The winner stands to supply more than 13,000 medallion taxis for at least a decade, a deal that could be worth up to $1 billion. Imagine if, in turn, the yellow spots monopolizing New York’s streets could help transform the urban landscape, perhaps by being smaller and more streamlined, having less environmental impact, or providing more comfort, convenience and aesthetics to passengers. What if the “tomorrow” part manifested itself not just in the object (the car) but in new initiatives inspired by the broad national movement toward collaborative consumption, like a taxi-sharing app that could help facilitate carpooling from J.F.K. into the city?

Steven M. Johnson The perfect solution for these recessionary times, this cab, re-envisioned as a compact bus, allows passengers to pay on a sliding scale. Click on the photo to see more of Mr. Johnson’s ideas.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said that “if [the taxi] doesn’t meet our needs, then we can start the process all over again, or say we just can’t find what we want and come back and visit this at another time in the future.” Well, only one of the three is wheelchair accessible, only one offers an electric option. So with the door still open, as it were, I had several conversations with the artist/inventor (and former R&D guy for Honda) Steven M. Johnson, a self-described conjurer of “ludicrous” ideas for decades. But sometimes the wildest ideas result in the best solutions. We discussed the taxi-related issues that seemed to have been inadequately addressed in the Taxi of Tomorrow competition.

There is traffic, as in the inability to do anything about it. Should there be a taxi lane? An elevated one, straight out of Rem Koolhaas’s “Delirious New York”? There’s availability — how to improve the odds of getting a cab when you need one — and also affordability: a cab-sharing program has been tried in the city already, but is there a way to improve it, or create a vehicle that allows for ride-sharing? And there’s reliability — how can you better the odds that your driver knows how to get where you want to go?

In addition, there are different and specific issues of comfort that need to be addressed for a car that hosts many passengers in the course of a day. The average taxi seems too hot, or too cold, or too loud; the upholstery sags, and cleanliness is relative. This affects the relationship between passenger and driver, and the corresponding civility (or lack thereof). Is the environment safe and secure? Are the temperature, noise level and air quality satisfactory? Should there be an enforceable dress code for drivers, as has been proposed by the city’s taxi and limousine commission?

After we talked, Johnson came up with nearly 60 different concepts, some pragmatic, some dystopic, others clearly silly. We winnowed it down to nine, tongues firmly in our cheeks. Click here to see a slide show of his ideas.

I commend the city for soliciting comments on the finalists, and the media, design and innovation firm Human Condition for creating the Taxi of Tomorrow crowd-sourcing site, which has been offering a forum for ideas and commentary since October. I hope the commission pays attention.

Now that we’re entering the thick of the holiday travel season and we’ve been groped, scanned, forced to eat a Cinnabon and otherwise made to suffer the slings and arrows of air travel — here’s something rarely offered of late: a positive story about airports.

Courtesy of Gensler. The Virgin America ticketing counter. T2’s design supports SFO’s goal of zero waste and will encourage travelers and employees to participate in its sustainable programming. CLICK TO ENLARGE

A newly renovated international terminal at San Francisco International Airport by Gensler Architects is opening this spring and its design aims high in trying to re-set the expectations of a weary (and wary) flying public.

With its James Cameron-esque moniker “T2,” it just might be on to something. A design-build partnership between Gensler and Turner Construction, the 640,000-square-foot terminal will feature 14 gates serving the already design-savvy Virgin America and American Airlines; with its focus on sustainability, localism and comfort, it endeavors to make the best of the fact that we are spending far more time at airports and will continue to do so.

Most existing airports in the United States were designed before 9/11, at a time when it was typical to arrive 30 minutes before your flight was due to depart. Today, as Bill Hooper, aviation practice leader at Gensler, says (and we all know all too well), “We all need at least twice that to make sure we get through security in time. Plus, you need to grab food in the terminal, because meals aren’t served on flights as they once were. So we have people spending twice as much time past security, and needing more amenities while they’re there. The things that travelers need in terminals today just weren’t considerations when most terminals were originally designed, so the needs just aren’t being met.”

Courtesy of Gensler T2’s restrooms feature live plants, earth tones, natural light and sustainable features like toilets that use reclaimed water. CLICK TO ENLARGE

One big reason those needs aren’t being met is the fact that airports were designed to get people in and out as quickly as possible. Only four terminals have been fully designed and constructed in the United States since 9/11: JFK’s JetBlue Terminal and the new North Terminal at Detroit Wayne County Metropolitan Airport (both designed by Gensler), the new terminal designed by HOK in Indianapolis and Raleigh-Durham’s Terminal 2 (which will be completed in early 2011), designed by Fentress Bradburn Architects of Denver. T2 will be the fifth. While many of the older terminals have made modifications to address the changing realities of security checkpoints, online check-ins and orange alerts, most feel like incomplete workarounds rather than integrated solutions.

T2, on the other hand, is the first LEED Gold-registered airport in the United States. LEED really shouldn’t be big news at this point, but its fulfillment so often manifests itself in ways that make the tangible, day-to-day benefits of its green-ness too subtle to discern, even for those who enter the space daily.

Courtesy of Gensler. T2’s restrooms feature live plants, earth tones, natural light and sustainable features like toilets that use reclaimed water. CLICK TO ENLARGE

But SFO’s T2 makes the “Gold” designation mean something in this decidedly un-golden age of travel: it’s a terminal designed in part to spark ideas about how people can live sustainably, both while traveling and in everyday life. Gensler’s greening is aimed at a spectrum of airport “users,” from airport employees resigned to a work day characterized by impatient hordes, fluorescent lights and an incessant soft rock soundtrack interrupted by gate announcements, to passengers forced to run the gantlet of TSA security procedures and boarding shuffles that compete with Russian traffic jams for expediency.

In ways both visible and invisible, sustainability is a constant. Hydration stations can perhaps solve the wasteful problem of tossed half-full plastic water bottles by providing a place to fill reusable ones. An innovative displacement ventilation system will not only improve indoor air quality but use 20 percent less energy in the process. And that vastly underused building material known as natural light is here a major design element in the form of new skylights and clerestories, enhancing not only aesthetics and health but also reducing the terminal’s electricity requirements during daylight hours.

“Sustainability is at the core of so many things happening in San Francisco,” says Steve Weindel, a Gensler design director, “so it was natural to take a very forward-thinking approach to incorporate sustainable thinking into the way the terminal is both designed and operated.”

Localism is integral to sustainability, and Gensler has taken the unusual step of creating an extension of Bay Area aesthetics and culture within the terminal itself. Most American airports have a deadening homogeneity to them — identical food vendors, retail outlets and environmental design systems — making the experience of arriving in one place indiscernible from the next. At T2, that’s replaced by putting the destination in context: people will see works by local artists, for example, and will be able to purchase food and wine prepared by local organic producers. Says Weindel, “Have you seen ‘Up in the Air’? We were shooting for something that is the opposite of the airports you see there.”

Janet Echelman The “recomposure zone,” with natural light entering through skylights, offers a place to regroup and refresh. CLICK TO ENLARGE

No firm engaged in airport design and renovation can alter TSA procedures, but they can create environments that make them more tolerable. T2 will have a new area called the “recomposure zone,” just past security — you still have to take everything off, but now there will be a designated and unhurried place to put it all back on, too. Says Hooper, “It’s the uncertainty of moving through airports that stresses people out, so what we can do as designers is to make the environment very clear, and very comfortable.”

