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How urban planners are turning industrial eyesores into popular public spaces

The High Line serves as a prime example of a new kind of park taking shape in countries such as the United States, Germany, Mexico, and Canada — one that uses the abandoned infrastructure and artifacts of industry to create distinctive public green spaces. Where we once understood parks to be the manicured places of respite envisioned by legendary landscape architects like Frederick Law Olmsted, creator of Manhattan’s Central Park, they increasingly reflect recent urban history, seeking to create a positive legacy for what were once polluting structures.

One of the reasons for this change is economic: it’s typically less expensive to reinvent industrial ruins than to remove them. Another is that cities are simply running out of green space. “With Central Park, the land was acquired when Manhattan’s growth was still very much on the tip of the island; same pattern with Golden Gate Park in San Francisco,” says Julia Czerniak, director of the Upstate design centre at the Syracuse University School of Architecture, and co-editor of the book Large Parks. “Now we’re going back into cities and finding military bases or old factories, and cobbling together vacant land, typically brownfields,” she notes, referring to contaminated sites. It’s not that landscape architects enjoy cleaning up degraded sites, says Czerniak — “That’s just what we get.”

Source: www.walrusmagazine.com/…

LS » I happened to take a stroll on the High Line in NYC this past summer. Totally awesome rejuvenation of an old industrial space. All cities should make an effort to do this kind of thing with the detritus of our industrial era’s. Recycle and reuse on a large scale.

Start with big oil companies, and the money and connections flow.

Here’s how it fits together. Sallie Baliunas is a Harvard-Smithsonian Institution astrophysicist who has been providing scientific cover for global-warming deniers since the mid-nineties. She is a senior scientist at the George C. Marshall Institute (received $310,000 from ExxonMobil), where Marshall CEO William O’Keefe was a former ExxonMobil lobbyist, senior official of the American Petroleum Institute and chairman of the Global Climate Coalition. Baliunas co-wrote (with colleague Willie Soon) the Fraser Institute pamphlet Global warming: A guide to the science (receives $60,000 a year from ExxonMobil). Baliunas is “enviro-sci host” of TechCentralStation.com (received $95,000 from ExxonMobil) and is on science advisory boards for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow ($252,000) and the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy ($427,500). She has given speeches before the American Enterprise Institute ($960,000) and the Heritage Foundation ($340,000). The Heartland Institute ($312,000) publishes her op-ed pieces. She is not lying when she says she receives no direct funding from ExxonMobil, but the money surrounds her.

Source: www.thetyee.ca/…

LS » I wish I had read this article before Xmas dinner when my over-sized SUV-driving uncle started blustering on about the global-warming hoax perpetrated by scientists looking for funding. Talk about hypocritical, but he was right about always following the money.

More Info:
Responding to the skeptics: Science takes on four common arguments against global warming
www.theglobeandmail.com/…