groundcondition

Jacques Abelman | groundcondition in collaboration with Marijke Bruinsma | de Stuurlui stedenbouw MushroomWall aims to capture a part of the urban waste stream in the form of used coffee grounds and transform it into food— delicious oyster mushrooms. At the same time, the project aims to make the process of recuperation, transformation, and harvesting […]

FAO estimates that to feed a world population expected to number around 9 billion people in 2050, global food production will need to be increased by 70 percent. Global energy demand will increase by 36 percent by 2035, and competition for water between farming, cities and industry will continue to intensify as a result. “Tackling […]

The “Swimming to Manhattan” competition was created by the Amsterdam Academy for Architecture and ARCAM. Jacques Abelman, Txell Blanco Diaz, Simona Serafino, Egle Suminskaite, and Marit Janse collaborated to present Red Point Parks, a vision for future development around New York’s Upper Bay, in a future where the sea has risen over 3 meters. Climate […]

  One of the remarkable characteristics of The Netherlands, especially from the foreigner’s point of view, is the amount of carefully protected open green space surrounding densely populated urban centers. The Dutch are extremely keen on verdant fields with placidly grazing cows and sheep always being within a bike ride away from the city, and […]

from the website of BRACKET: ISSUE #1: ON FARMING Once merely understood in terms of agriculture, today information,energy, labour, and landscape, among others, can be farmed. Farming harnesses the efficiency of collectivity and community. Whether cultivating land, harvesting resources, extracting energy or delegating labor, farming reveals the interdependencies of our globalized world. Simultaneously, farming represents […]

Taken from www.ohchr.org the United Nations Human Rights site. BRUSSELS (22 June 2010) – “Governments and international agencies urgently need to boost ecological farming techniques to increase food production and save the climate,” said UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, while presenting the findings at an international meeting on agroecology […]

Quote from Alan Berger, professor at MIT and director of the laboratory for design research called P-REX, The Project For Reclamation Excellence (www.theprex.net) “The main issue for me is that landscape architecture is not doing a great job addressing the larger-scale environmental issues that are currently affecting urbanized regions in the world. Rather, landscape architecture […]

Dennis Moet is author of “Autarkische Wonen” and a number of other works dedicated to framing contemporary views on sustainability within urbanism and architecture. He currently works as a senior advisor on water, climate, and sustainability at ARCADIS (www.arcadis.nl.) I was recently able to ask him some questions about sustainability and urbanism in the context […]