Other welcome changes? If you’ve got your laptop, you’ll enjoy lounge- and counter-seating options with places to re-charge electronics, and will no longer be forced to huddle on the ground near power outlets. Parents will revel at the inclusion of well-considered children’s play areas, unlike, say, one consisting solely of a single video screen projecting Sponge Bob cartoons, something I’ve encountered while traveling with my preschooler.

An airport doesn’t need to feel like a boutique hotel, but it shouldn’t feel like a refugee camp, either. “Fun isn’t a word that people have come to expect from airport environments, and we’re looking to change that,” says Jeff Henry, a Gensler design director.

Can fun be had in airport? That security and shopping will continue to define our travel experience is not ideal, but one hopes that with the opening of T2 in the spring, clean air, fresh produce and natural light (not to mention free WiFi) might help.

Note: An earlier version of this article stated that the SFO terminal will be the fourth to be completely designed and constructed since 9/11; in fact, one in Raleigh-Durham is scheduled to be completed a little before that in early 2011, which would make SFO the fifth.

That tweet by Carol Coletta, president and CEO of CEOs for Cities, is a radical provocation in our age of the non-expert. The nation is gripped by the fantasy that the least-qualified, least-experienced among us make ideal leaders. Dissatisfaction — no, real anger — with the status quo, as opposed to informed ideas or policy experience, seems to define qualifications for public service.

This shouldn’t really come as a huge surprise. I guess moms have stopped telling their kids, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything.” Far too many of our public processes, from school board meetings to town halls, provide citizens with a forum to complain but not much else. Hand ‘em a mike and two minutes and they’ll unleash a torrent of opinion — but it’s unlikely anyone will step forward with constructive advice or proactive steps relating to budget cuts or the latest environmental action report.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with complaints — we’ve all got plenty to gripe about these days — and it is important that we have forums in which to air them. In just one recent week, for example (as illustrated in this beautiful infographic from Wired UK), New York City’s 311 number received 34,522 complaints, mostly having to do with rodents, noise and taxi cabs. So there is no shortage of problems to solve. But, increasingly, there is less time, and fewer resources and people, to do so.

What if there were a way to transform complaints into something positive and productive? What if we reframed the exchange to be less about adversity and more about cooperation and action? What if citizens were encouraged to offer their thoughts on how things from transit systems to city parks might be improved — as opposed to simply airing their grievances about all that was wrong with them?

Courtesy of Local Projects

That’s the beauty of Give a Minute, created as part of CEOs for Cities’ US Initiative by the media design firm Local Projects. Says Coletta, “We need more citizens who feel agency — that they can actually influence the future of their communities. Otherwise, there is complacency and resignation. Give a Minute encourages agency. Go ahead. Share your ideas. Change your city.”

In embracing a technology that nearly everyone now possesses — text messaging — Give a Minute provides a fast, cheap and easy way to share ideas, connect them together and make them happen. As Local Project’s Jake Barton, whose firm has excelled in previous participatory projects like StoryCorps, explains, “It’s like 311 for new ideas.”

“There are no hoops to jump through, no points to win, no fake “votes” to solicit, no games to play,” adds Coletta. “It’s a very straightforward question to citizens that treats them respectfully, as adults, and assumes an authentic relationship between citizens and their government.”

As part of its US Initiative, CEOs for Cities is hosting Challenge events in cities across the country. It is at these events that the specific needs of each particular city are identified. In Chicago, where Give a Minute recently launched, the goal was to make it possible for people to go where they need to go without owning a car, while in Memphis (where Give a Minute will begin in January 2011), says Coletta, “The ambition is to develop all of our talent and put all of our talent to work.”

In other communities, the questions will be driven by urban leaders who are hoping to engage citizens in an authentic dialogue on how to improve the community in specific ways. Other cities on tap include Indianapolis, New York, San Jose and Grand Rapids.

Courtesy of Local Projects

Give a Minute launched with the question, “Hey Chicago, what would encourage you to walk, bike or take CTA more often?” Citizens, who are learning about it from billboards, ads on the L and in the local paper, are texting their ideas and posting them to the Give a Minute Web site. You can look here to find the responses texted so far (1,000 in the first two weeks), which range from “lower CTA fares” to “organized walking groups going roughly the same route with similar interests” to “play classical music on train system” to “I need to bring my daughter with me, so the streets need to be kid-safe.”

“We’re just culling through all the different ideas that run from the specific to the hilarious to the utopian,” says Barton. “But one thing that does seem clear is that they are far more diverse and often smaller scale, and actionable on different scales including individual, neighborhood and government.”

Courtesy of Local Projects

These ideas aren’t revolutionary — but that wasn’t Give a Minute’s goal. At first glance, the endeavor does feel like just another version of the often-overrated concept of crowd-sourcing, which aspires to gather together the collective brilliance of those most qualified to solve complex problems but rarely does. Give a Minute did spring from an open exploration into existing open-source and crowd-sourcing platforms, but realized the general emphasis on finding the most revolutionary idea amidst the multitudes wasn’t quite right. Says Barton, “At meetings, Carol would say, ‘What are the experts not figuring out? What are these new silver bullets that trained professionals aren’t coming up with?’ It’s not about inventing new ideas but having those ideas phrased and framed by the public so it doesn’t feel like [the solution] is being dropped down from above.”

“It’s about people in a specific neighborhood saying let’s put in a garden here,” Barton continues. “I’d say it’s a more nuanced approach to crowd-sourcing, less the winner-takes-all model but rather getting a group to rally around something specific. The entire process is designed for maximum participation to some kind of constructive end. The basic idea was to reinvent public participation for the 21st century.”

Courtesy of Local Projects

When participants text their responses, they hear back from representatives of the local agencies, non-profits and other groups working in that area. Then you might, optimally, hear back again about opportunities to get involved with like-minded individuals and organizations. Or you might get a response to your text message back from the head of CTA, or some other expert involved in the issue. Give a Minute is aiming for a broad range of respondents — not just transit or government folks, but also grassroots activists and local celebrities (on the wish list might be, say, David Byrne or Jay-Z in New York, Steve Wozniak in San Jose/Silicon Valley).

Give a Minute wants to recruit change-minded people to do more than text for change; in tracking responses, Local Projects will be able to point to particular ideas and causes in common, and direct individuals into larger efforts through other technology platforms like Meetup or Kickstarter. And cash-strapped government agencies and non-profits understand that being open to, and willing to cultivate, these ideas — including allowing for temporary solutions, for execution and management from the bottom up — can not only be beneficial but is probably essential. This helps remove the adversary: it’s not NIMBY, it’s “how can this community work together to make change happen?” Coletta refers to this as a Declaration of Interdependence.

The localism inherent in Give a Minute makes sense for the times. Weary of the national conversation, overwhelmed by the global ones, people are turning inward to their own communities — something I’ve written about frequently in this space. From carshares to communal ovens, local currencies to walkability indexes, people increasingly understand that they can effect change in their own backyard, block and neighborhood. In this country’s quest for individuality, we sometimes forget we do need other people; this project helps facilitate that. It may take more than a minute, but it’s worth a shot.

Courtesy of Laguna Honda

Traditionally, Nightingale wards like those once used at Laguna Honda contained about 24 to 34 beds, which made patient privacy an impossibility.

