July 2019
    October 2018
    September 2018
    July 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    August 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    November 2016
    October 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
  • Bookshelf
  • City Wild Blog
  • Workshops and Classes
  • About Susan
  • Connect