Article on New MA program in Urban Sustainabilty at CCNY

Sounds pretty good: kudos to CCNY! Given BC has no engineering or architecture program, ours would have a different composition, such as ...?

Teaching urban sustainability to tomorrow’s leaders

By Melanie D.G. Kaplan | Jan 19, 2010

Everywhere we turn, we hear and read about sustainability—whether it’s shopping, eating, building or wasting. Now, our colleges and universities are starting to train the next generation of sustainability experts.

This semester, the City College of New York is introducing a one-year graduate program called Sustainability in the Urban Environment. I recently talked to the program’s director, Latif Jiji, about the kinds of problems students will attempt to solve, the jobs they’ll be qualified for when they graduate and how he’s created his own personal sustainable roof (while beefing up his wine supply).

Arizona State's School of Sustainability

One of the most advanced sustainability programs in the US at a university of size is the School of Sustainability at Arizona State (ASU).  That's right, its not just a department but a whole school!  (BTW, University of District of Columbia also just put together a major related program, a College of urban Sustainability and Agriculture;  I met the dean of that college last week, more on that soon.)  The president of ASU is a key figure driving all this, and he is truly a visionary (a word i dont use lightly)  I saw him speak at the "green economy" conference in DC last week (more on that soon.)  But for now, more on ASU:

A Newly Renovated Green Home for Global Institute of Sustainability

In his remarks to a crowd of 400 at the building’s rededication, ASU President Michael Crow described the building as the nerve center for hundreds of students, faculty, and staff who are researching sustainable solutions for an urbanizing world. He also compared the formation of the Institute’s new School of Sustainability, the only school of its kind in the US, to the emergence of medical schools, focused on individual health, in the 18th century. “ASU is the only institution in the US that has stepped up to focus on our collective health and well-being of the planet.”

Bringing Democracy to New York

IN Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s State of the City speech on Wednesday, he spoke of the City Council as if it were an equal partner in government. Indeed, the mayor’s surprisingly close re-election, the unusual defeat of a handful of council members and some spirited races in the general election in a city where winning the Democratic primary is tantamount to victory, might lead one to expect the 51-member body to be imbued with new democratic vigor. However, the council members inaugurated this month have joined a body whose governance structure is hardly more democratic than a high school student council’s — where the principal calls the shots.

Ultimately, all City Council decisions are made by the speaker and the speaker’s staff. The speaker controls which members get to sit on which committees and who heads those committees, what legislation comes up for a vote, the hiring and firing of the 250-plus central staff and the money that members get to dole out to their districts.

School Adds Weeding to Reading and Writing

By KIM SEVERSON

Published: January 19, 2010

THOSE who believe trends start on the West Coast and are perfected on the East Coast might add to their argument a garden planned for an elementary school in Brooklyn.

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Natalie Behring for The New York Times

John Lyons, left, is helping to raise money for an Edible Schoolyard at P.S. 216 in Brooklyn. Celia Kaplinsky is the school’s principal.

This summer, supporters will tear up a quarter-acre of asphalt parking lot behind P.S. 216 in the Gravesend neighborhood and start building the first New York affiliate of the Edible Schoolyard program, developed by the restaurateur Alice Waters of Chez Panisse.

It’s a $1.6-million architect’s dream. A new building, powered by the sun, will hold a kitchen classroom with communal tables where children can share meals they make from food they grow in the garden.

Designers from the Work Architecture Company have incorporated a chicken coop, a composting system, an outdoor pizza oven and a cistern to collect rainwater. A movable greenhouse will be rolled out each fall.

Teachers will use the garden to give students — 460 children from prekindergarten to the fifth grade — lessons in subjects like art, math, history and science. Administrators hope the school will eventually become a center for the study of the environment and agriculture.

The P.S. 216 project will be not only the most expensive of the six Edible Schoolyards but also the only one to operate year round. The original, built 15 years ago at a middle school in Berkeley, Calif., cost about $75,000, Ms. Waters recalled.

Saving The Bed-Stuy Farm: Choose Better Nutrition, Not Demolition

Give Mother Nature a vacant city lot, and she’ll fill it with weeds and wildlife. Then human nature comes along and dumps clumps of consumer goods-gone-bad and construction debris on top of the pigweed and pigeons.

It takes visionaries like Reverend DeVanie Jackson and her husband, Reverend Robert Jackson, to convert a garbage-filled Brooklyn lot into a productive urban farm that provides 3,000 people a month with fresh, healthy food. The Reverends Jackson, who run an emergency food pantry in Bedford Stuyvesant, the Brooklyn Rescue Mission, became urban farmers out of sheer necessity back in 2004, challenging the ‘charity’ of serving poor people even poorer food.