When I started writing this article a little more than a month ago, I hadn’t yet had two bulging disks flare up, putting me in excruciating pain. I hadn’t yet had a neck epidural where, as I sat in a hospital gown designed for someone three times my size, the R.N. inserted the IV into the arm on the side that was in such distress. I hadn’t had to spend my half hour of recovery time in a Nightingale ward — those wards with rows of beds divided by the thinnest of sliding curtains that allow you to hear all the particulars of your neighbors’ condition and all the sounds of their discomfort. I hadn’t had to sit in a row of wheelchairs (no other seating was provided) while waiting to consult with the surgeon after the procedure.

The procedure went fine and I’m slowly improving, but in my woozy post-op state I had ample time to think yet again about how the experience of health care could be so vastly improved.

So let’s move away from my story — which was unpleasant but is getting better — and toward the more positive one I had begun to prepare, the story of a skilled nursing and rehabilitation facility called Laguna Honda, in San Francisco.

When it was founded in 1867, Laguna Honda was known as the Almshouse, and housed an indigent population with either no family to care for them or no money for other care. Back then, most institutions had names that seemed perfectly, and tragically, aligned with their level of care, names like the Industrial Home for Crippled Children or the Home for Orphans, Indigent, and Aged. Over the decades, some of these names have changed, but a trip “to the home” remains a fate not desired by anyone.

Usually one approaches a hospital with a sense of fear or apprehension. The bold entrance of Laguna Honda’s new pavilion building, bordered by green space, helps change that experience. © David Wakely

Laguna Honda is for people in need of long-term rehabilitation, or nursing home care, city-run and meant for those unable to afford any other alternative. There’s no doubt that for periods in its long history, it was one of those places you wouldn’t have wanted to end up. Until recently it was using the aforementioned Nightingale wards for long-term and permanent patients, something I’d always associated with triage units or British war films. But now, freshly renovated, the new Laguna Honda suggests an inspired way of thinking about not only institutionalized care but of what a truly effective health care facility might look, feel and act like.

Laguna Honda's interior courtyard features an organic garden where residents can plant and grow their own produce — and have it prepared in their "neighborhood" kitchens.

When Anshen + Allen (now Anshen + Allen / Stantec Architecture Joint Venture Partners) were commissioned 10 years ago to renovate and create a new building for the 150-year-old Laguna Honda, the firm was asked to design a campus for 1,200 beds. “From day one, we did not want Laguna Honda to be about 1,200 beds but about 1,200 places,” says Sharon Woodworth, senior architect with Anshen/Stantec, who helped lead the charge to scale the number back to a more humane 780. “The intent was always to create a ‘home,’ not an institution. Even if the project had been 120 or just 60 beds we still would have sought to create a sense of place beyond the bed the individual slept in — a place that felt like home — in a community setting. The community setting is a key difference.”

As is what Woodworth considers the defining characteristic of the project: natural light.

Most of us associate health care facilities with flickering fluorescents, but at Laguna Honda, as Woodworth explained to me on a recent tour, each space is infused with natural light from the resident bedrooms to the gymnasiums, the therapy spaces to the staff work areas, which “is unprecedented in a health care setting; regardless of time of day or season of year, residents, staff, and families can sense the outdoors to experience the greater world.”

So an over-reliance on artificial light was out, but so too were conventional notions about hospital rooms. Laguna Honda’s bedrooms, for example, are organized into “households” for 15 residents who all have their own room, and each of these households has its own dining and living room with residential-style bathrooms shared by one, two or three residents in private bedroom suites or semi-private, dorm-style bedrooms. Four households on each floor create a neighborhood of 60 residents. In the end, it’s less institution, and more of a mixed-use, walkable community within a building.

Inside that building, as Woodworth says, “details provide dignity.” Every resident has an operable window, making not only sunlight but fresh air a real option. Mercifully, the design team has done away with those radically ineffective — noisy but not noise-canceling — hospital curtains. Anshen/Stantec’s 18 months of predesign and user research led them to develop a 44-inch-wide sliding door that’s safer and easier for both patients and staff to use — but which was against building code. That code is now being re-evaluated, remarkable given that regulatory oversight for hospitals is more numerous than for nuclear reactors.

The building has just opened, and it will take months for staff and residents to move in. As they customize their surroundings, distinct neighborhoods will be allowed to form. A significant amount of artwork has already been installed but not for the reasons you might think. Anyone who has wandered helplessly through seemingly identical hospital hallways will appreciate how each wing, hall and floor has visual markers that serve not only an aesthetic function but a practical one. The murals on one floor and the tactile sculpture on the other are also memory devices. Residents begin to associate their space with a particular wall color or work of art: this keeps their minds active and enhances their self-sufficiency.

Rehabilitation encompasses the creative mind and the social being here, too. In contrast to the often drab, typically unusable “public spaces” in similar environments, Laguna Honda has an aviary, library, art studio, hair salon, theater and chapel. Living rooms have floor-to-ceiling windows. (The idea initially met with opposition. “People thought seniors would be afraid!” said Woodworth.)

But perhaps the most wonderful surprise and dramatic example of difference is to be found outside. Laguna Honda extends far beyond its walls. There’s a basketball court, a sculpture garden and an organic farm where residents can grow and harvest produce, and then have it cooked in the kitchen. Public transit that’s easily accessible is just across the street, as well as a shuttle bus that stops throughout the city, making the outside world part of daily life and not off-limits. There is even an apartment where residents who will be returning to life outside Laguna Honda can live either alone or with their families to relearn and regroup.

I was in terrible pain this past month but I will improve and am lucky to have the help of family and friends to see me through it. For those who must either spend an extended period of time recovering from truly serious injury or set up permanent residence in a place like Laguna Honda, Anshen/Stantec’s new way of thinking about a hospital’s staff and its patients and their families is a shining example not only of what is possible but what should be required.

Amy Casey, Courtesy of Zg Gallery, Chicago “Dangling”

My husband and I spent a year looking for our first home. Every Sunday, we’d jump in the car with driving directions and hope, the latter often dashed before we even got out of the car. The open houses were often short stories unto themselves: what exactly — or who — was behind that padlocked door in the hall? Who thought to put the kitchen next to the master bedroom? What sort of people suspend a suit of armor over their bed?

One constant behind all the front doors was the fast and cheap kitchen renovation. Done no doubt at the urging of the real estate agent, who warned that no one would ever buy a house without an updated kitchen, these cookie-cutter remodels featured identical green granite countertops, frosted glass cabinet doors (revealing a hint of the Italian pasta boxes inside), black and white checkerboard floor tile and wannabe Viking ranges.

In the end, we found our house, built in 1907 and featuring a fully functional and actually pretty hip kitchen, untouched since the late ’60s. All those homes we’d visited over the previous years found buyers, too — and I’ll bet that many of those kitchens were ripped out and remodeled anew.

When did “rm w/a vu” turn into Viking range, cathedral ceiling, granite countertop and four-car garage? At what point did the house become more about the future tenant than the current resident? It’s hard to trace the moment, but let’s hope it’s passed. Because for too long, home design has been hijacked by the allure of resale value. Maybe now we can begin again to think of our houses not as investments but as homes.

Amy Casey, Courtesy of Zg Gallery, Chicago “Spills”

The concern for resale value was never more apparent to me than it was a few years ago when I spent nearly a year consulting for a developer of planned communities — like the ones in Phoenix or Orlando or Las Vegas with many foreclosed homes that you now see on the news. The company had asked our team of design consultants to “rethink the way we sell houses.” We interviewed numerous potential home buyers about how they made their purchasing decisions, and learned the extent to which resale concerns dictated people’s choices — about square footage, location, number and type of rooms, brand of appliances, even paint colors.

