Tweet What do you want to see in the next 100 years in Arizona? Post your answer on Twitter or Facebook. Or email me at tazmine@bloomingrock.com! The best answers will be published on the Blooming Rock blog on Centennial Tuesday. Photo credit: Photo from OldTucson.com
Tweet One of the most onerous but beneficial parts of architecture school is presenting your work to a panel of guests, faculty and the rest of your classmates. I remember these reviews being the source of great anxiety before hand and sometimes angst and sometimes joy afterwards. Having to put yourself out there was an emotionally harrowing experience, but one that taught us how to learn from criticism and input for the rest of our careers. Last week Friday I was a guest reviewer at ASU for a fourth year architecture class, taught by one of my former teachers, Scott…
Tweet Air pollution is a major problem for Valley residents, not just because it sullies our beautiful blue skies, but because it has a very real and lasting negative impact on our health. According to an excellent seven-part series currently running in the Arizona Republic called The Air We Breathe, “studies now link pollution, especially traffic-related pollutants to heart disease, premature births, asthma attacks and shortened lives.” The series, of which only three installments have been published to date, explores many reasons why we find ourselves in a choke hold with air quality, but lays much of the blame on…
Tweet Below is an article written by Phoenix’s sustainability officer about our city’s state of sustainability published in the Arizona Republic on Friday January 20, 2012: Greening of city hits stride – by Carolyn Bristo Phoenix led the way in sustainability decades before “green” was cool. Though the color brown is often associated with our desert region,”green” has saturated our policies for more than 30 years. In the 1960s, Phoenix developed rubberized asphalt made from recycled tires. We adopted water-conservation and energy-efficiency programs more than 30 years ago. Our alternative-fuel program is now one of the largest programs in the…
Tweet Andrew Ross’s book Bird on Fire: Lessons from the Least Sustainable City in the World is the talk of the town. And tomorrow night, it will be the subject of a panel discussion put together by the Downtown Voices Coalition called the State of Sustainability Forum. As I wrote in my article in the Atlantic Cities called In Defense of Phoenix, Ross’s book has raised a lot of ire in our city, whether it’s focused on the author himself who can conveniently go home to New York without offering any solutions after criticizing the place we hold dear in…
Tweet New bike lanes are in on Central between Camelback and Bethany Home as part of the planned road diet for the area! I rode this newly slimmed down stretch of Central on Sunday with a group of bikers in celebration of this move towards making Phoenix a more bike-friendly place. Someone said to me on the ride, there are people in Arizona that don’t like bicyclists, that don’t think they should be on the road. And for too long, these people have had all the say in the transportation planning of our city. the road diet is a…
