NYC Council FOOD WORKS report

This report details all the dimensions of the NYC food system (processing, waste, jobs, carbon footprint) and recommendations to improve it, especially in terms of local economy.  mm


FoodWorks: A Vision to Improve NYC's Food System. On Monday, November 22, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn released FoodWorks, a comprehensive report outlining policy recommendations for New York City's food system. UDL Assistant Director Michael Conard, who sits on the City Council's Food Policy Advisory Board, and UDL Project Manager Kubi Ackerman, were significantly involved in shaping th report which reflects many of the UDL initiatives around food systems and urbanization. Included is the Urban Design Lab's mapping of the New York City regional foodshed.  The UDL is encouraged by the public interest generated with the release of this report and will continue to develop research and policy recommendations in this expanding field.

Report on Agriculture in Hudson Valley

From the Columbia Urban Design Lab, on NYC regional agriculture

Glynwood Center new report: The State of Agriculture in the Hudson Valley Region
The UDL mapped and analyzed land-use and agricultural parcel distribution in the Hudson Valley Region for a report released recently by the Glynwood Center, a longtime partner of the Urban Design Lab.  This work is part of the UDL focus on agriculture and food systems in the New York City Region and their relationship to urbanization, environmental protection and restoration. Read the report The State of Agriculture in the Hudson Valley Region

The One Percent Actually Benefits from Tax Increases on the Wealthy

By Jay Walljasper

Here is some straight talk about the need for increasing taxes on the wealthy from the great-grandson of Oscar Meyer (yes, that Oscar Meyer), who admits he was born into the one percent.

On the Commons Fellow Chuck Collins—Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and director of the IPS program on Inequality and the Common Good—offers compelling reasons, spiced with humor and common sense, on why it’s good for 100 percent of us to raise taxes for the most fortunate Americans. He vividly describes how wealthy entrepreneurs and investors benefit from a host of public services paid for by tax dollars, in other words the commons.

See the video of his talk at the TEDx conference at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Meet the Movement for a New Economy by Gar Alperovitz

Meet the Movement for a New Economy by Gar Alperovitz

good essay on need for "new economy"

The idea that we need a “new economy”—that the entire economic system must be radically restructured if critical social and environmental goals are to be met—runs directly counter to the American creed that capitalism as we know it is the best, and only possible, option. Over the past few decades, however, a deepening sense of the profound ecological challenges facing the planet and growing despair at the inability of traditional politics to address economic failings have fueled an extraordinary amount of experimentation by activists, economists and socially minded business leaders. Most of the projects, ideas and research efforts have gained traction slowly and with little notice. But in the wake of the financial crisis, they have proliferated and earned a surprising amount of support—and not only among the usual suspects on the left. As the threat of a global climate crisis grows increasingly dire and the nation sinks deeper into an economic slump for which conventional wisdom offers no adequate remedies, more and more Americans are coming to realize that it is time to begin defining, demanding and organizing to build a new-economy movement.