The decades-long pattern of people moving to new, bigger houses as they got new, higher-paying jobs is in retreat.

We also spoke with builders working for the developer who had a checklist of “necessary” amenities, gleaned purely from industry perceptions. People want “X,” the builders would say, referring to such marketing darlings as Viking ranges, Sub-Zero refrigerators, walk-in steam showers and master suite seating areas. Lenders likewise told us they arrived at loan-making decisions based on the perceived value of these add-ons.

Today, it’s clear that resale should not have been so big a driver of residential design. After all, how often do people feel compelled to use their master suite lounge area — or, for that matter, their living room?

As one mortgage broker I recently spoke with observed, “The whole idea of buying with resale value in mind is gone. All the countertops, the backyards, all those things are meaningless.”

What that developer should have asked us to rethink was not the way houses are sold but how they are designed. More than 1.6 million properties went into foreclosure in the first half of 2010. And the decades-long pattern of people moving to new, bigger houses as they got new, higher-paying jobs is in retreat. Now we need to think more sensibly about building houses that people want to stay in.

Amy Casey, Courtesy of Zg Gallery, Chicago “Hi Voltage”

The 2009 Builder/American Lives New Home Shopper Survey showed a trend toward smaller house size in 2010. The “unprecedented housing bust, which brought about the largest loss of home equity in history,” the magazine reported, “has fostered fundamental attitudinal changes in new-home prospects…. The desire for a McMansion seems to have been supplanted by the desire for a more responsible home.”

People still want amenities, that same survey suggests, but they also want energy-efficient heating and cooling. Yet the status quo makes such greener options hard to come by: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac recently announced a decision to block green financing projects in California, for example, making solar and other energy efficiency projects nearly impossible to achieve. The state is suing to overturn the decision.

Perhaps recognizing that they’ll be staying in their homes longer, buyers are starting to look for universal design, ranging from wheelchair-accessible bathrooms to single-story homes — options that will allow them to “age in place” — in other words, move into a home they can grow old in. They want accessory dwellings (a k a granny flats) to accommodate rising numbers children moving home after college and aging parents needing care. So far, the market isn’t offering many of these, a lack one can chalk up somewhat to inertia but also to legitimate obstacles ranging from zoning and code restrictions to difficulties with financing.

Amy Casey, Courtesy of Zg Gallery, Chicago “Private Property”

A last survey finding worth reflecting on: Fully 85 percent of the respondents agreed “somewhat” or “strongly” with the suggestion that “community is just as important as the home.” What exactly they meant by community is hard to say. Friends in the neighborhood perhaps? An interesting mix of neighbors? A vibrant shopping street? A nearby Starbucks? Community is notoriously hard to define and perhaps even harder for builders to provide. But it should be given as much attention as building equity.

I have an old kitchen and not a whole lot of square footage, but I know all my neighbors, shop at locally-owned businesses without getting in the car, and water 15 different kinds of vegetables in my backyard with a simple “gray water” system that only recently became legal. These are things that make me want to stay where I am. What’s outside the front door is at least as important as what’s behind it.

Levittown, N.Y., c. 1950s. Courtesy of Hofstra University’s Department of Special Collections, Long Island Studies Institute

That the Murphys, the couple recently arrested for spying for the Russians from Montclair, N.J., were described by a flabbergasted neighbor as “suburbia personified” is telling, an observation that perfectly sums up our collective notion that the suburbs are chock full of white, middle-class families, both nuclear and normal.

An ad for Levittown. Courtesy of Hofstra University’s Department of Special Collections, Long Island Studies Institute

But that prevailing vision contradicts the reality of suburbia today. There may be white picket fences and home owners associations in common, but beyond that, “suburb” has outlived its usefulness as a descriptive term — and as a model for future planning, at least in its current incarnation. Suburbs continue to be designed for homogeneity even though they’re no longer homogeneous at all, and in fact have become increasingly varied in type, density, infrastructure and demographics.

The Long Island- and Maryland-based Rauch Foundation, whose efforts focus on issues relating to children, leadership and the environment, knows this and has dedicated some serious energy to addressing it where they live: on Long Island, a perfect laboratory given that it’s a textbook case of suburban sprawl. Last month, I was a juror for the Build a Better Burb competition organized by the foundation, which asked entrants to consider a series of issues like housing choice and affordability, stemming “brain drain,” enhancing car-free mobility, and equity, access and public space. Here’s one example of a possible design brief proposed by the organizers (though entrants were free to focus on any area of Long Island they chose):

What would you propose for the 69 available acres along Hempstead Turnpike in iconic Levittown, where only 3 percent of the housing units are multi-family, 21 percent of the population is over 55 and virtually no new housing has been built in decades?

Aerial view of Levittown, N.Y., c. 1950s. Courtesy of Hofstra University’s Department of Special Collections, Long Island Studies Institute

Levittown is (or was) the quintessential suburb, and in our collective imaginations we tend to view all suburbs in its image. But the research presented in the Long Island Index, which gathers and publishes data on the region with an eye toward moving policy, demonstrates that today’s suburbia rarely resembles the images we commonly associate with Levittown and similar communities of that era.

According to the 2000 census results, for example, Long Island is the third most segregated suburban region in the country, a statistic developed by the organization Erase Racism and exemplified by the stark contrasts to be found between, say, the neighboring communities of Garden City, with its six-figure median incomes and 92-percent-white population, and the working class community of Hempstead, which has a population that’s more than half black and 32 percent Hispanic, and significantly lower incomes.

An aging population is another issue facing the region. Though Long Island is home to many young families, its population is getting older: those 55 and over comprise the fastest growing segment, while young adults are leaving in significant numbers (69 percent of 18-to-34-year-old people surveyed say they’re apt to leave within five years) largely due to a lack of employment opportunities and affordable housing. Over 20 percent of Long Islanders spend half their income or more on housing, which helps to explain the startling fact that 48 families begin the foreclosure process there each day.

Is there an opportunity to create more vibrant communities around train stops like this one in Rockville Center, Long Island? Photo: John McNally

In Patchogue, sidewalks, but little else to suggest walkability. Could mixed-use development improve the situation? Photo:Diana Weir, Long Island Housing Partnership

Another challenge? The Long Island Rail Road was designed to bring people into New York City and back. Yet over 77 percent of Long Islanders live and work on Long Island. They may commute, but they’re doing so within the region. And three out of every four Long Island workers drive to work alone; only one in 10 take public transit. The things that once connected Long Island to itself, like cable cars, no longer exist.

Aerial view of Long Island.

So where to start? The aim of Build a Better Burb, says Ann Golob, director of the Long Island Index, was “to help Long Islanders visualize what our region might look like if we boldly reconsidered how we build here.” Here are some of the 212 ideas submitted to the competition. (You can make your voice heard in the debate: the 23 finalists have been posted at Build a Better Burb for the Long Island Index People’s Choice Award, now through September.)

1. DUB Studios’ SUBHUB Transit Systems proposes newly configured transit networks for the region combined with public services and product delivery. Instead of focusing on the direct path from Long Island to New York City, this project envisions a feeder transit system anchored at public school sites, with the goal of reducing commuter car parking downtown while enhancing civic hubs in surrounding neighborhoods. The jurors appreciated the connection to schools — an imperfect but intriguing way to address how few kids walk to school these days — and the attention to seldom-addressed issues like food miles traveled.

