city cooperative

via GOOD | New York Turns the Spotlight on North Brooklyn’s Creative Communities
“Love them or hate them, it’s undeniable that the North Brooklyn neighborhoods Williamsburg and Greenpoint have served as a laboratory of creativity for longer than a decade. Urban activists in the trendy enclaves have created models for more collaborative, locally focused economies, mapping out a blueprint for a sustainable approach to urban life. Amplify Brooklyn, an exhibit and event series officially opening tonight, will explore the work and ideas generated in those neighborhoods. Workshops will showcase organizations like Green Map System, which uses mapping to promote sustainable community development, and ioby, a social media and fundraising site for activists that’s debuting a new toolkit for neighborhood problems…
The exhibit is part of a two-year initiative called Amplifying Creative Communities, which investigated Manhattan’ Lower East Side last year before shifting the focus across the East River for this year’s Amplify Brooklyn. Graduate students and faculty affiliated with Parsons’ Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability Lab interviewed leaders from 30 different community organizations about socially innovative solutions to urban problems, from community gardening to alternative transportation….”

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via Next American City | Power Meets the Arts in Detroit
The Power House is named for its ability to power itself through the generation of its own electricity and heat | © Mitch Cope
“Exemplifying ‘intelligent citizen interest and action’, Power House Productions (PHP) is working to help stabilize and revitalize their city – specifically in a Detroit neighborhood near Hamtramck - through the arts and other cultural endeavors.
Formed in 2009, PHP is run by architect and artist couple, Gina Reichert and Mitch Cope, and is a result of their own Power House project, which began back in 2008. Their work soon grew beyond one house to a point where, as is written on the PHP website, “it was necessary to establish a more structured organization”.
Located just around the corner from their residence, the Power House was a formerly foreclosed drug house that Reichert and Cope purchased for $1900. The home was one amongst several of a new crop of vacancies, as Reichert put it, that the couple took note of one year after the purchase of their residence in 2005. This, along with an arson, changed the feel of the neighborhood for them and pushed them to take action. “We started to be more active out of necessity,” said Reichert.
With minimal financial risk, the couple envisioned being able to implement their long-held interest in setting up an artist residency (throughout the years they had been hosting various artists in their own home and felt it was time to maintain a bit more privacy for themselves) and also their idea to “play with the space”, Reichert said.
The art and design duo coined the name Power House to describe the home’s ability to literally power itself through the generation of its own electricity and heat (via a solar power setup that includes a roof redesign implemented this past winter) as well as the home’s significance as “a kind of taking control of ones own community by becoming an example of self reliance, sustainability, and creative problem solving through education, communication and increased diversification of the neighborhood, ” as written on the PHP website…”

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via city cooperative:
utnereader:

“Why would someone spend their limited leisure time shoveling horse-shit into a compost pile?” wonders Jason Mark, co-manager at San Francisco’s Alemany Farm, which hosts community workdays twice a week.
More and more, people are clamoring to join in the urban farming movement and get their hands dirty. There’s no doubt that urban gardening has graduated from fledgling trend to part of our cultural landscape, with vegetable gardens taking root everywhere from tiny backyards, to college campuses, to the White House grounds, to fire-escape terraces.
Keep reading …

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Make my city greener, leaner and greater by...

“Citizens in Hazel Park, Southgate and Ypsilanti are improving daily life in their cities by taking action to combat climate change. Residents of each community will contribute to a Climate Action Plan designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve environmental quality, enhance quality of life, and save money for the city and its residents.

These Climate Action Plans will lay the groundwork for other cities in metro Detroit to engage their citizens in creating a sustainable future and make the region a leader in green living, technology and jobs.

How would you make your community greener, leaner and greater?”

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via Next American City - Pushing Gently: A Look at San Francisco’s Tenderloin National Forest
“This is the Tenderloin National Forest. Tucked in the heart of a neighborhood long viewed as a hopeless refuge of the homeless, drug addled and destitute, its transformation over the past two decades has become a groundbreaking experiment in community-based reclamation of public space.”

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