PermaLiv

The northern end of Lake Randsfjorden in Oppland, Norway. The wetlands of the Dokka Delta is situated here, where the river meets the lake. Full resolution available here . Wisit the website of Dokkadeltaet National Wetland Center here . North of Oslo, west of Lillehammer and south of the highest mountains in Norway, Jotunheimen, water drains through mires, creeks and rivers into the ramsar site and nature reserve, Dokkadelta. The water from the alpine mountain region Synnfjell runs through the protected river Etna and through the river Dokka, passing several aqua power stations, into the fourth biggest lake of Norway, Randsfjord. Wetlands, creeks, rivers, forest and vast alpine mountains invite to experience the landscape of the municipalities Northern Land, Southern Land and Etnedal in the county of Oppland.  Dokkadelta National Wetland Centre has got the task to develop this compact ecosystem for experiencing the strong bonds to nature in the culture of this region. But al...

Editorial Notes A response from VillageTowns : We were delighted to read the review of our VillageTown work and would like to add some comments, but your comments section is closed. Øyvind Holmstad wrote "Unfortunately they don’t seem have the same enthusiasm for the compost toilet, but hopefully they’ll take this advice from Lester Brown." Wooden toilet room  with compost b in We did read the links provided, but note that Lester Brown writes: "Collected urine can be trucked to  nearby farms". That means we need trucks which means the VillageTown need to buy trucks, fuel them and use roads to transport the urine in those trucks. And where do we store the urine until it is collected? Do we need to include urine storage tanks in each house? That adds a few hundred dollars and then means we need to send trucks around to empty them. How long do we leave the urine in the tank before collecting it? And how do we vent the tanks if people have roof g...

Suburban garden. Photo: Philip Talmage "This essay outlines how to incorporate morphological rules within the exigencies of our technological age. We propose using the current evolution of GIS (Geographical Information Systems) technologies beyond their original representational domain, towards predictive and dynamic spatial models that help in constructing the new discipline of "urban seeding". We condemn the high-rise tower block as an unsuitable typology for a living city, and propose to re-establish human-scale urban fabric that resembles the traditional city. Pedestrian presence, density, and movement all reveal that open space between modernist buildings is not urban at all, but neither is the open space found in today's sprawling suburbs. True urban space contains and encourages pedestrian interactions, and has to be designed and built according to specific rules. The opposition between traditional self-organized versus modernist planned cities challenges ...

This new project at old Grefsen Station is advertised to become one of Oslo's largest and most exiting housing projects. Well, some still think Le Corbusier's old idea of "the tower in the park" is modern and exiting. A pity his ideas didn't follow him into the grave, but continue to multiply. By the way, the main investor of this project is ROM Eiendom, the same company that is given the task to develop the new Oslo Central Station area. I guess you can see the same flawed typologies:  From Stone Desert to Glass Desert . (Typologies like just a hole in the wall for windows to empathize the machine age, the windows exactly wrong to make the building "exiting" , vertical pull design etc.) Poor urbanism continues to be practiced, enthusiastically supported by the universities, because both private developers and city governments refuse to accept the scientific basis of good urbanism. They continue to listen to academic experts who dismiss hu...

EXCERPT : Money and energy have always been linked. For example, a gold currency was essentially an energy currency because the amount of gold produced in a year was determined by the cost of the energy it took to extract it. If energy (perhaps in the form of slaves or horses rather than fossil fuel) was cheap and abundant, goldmining would prove profitable, and a lot of gold would go into circulation enabling more trading to be done. If the increased level of activity then drove the price of slaves or coal up, the flow of gold would decline, slowing the rate at which the economy grew. It was a neat,natural balancing mechanism which worked rather well. In fact, the only time it broke down seriously was when the Spanish conquistadors got gold for very little energy—by stealing it from the Aztecs and the Incas. That caused a massive inflation and damaged the Spanish economy for many years.

Michael Mehaffy  og  Nikos Salingaros  har for tida ein serie av essay gåande i Metropolis Magazine, dei vert samla her . Eg har inga aning om kor lenge han vil gå - vonleg for alltid. Men same det så er det på høg at denne serien vert introdusert for eit norsk publikum, og eg vil fokusera på dei fyrste fem essaya om teknologiane til Christopher Alexander. Essaya om Alexander sine teknologiar i kronologisk rekkjefylgje:  The Radical Technology of Christopher Alexander The Sustainable Technology of Christopher Alexander The Pattern Technology of Christopher Alexander The Living Technology of Christopher Alexander The “Wholeness-Generating” Technology of Christopher Alexander Mønstre i sand orsaka av ferskvatnsavrenning. Foto:  Martyn Gorman Det tjugene hundreåret var ideologiane sitt hundreår, men alt i hop enda i vitlaus konsumerisme. Så det er openbart at ideologiar aleine ikkje har noko godt svar, sjølv om dei kan helde på mang ei sanning ...

Amazing!