DUB studios, Michael Piper, Frank Ruchala, Natalya Kashper, Gabriel Sandoval, Jeff Geiringer SUBHUB Transit System, Click to Enlarge

DUB studios, Michael Piper, Frank Ruchala, Natalya Kashper, Gabriel Sandoval, Jeff Geiringer SUBHUB Transit System

2. Also interested in food was the team of Amy Ford-Wagner, Tom Jost, Ebony Sterling, Philip Jonat, Emily Hull, Will Wagenlander, Meg Cederoth, Melanie George, David Greenblatt and Melissa Targett, which, with their project, AgIsland, looked to put the “farm” back in Farmingdale by proposing the replacement of office parks with organic farms.

Amy Ford-Wagner, Tom Jost, Ebony Sterling, Philip Jonat, Emily Hull, Will Wagenlander, Meg Cederoth, Melanie George, David Greenblatt and Melissa Targett

3. Long Division, concerned about the contamination of Long Island’s aquifers, aims to establish a regional strategy to promote both growth and contraction. Proposing alternatives to conventional single family housing — like a compound that might include apartments and a community garden or another that consists of multifamily housing, communal space and small-scale retail — is an important strategy for developing more sustainable approaches to sprawl.

Long Division: Kazys Varnelis, William Prince, Leigha Dennis, Kyle Hovenkotter, Momo Araki, Alexis Burson

Long Division: Kazys Varnelis, William Prince, Leigha Dennis, Kyle Hovenkotter, Momo Araki, Alexis Burson

Long Division: Kazys Varnelis, William Prince, Leigha Dennis, Kyle Hovenkotter, Momo Araki, Alexis Burson

4. Temporary, small-scale interventions are a perfect vehicle for change in the current economy. While they can’t fix all ills, they can at the very least help create community and influence behavior change, as we’ve seen with the lawn chairs and traffic closures in Times Square, for example. Following that thread, Amir Hossain Zade Zarrabi, Mohammad Pourhasani and Hamidreza Fazlollahi made a simple and executable proposal: provide modular pieces of street furniture that can be rearranged for different uses as a means to bring diverse people together in public space.

Amir Hossain Zade Zarrabi, Mohammad Pourhasani and Hamidreza Fazlollahi

Amir Hossain Zade Zarrabi, Mohammad Pourhasani and Hamidreza Fazlollahi

5. Economic behavior is key to suburban transformation: people tend to buy more house than they can afford, which helped give rise to the current mortgage crisis. “Innovative financing” has had only negative connotations of late, but with their project UpCycling 2.0, Ryan H. B. Lovett, John B. Simons and Patrick Cobb proposed a new way of thinking about financing: income-pooling to support community improvements, neighborhood amenities and multifamily housing options. The project title is misleading; this is less upcycling than an HOA with a conscience.

Ryan H. B. Lovett, John B. Simons and Patrick Cobb

Nelson Peng, Yang Wang, Zhongwei Li. Click to enlarge

Nelson Peng, Yang Wang, Zhongwei Li. Click to enlarge

Was there one world-changing idea? Probably not. But the broad array of issues addressed — rethinking north-south corridor transit, introducing a MoMA P.S. 2 in Bethpage, repurposing infrastructure, designing more walkable neighborhoods — shows us that there is, of course, no single answer to building a better burb in the future. The range of solutions does point to a systems-thinking approach: one can’t consider housing without considering jobs, and transit, and smart growth, and so forth, and how they influence one another other within a whole.

The admirable Long Island Index has collected a lot of important data. But as Golob says, “These numbers are abstractions. People worry about what it would look like. A lot of denser building that has been erected isn’t very visually pleasing. We thought we could help move the conversation forward if people got excited about a particular image of the future.”

Agreed. And so, a big idea I’d love to see in future competitions? Clarity. Architectural schools often promulgate the notion that an idea can’t be important unless it’s indecipherable. It’s time for this to change. There’s no shortage of good ideas, but communicating them so they make sense to those who stand to benefit is essential. As seductive as the use of multiple upper and lower case letters within a word might be, as intriguing a term as “permeable membrane” is, big ideas can only become reality with a clear — not just compelling — narrative. This is not exclusive to the Build a Better Burb competition by any stretch, but it’s worth noting. People get more excited about ideas they can understand.

‘Garbino’ trashcan for Umbra.

“Plastic was the material that I naively knew was the material of our contemporary world, even at the age of 10,” the designer Karim Rashid said in a 2006 interview. Rashid has certainly been plastic’s most high-profile ambassador, using it for everything from dish-soap containers to the (then) ubiquitous $7 “Garbino” trashcans that made him famous. Many other designers were similarly enamored with the way plastic could become any color or shape, and though products made from the material were offered at all price ranges, plastic delivered on the popular premise of good design for all because it could be used to create on the cheap.

Though our connected culture would be lost without it, plastic assumes a radically different role in the design world: its most high-profile usage of late comes not in throwaway consumer goods but rather in the form of the 12,500 plastic bottles (that’s about the same number consumed every 8.3 seconds in the United States) used to build the Plastiki, a wind-blown, solar-powered boat currently sailing from San Francisco to Australia, stopping at environmental hot spots like the roughly Texas-sized North Pacific Garbage Patch or Pacific Gyre along the way. The goal of the Plastiki voyage is to encourage people to re-think waste: according to Project Aware, 15 billion pounds of plastic are produced in the U.S. every year, for example, but only 1 billion pounds are recycled.

The Plastiki solar-powered boat, made from 12,500 plastic bottles. Courtesy Plastiki Crew, top; Adventure Ecology

It would be overstating things to say that Plastiki is helping chart a new course for design, but the vessel and the voyage do provide a nice departure point for discussing the place the discipline finds itself today. Though the expedition leader, David de Rothschild, has in many ways been the face of Plastiki, the project as a whole speaks to the reality of collaboration versus individual creation. The Plastiki site acknowledges a team including diver, documentarian, boat builder and solar array designer. Designers like Philippe Starck may have turned their attention to things like wind turbines now, but most design efforts these days, whether for iPods or affordable apartments, seem to be very much the product of teams. Coming off an era where designers assumed the role of artist/auteur, that’s a big shift. Plastiki, in engaging with a host of environmental technologies and issues, also mirrors a broad cultural shift in design’s focus. Design now exists less to shape objects than to produce solutions. Instead of creating a desire and designing an object to fulfill it, a designer spotlights a problem or need and solves it. The latter has not completely displaced the former, but it has become the prevailing discourse. So it’s fitting that the newest edition of the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial questions the purpose — and future — of the discipline with an exhibit called “Why Design Now?” The Triennial, which opened in mid-May, assuages any fears surrounding the capabilities of natural materials. In fact, inventiveness around unremarkable stuff from sunflowers to banana stems has resulted in numerous greener alternatives to plastic on display here, including Bananaplac, an alternative to hardwood and Formica, produced from banana fibers extracted when the fruit is harvested; AgriPlast, made from field grass and polystyrene; Kraftplex, a 100 percent biodegradable fiberboard made from sustainably harvested soft wood fibers, water, pressure and heat; and Flax, a natural fiber typically used to make linen but transformed by designer Francois Azambourg into high-performing recyclable furniture like the Lin94 Chair. But new materials are always being introduced, and their inclusion here is just a small part of a much larger story.

