Yesterday, Karen and Charlie came over and planted a Gingko they got my wife for her birthday. What’s peculiar about this to me, is that I was going through the Thompson and Morgan seed catalog Saturday, and had highlighted Gingko. Ask and you shall receive.

Both Karen and Charlie are involved in green architecture. In light of the recent successful effort to keep Wal-Mart out of town, Charlie’s thinking of running for local public office. I asked if they’d be willing to guest-post here, and they were both enthusiastic. So they may be the first to join, but I have many other folks in mind as well.

This morning I found this post on TOD about the framing of debate around downtown revitalization efforts and the ubiquitous parking issue. My first thought is Ithaca, which has a pretty vibrant pedestrian mall, and then I thought Boulder, which also has something similar, I think. I was in Boulder once, ten years ago, but that’s my memory. So then I think, is it only way-liberal college towns that can do this?

The mall model is interesting: surround a covered “commons” with acres of free parking and kludgy traffic patterns. I think the key thing is that the mall is covered, making it shoppable in all weather, especially around Christmas. I haven’t seen many covered outdoor pedestrian malls, but maybe they’re out there. They’d have to accommodate both cold winter and hot summer environments, perhaps the cover being removable in summer.

Picking up on Monday’s post, I built a little design tool that generates random ideas about how to place two elements in relationship to one another.

I mainly used JavaScript to build this and I wanted to keep it as simple as possible. The tool already suggests a bunch of next features to add: ability for visitors to add their own components, ability to relate more than two things, ability to save placements that seem to make sense and annotate them, adding pictures, flash etc.

One thing I started thinking about is creating each element as an object with inputs and outputs and relationships to its consumers and producers. For example a chicken produces feathers, eggs and fertilizer and consumes seed, grass etc. The lawn produces grass. The garden and lawn needs fertilizer. The house needs pillows which need feathers. By setting rates on all these things, we can start to build very sophisticated models and simulations. But that’s obviously a larger project.

I’m starting to mess around with PHP, and got the left hand navigation bar in davefeasey.net built as a single list that is contextual, meaning it knows what page you’re on and so turns off the link and bolds the text for the current page. I’m learning the ropes on include files and I think I finally have that pegged; the paths are different since I’m in a shared / virtual environment and can’t see all the way up my directory tree. Also had to figure out how to hide the INI file.

I started re-reading the Permaculture Designers Manual this weekend. The starting point for the book as a code of ethics, which I’ll talk about in future posts. I want to point out the centrality of design even in the first few pages. This might seem counter to the idea of self-organizing systems, but systems don’t organize by themselves too frequently. More often, they devolve into chaos. I see this a lot in my current tech job: if we lay off 35% of our IT staff, the rest will figure it out- it’s a “free market”, after all.

Also, right off the bat, Bill Mollison starts talking about computers, and using them as design aids. I’ve said for at least ten years my ideal job is building these types of tools. For example, Mollison mentions H.T. Odum’s Emergy concept. There’s an open source Emergy modeller now available.

One of the way’s systems self-organize is through a random process, and one of the things computers do well is random number generation. One strongly emphasized aspect of Permaculture design is selection and placement. I saw an example yesterday that I hadn’t thought about. I was at the studio and only had about an hour and thought I should walk up St. Paul and see what I saw. I found an urban garden next to a church and they had a compost bin pretty much in the center of the garden, just behind the corn, a little north of center. This is counter intuitive to me, from a “look and feel” perspective, but makes perfect sense from a work and zones perspective. I usually put the ugly compost in a corner somewhere. They prettified it by making the bin itself pretty, painted it pink and put big wooden painted bugs on the side.

Later in the walk I found wild turkeys, pioneer species (sumac, some type of artemisia I think- looked like mugwort, poplar) starting to work on an abandoned parking lot, and a path down to the river’s edge. Pretty productive for an hour downtown. This is all in the heart of a very urban landscape.