Kraftplex, a 100 percent biodegradable alternative to plastic. Weil Ausstellungssystem GmbH

“Why Design Now?” is an important show because design is in a strange place. One always hears talk about the need to not reinvent the wheel; well, the design community — some of it, anyway — has realized the need to stop reinventing the chair. This is not to suggest that design should fully move away from making things — and indeed, the Cooper Hewitt show is chock full of smartly conceived, necessary objects like the AdSpecs, low-cost corrective eyeglasses with lenses the user can adjust to his or her own individual prescriptions; the Modular Prosthetic Limb System, created by a multi-disciplinary team culled from more than 30 American, Canadian and European organizations, and the Zon hearing aid by Stuart Karten Design, a minimalist accessory rendered so elegantly as to erase any need for self-consciousness on the part of the wearer. There are thoughtful, beautiful ones as well, like Karinelvy Design’s blown glass Gripp glasses, so graceful one might not even notice they were designed to function for anyone, even people with limited hand function, and Alabama Chanin’s hand-sewn garments that favor local commerce over overseas production.

From left: Self-adjustable prescriptive eyewear created by Joshua Silver; minimalist hearing aid designed by Stuart Karten; universal-design glassware by Karinlevy Design. Oxford Centre for Vision in the Developing World, left; Starkey Laboratories, Inc., center; Karin Eriksson, right.

The show actively engages with the question designers both emerging and established must ask today: If not objects, what? It’s a dilemma closely mirroring that of the larger American economy, which has been shifting steadily from manufacturing to service. In response, design schools are scrambling to offer curricula that moves away from what Jon Kolko describes as “the Bauhaus, form-giving stuff.” Kolko, founder of the Austin Center for Design, a newly formed educational institution that “exists to transform society through design and design education,” believes that our recession-weary era is absolutely ready for this sort of work to thrive. “All the travesty and direness is making all the right things happen,” he says. “Kids today don’t care about the big house, the big salary. At the heart of their value system is ‘I want to make a difference.’” With an eye to contributing to the greater good, practitioners might design a game, a process, procedure or experience. For example, Emily Pilloton founded the non-profit design collective Project H (the “h” stands for humanity, habitats, health and happiness) after a demoralizing stint designing doorknobs. The 28-year-old now designs projects like the Learning Landscape, which takes a creative approach to math education by installing a public sculpture-like grid of half-submerged tires as a setting for math games. Another example might be Participle, which bills itself as a public service design firm, and has developed and prototyped new services to help combat social isolation and loneliness among the elderly.

Adaptable to any setting, Project H’s Learning Landscape uses reclaimed tires, sand, lumber and chalk to create a setting for math games. Project H Design

In showcasing the work of Pilloton and many of her peers, this year’s version of the Triennial feels very much of a piece with another Cooper Hewitt exhibit presented in 2007, “Design for the Other 90%” (now on view at the National Geographic Society Museum, Washington, D.C., through September). The low-cost innovations in health, shelter, energy and transport for the 5.8 billion people globally with little or no access not only to most products and services but also to food, shelter or clean water have become the sort of things young designers want to engage with today. (Though creating smart business models for this work may be the most challenging of design projects they could undertake.) “Why Design Now?” might well have been called “What Should Designers Do Now?”

Courtesy of Academy for Global Citizenship. Getting kids interested in nature and their environment can help improve their test scores, reduce childhood obesity and increase self-confidence.

Thursday is the 40th anniversary of the original Earth Day. Over the years, the impact of this once seminal day has lessened. Earth Day brings people together for nice gatherings and noble efforts but has, for the most part, made sustainable action more of an annual event than a daily habit. We’ve got to change that.

Here’s a move in the right direction: launching this Earth Day is Green My Parents, a nationwide effort to inspire and organize kids to lead their families in measuring and reducing environmental impact at home. Not just on Earth Day, but every day. GMP’s initial goal is to have its first 100 youth advocates train and educate 100 peers (who will then turn to 100 of their respective peers and so on), with the aim of saving families $100 million between now and April 2011.

How? By washing in cold water, walking or biking to school/work and kicking the bottled-water habit, for example. GMP’s founders suggest that by taking simple steps like those, the average family could save over $1,000 each year.

Green My Parents’ official launch is this Thursday morning, with the broadcast of a free online workshop for youth, adults and educators to learn about easy and effective ways to help save the planet. Led by 12-year-old Adora Svitak, a prolific writer, teacher and advocate for literacy and the environment, the broadcast will also be disseminated by book (via paper-saving print-on-demand), Web site and peer to peer interaction.

At first glance, GMP seems to be in keeping with countless other efforts urging baby steps toward greener living, through exhortations to replace light bulbs, take shorter showers and so forth. But it is GMP’s advocacy strategy that is different — and, I think, really smart. GMP recognizes that young people are inherently attuned to their environment and understand the importance of protecting it. Conversations I’ve had with kids of late reveal real worries about the future of the planet and concerns about their inability to act. Much as the threat of nuclear war weighed heavily on my generation’s youth (I remember our local video store had “The Day After” on permanent display on the counter; you could rent it for free), global warming affects the hearts and minds of kids today. GMP argues, and has already demonstrated, that when they’re given tangible steps to help, kids feel part of something larger.

Svitak, who despite her tender age is a frequent lecturer on the global environmental circuit, suggests in her presentations that we [adults] need “childish” thinking: bold ideas, wild creativity and, especially, optimism. At this year’s TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, she told the crowd that “kids’ big dreams deserve high expectations, starting with grownups’ willingness to learn from children as much as to teach.”

Kids still dream about perfection, says Svitak: “They don’t think about limitations, just good ideas.” GMP’s other student champions seem to prove this assertion. They include inspirational powerhouses like high school senior Jordan Howard, who has already shared a stage with Hillary Clinton and lectured on the dangers of plastics and other environmental dangers; 15-year-old Alec Loorz, who founded the advocacy site Kids-vs-Global-Warming.com at 13, the same year he became the youngest trained presenter of Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” talk; and 16-year-old Chloe Maxim, founder of The Lincoln Academy Climate Action Club, a school group dedicated to fighting global warming.

“GMP is a platform that parents can advocate for, kids can lead, that requires better communication, fosters collaboration across various roles in the home, depends on immediate behavior changes (not big investments) and has a payoff that benefits everyone, regardless of respective political or cultural or regional divisions or preferences,” says GMP’s founder, Tom Feegel. “GMP helps prove economic recovery [and] is directly linked, in real practical ways, to the environmental sustainability choices we all make from sunrise to when we go to sleep, every day.”

Within the GMP program, it’s the parents who have to get on board. The kids are already there. So ultimately what this program does is help raise a generation that no longer needs convincing on climate change. All the money-and-planet saving tips should, to them, seem as normal as putting on a seat belt or drinking a cup of coffee in the morning.

I have to welcome, too, GMP’s unabashed fusion of capitalism and carbon footprints: they believe that carrots work better than sticks. Says Feegel, “What works for Wal-Mart, G.E. and H.P., which is aligning the business strategy with sustainability, will work at a grassroots level, too.”

It’s been difficult enough to get people to carry reusable bags to the grocery store; incentives help, and saving $100 month is a big incentive. Tiny as many of the green steps are, they cumulatively result in households geared toward collective action. Kids are urged not just to find ways to save money and energy but to negotiate with their parents for a percentage of the realized savings in return for their initiative. Environmental, familial and financial responsibility are linked, so the effort isn’t so much about being an environmentalist as it is about being a responsible, engaged and caring member of the family.

This essentially amounts to a sort of systems-thinking-type approach to sustainability from the ground up, or what the authors of the new book called “The Third Teacher: 79 Ways You Can Use Design to Transform Teaching and Learning” would call ecological design.

The “third teacher”? It’s the environment. Accordingly, the book’s proposed solutions include “Make health and safety a classroom project and develop lesson plans that will produce real improvements to the learning environment” and “Free Choice: Life is full of choices. Prepare kids by giving them a say at school.” Ultimately, learning is less about individual subjects, more about contemplating systems and their interconnectedness.

Green My Parents supports such an approach. And while they haven’t reinvented the wheel, they’ve designed a program that makes behavior change easy and economically rewarding for participants. Such a clear directive is key right now, given the general lack of success in communicating sustainability’s importance to the public. It should be abundantly clear that the average person isn’t going to act on behalf of polar bears, let alone take the time to understand cap and trade. By reaching out to kids, you’re reaching out to a

Connecting kids to their environment is core to the philosophy of Green My Parents and The Third Teacher. These students at Chicago’s Rogers Park Montessori School are taught from an early age that care of the environment is a fundamental value. Courtesy of OWP/P | Cannon Design and James Steinkamp Photography

population that most likely doesn’t need to be persuaded that there’s a problem and, significantly, that hasn’t had time to develop ingrained habits around daily acts like driving, shopping and showering. As technology improves, behavior will change. GMP champion Howard, in a recent blog post about her experience test-driving an electric car together with her younger sister, observed that the experience “is revolutionary because she’ll NEVER drive a gas car.”

Raising a generation that — finally — won’t even need to make a distinction between “green” and “normal” is our best path to success.

Highly controversial government trailers once intended for disaster victims were recently put on the auction block. Associated Press.

The federal government recently agreed to sell most of the 120,000 formaldehyde-tainted trailers it bought nearly five years ago for Hurricane Katrina victims for pennies on the dollar. How could it not have anticipated that the sale of those units — perhaps the most visible symbol of the government’s bungled response to the hurricane — would result in outrage? And how can they sell them cheaply to middlemen who will then turn a profit selling them back to those who still remain without housing, post-Katrina?

The reintroduction of the infamous trailers got me thinking about the current rebuilding efforts in Haiti and Chile, and what lessons could be learned from Katrina. The rebuilding in New Orleans might be best symbolized by two extremes: those notoriously substandard FEMA trailers, on the one hand; and on the other, 50 or so well-constructed but contextually challenged radical modern homes in an effort led by the Brad Pitt-backed non-profit Global Green.

These dramatically different responses are the result of a plethora of disconnected parties, each intent on doing things their own way. The uncoordinated response created a situation in which the wheel was reinvented constantly. Things didn’t happen — and still aren’t happening — fast enough. Five years after the hurricane hit, Ninth Ward residents describe themselves as feeling in limbo, and voice concerns about the slow pace of recovery in their community.

There will be a similar lack of expediency in Haiti, but at this still-early stage there’s still time to apply some of the lessons we learned from the missteps following Katrina. The widespread destruction in New Orleans (and Biloxi, Miss.) starkly highlighted the need for context-specific building codes, stable construction and non-toxic materials. One has only to look at the fatalities in Chile as compared to Haiti: though the Chilean earthquake registered 8.8 on the Richter scale, the country experienced 279 fatalities, compared to Haiti’s 230,000 from their less powerful 7.0 earthquake. (Another reason for the difference, of course, had to do with where and how the two earthquakes struck.)

Though daunting, Chile’s struggles will likely resolve themselves more quickly: just a week after the earthquake struck, drinking water, electricity, communications, banking and basic commerce had already been restored to over 90 percent of the affected areas. This is in dramatic contrast to Haiti, where, explains Sebastian Gray, professor of architecture at Universidad Católica de Chile, “because of the characteristics of the earthquake and the quality of construction, the destruction and loss of life was enormous.” In Chile, he says, the country’s strict building codes “accounted for the overall good performance of modern structures after the earthquake.”

A collaboration between GOOD and Karlssonwilker, originally published in GOOD. Infographic comparing the structural damage in Haiti and Chile. Click image to enlarge.

The specific challenges of places like Haiti, which has been traumatized throughout its history by natural disasters, require focused responses like the ones I’ll explore here.

Coalitions Beat Charisma

Photograph courtesy Architecture for Humanity Haiti after the earthquake.

Coalition-building has been a driving force of the Haitian rebuilding effort. Cameron Sinclair, co-founder of Architecture for Humanity (AFH), even sees a change in the attitudes of the architects themselves. “Rather than the ‘go it alone’ approach, groups are coming together to collaborate and figure out where to focus resources,” he says. “This work is also ‘no ego’ work and there are no high-profile projects. So the folks who are usually attracted to this work would rather figure out a pit latrine issue than study up on the latest cladding system.”

This emerging (and welcome) shift from starchitect to design collective is brought into sharp focus in the recent documentary “Citizen Architect,” about the radical design/build studio in Hale County, Ala., and its charismatic founder, Samuel Mockbee. In it, the architect Peter Eisenman explains that he doesn’t think architecture is about building a better world, but rather exists to “challenge people, challenge what they want, challenge their idea about comfort.” Eisenman, who also teaches architecture at Yale, is followed by AFH’s Sinclair, who sees things a bit differently. Architecture schools, he suggests, should not be teaching their students how to envision endless variations of a theme of the Burj Khalifa, but rather how to “design adequate and affordable housing for 90 percent of the planet.”

I believe we can all agree that no one in Haiti needs to be challenged by architecture. What the Haitian people need is homes, schools, hospitals, factories and offices, and they need to feel that they’re part of the process of building them. Essential to the effort is design that is less an expression of auteur’s vision and more a response to the aesthetic and functional needs of displaced residents.

AFH has deployed a team to Haiti to build educational and community structures, and provide technical support to housing groups. This collaboration, says Sinclair, “is also creating strong ties between local and international professionals (currently 60 percent of our team is Haitian or Haitian-American). It is important to include local expertise as they bring a ground knowledge and skill set that cannot be taught in any textbook.”

With partners including Article 25 (a U.K. charity rebuilding schools), Habitat for Humanity, Build Change (which is helping Haitian residents build earthquake-resistant housing), Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group (AIDG, which works to get residents affordable and environmentally sound access to electricity, sanitation and clean water) and others, AFH is developing a series of deployable hurricane-resistant classroom structures to help kick-start the education system. And on Jan. 27, they launched Students Rebuild, a partnership with the Bezos Family Foundation and the Global Nomads that consists of a $500,000 matching challenge grant and call to action for middle and high school students and educators around the globe to help rebuild better, safer schools in Haiti.

Duany Plater-Zyberk Architects, known for walkable, New Urbanist communities, is also embracing collaboration in construction, with an eye to developing community. “The reality of life has shown, in New Orleans for example, that most people going and trying to deal with [rebuilding] didn’t understand how New Orleans works,” says Eduardo Fernandez, an architect at DPZ. “To some it was as far away and incomprehensible as a foreign country. There is a certain ethos to the way the place deals with problems. Not understanding the reality has stalled many recovery efforts that otherwise could have yielded fruit way before.”

Prefab Fulfills Its Promise — Finally

Prefab construction tends to conjure up visions of mobile homes being torn apart by hurricanes. In the last decade, prefab has undergone a radical image makeover into a building technique ideally suited to producing more affordable modern homes — but with mixed results. Now, however, it has a chance to fulfill its promise by delivering housing efficiently, inexpensively and quickly to those who need it most.

Photograph by Eduardo Fernandez Duany Plater-Zyberk’s prototype for factory-built panelized housing in Haiti.

Soon after the earthquake, DPZ focused first on what they thought was the most pressing issue in Haiti: getting temporary shelter for the displaced victims. But as Eduardo Fernandez explains, “While working we realized that more often than not, whatever you build temporarily becomes permanent. People tend to stay there for years.” So DPZ has been creating housing that can go up quickly but also last. They’re collaborating on a panelized house with manufacturer InnoVida, whose prefabricated concept allows for several variations on a theme, each appropriate, as Eduardo says, “to different densities and contexts, from rural conditions to very compact and dense urban conditions — and the range in between.” Last month, InnoVida offered to donate 1,000 of the DPZ homes, and the company says it has lined up $15 million in investment capital to build a factory in Haiti that could produce 10,000 more homes each year.

“The ideal model,” says Fernandez, “should produce a set of a few basic designs, as attuned to the context as can be thought of, for which a complete set of parts could be shipped out very fast, and which could be then assembled by the local workforce.” This is no easy feat: the assembly process should be as simple and as quick as possible, involve no heavy machinery or sophisticated tools or complicated procedures. But arriving at such a solution is key, for as Fernandez explains, “As reconstruction progresses, the erection of prefab factories would be the next logical step, and the best way for foreign companies to help third world economies.”

Photograph courtesy Haiti House PermaShelter house designed for Haitian resettlement. Its steel hurricane shutter/tables can bolt closed in case of security risk or inclement weather.

Haiti House also wants to help develop an industry to employ the island’s citizens. A disaster-recovery services division of Harbor Homes, Haiti House worked with the United States government on Katrina recovery efforts. Now, in addition to bringing its PermaShelter housing system to Haiti, it’s planning a factory on the island so that residents can work there to build their own communities in the near future. “We even hate calling [what we’re doing] prefab anymore because it’s such a different animal,” says Haiti House’s Richard Rivette. “This could lay the foundation for alleviating a lot of global poverty.”

Reuse, Recycle Materials — and Ideas

Other projects are exploring ways the rebuilding effort might help Haiti’s economy as well. Earthbag Building is hoping to build more Sun Houses like this one (pictured below) in Pwoje Espwa in Southern Haiti, which uses readily available poly bags holding such dietary staples as rice, barley and wheat. Filled with a mix of moistened sand and clay, the bags are used like bricks to build housing atop a foundation of river rocks and mortar. Few if any additional materials need to be imported to the island.

Photographs courtesy Kelly Hart An example of earthbag building. The poly bags used to hold dietary staples are repurposed to create the structure, and then covered with stucco to complete its walls.

Photographs courtesy Kelly Hart

Similarly, Independence Recycling of Florida (IRF) is planning to move two mobile crushing and screening plants to Port Au Prince to recycle earthquake debris for use in new construction. By salvaging and reusing this material, Haiti can keep it out of landfills, dramatically minimize new material shipping costs and save significantly on new construction costs.

Open source has become a major component of the rebuilding effort as most groups realize they cannot scale their work on their own. By putting design solutions under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license on sites like the Open Architecture Network, individual designers, smaller firms and others can share information, ranging from materials used to lessons learned, and solutions, which other non-profits are free to implement.

In an e-mail conversation, DPZ’s Fernandez wrote, “Tantalizing as it may be, a universal approach to emergency housing . . . is a fallacy.” The complexity of any rebuilding effort cannot be overstated, and this quick rundown is unavoidably narrow in its focus. But I want to highlight the collaborative efforts under way — and keep what remains a dire issue in the news. Haiti’s rainy season looms heavy on the horizon: let’s hope these efforts can begin to have an impact on the ground before the storms come.

The complete antithesis of the rural idyll that many might associate with farming, the 4-1/2 acre Alemany Farm is located just off the decidedly non-bucolic Highway 280 in San Francisco, adjacent to a public housing project. But its tough exterior contrasts sharply with its benevolent mission of educating, engaging, and feeding its urban constituency through the organic food it grows. I spoke recently with Alemany’s co-manager, Jason Mark, who, when he’s not harvesting carrots and kale, is editing the quarterly environmental magazine, Earth Island Journal.

So how did you become an urban farmer?

When I was growing up, my father owned a landscape design and construction firm in Phoenix, Arizona, and we always had these amazing gardens at our house. But I hated helping out in the yard (it was, after all, a chore). So when I left home for college, I never thought about gardening again.

That is, until Sept 12, 2001, when I thought: “Man, the world is going to hell fast, I better learn to grow my own food.” So I enrolled in an urban gardening course offered by the now-defunct San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG), where I learned some of the basics about food production. Then I got a small (I mean, tiny) plot in a community garden in San Francisco’s Lower Haight neighborhood, where I grew some pretty impressive carrots and some pathetic radishes. It was a blast.

During this time, I was working at the human rights group Global Exchange, where I ran a national campaign trying to break America’s oil addiction. I began to feel an even more acute sense of the importance of building a sustainable food system. So I quit my job, left San Francisco, and enrolled in the ecological horticulture apprenticeship at the UC-Santa Cruz Farm & Garden. It was a truly magical experience: living in a tent with 45 other industrial-society skeptics, learning to grow your own food, watching the sun set over the Big Sur Mountains across Monterey Bay. The farm gave me a visceral sense of the importance of not only sustainable food production, but also the need for people to get closer to the natural system on which we depend.

And then you got involved with Alemany Farm?

I felt that bringing my skills back to the city was important. Because if we can’t bring the people to the land, then we should bring the land to the people.

What are the biggest challenges of running an urban farm, particularly an all-volunteer one like Alemany?

Farming is the easy part–or at least the easier part. It’s a craft humans have been practicing for 10,000 years, and I believe it’s in our DNA at this point. To thrive, the plants need water, sunlight, and healthy soil. And we really only have control over this last one.

Plants are easy; people are more challenging. Farming in a big city like San Francisco involves a lot of different communities and a lot of different agendas. This is part of the charm of the enterprise–and its challenge. Groups and individuals come to Alemany Farm with their own goals, expectations, and agendas. And since we naturally want to be inclusive and welcoming, a big part of the farm is balancing out all of the different interests.

Perhaps our biggest challenge is how little urban folks know about food production. I give almost the exact same tour to 7th graders as I do to middle-aged corporate executives, because the adults don’t necessarily know much more about food production than the kids. Of course, this is one of the most rewarding elements of urban farming: education. We are engaged in a mission to show people how they themselves can become their own food producers.

How do you feel about the seemingly exponential growth of interest in urban farming over the past few years? Do you see a bright future?

There’s no question there is a tidal wave of interest in sustainable food right now–what I think of as the Alice Waters-Michael Pollan-Barbara Kingsolver effect. Local-organic food is IN. And that enthusiasm has translated into a lot of interest in urban agriculture.

Some might dismiss this as simply a trend, but looking at the expressions on our volunteers’ faces, feeling their enthusiasm and commitment and passion, I am positive that this is no passing fad. There is an entire generation of people who are eager for some tangible, physical connection to the natural world, and they are finding that in their food.