Metaphoric

.:: Emerging Projects for a new Fiscal Year

2007-09-17T02:37:34Z

Working in the public sector always brings about planning. Whether it be short- or long-term. Stategic or otherwise. Budgeting is planning. Simply it is program planning and needs assessment balanced against competing needs and available funding.

This year, a few projects emerged partially unscathed by the process. A project previously scheduled within the 2006-2007 budget was moved to 2007-2008 to provide for other more critical projects necessary for future infrastructure needs.

The zoning code will be remodeled to include updated land use categories and a rezoning of the entire city based upon the Land Use Plan adopted in March 2007. Additionally, other chapters of the code will be updated to reflect state of the art standards and model coding.

Another potential project within this budget is street landscape design requirements, and upgrade of the landscape and planting standards, and a revamp of the tree preservation and mitigation standards.

The biggest help out of this years budget is geocoded planimetric mapping and parcel map clarification. This is a big deal for us, as it will allow for better and more accurate mapping within GIS and other programs.

tag: planning, budgeting, projects, programs

.: Cibolo Town Center Overlay District :.

2007-04-29T19:23:24Z

The Cibolo Town Center Overlay District was adopted by City Council this past week. As a part of the district, design criteria were written, including illustrations. The work was a collaboration of citizens, elected and appointed officials and staff assisted via the expertise of Andy Simpson of Archimedia. Andy has up the beginnings of a vertical modeling of the Town Center at his site. I’ll have up the design criteria in a couple of weeks.

You can download the plan at the link below:

Check out my Public Files on myDataBus!
CiboloTownCenterOverallPlan28march07.png
Provided to you by

tag: cibolo town center, overlay district, archimedia, cibolo, planning, urban design, new urbanism, mixed use

.: Sustainability: the stock market & cities :.

2007-03-16T03:58:47Z

I’ve found a couple of interesting articles on sustainability: the first regarding how cities are proving to be the leaders where sustainability is considered a forefront issue, pension funds (S&P is even creating indexes related to sustainability these days) and an American Prospect article on sustainable cities which was passed on to me by a Cibolo council member.

Profiles in Municipal Sustainability: An Interview with Dean Kubani

City sustainability initiatives are now the norm, rather than the exception. In the past year alone, some of the nation’s largest cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Washington DC, have launched sustainability initiatives or announced sustainability as a goal, joining noteworthy sustainability leaders such as Chicago, Austin, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. PBS recently aired a series called Edens Lost and Found, featuring sustainability efforts in four cities. This movement among city governments is gaining broader attention for its ambition, as noted last month by Neil Peirce in the American Prospect.

pension fund managers to shun ‘short-termism’

Generation Investment Management is a joint effort between Gore and David Blood, former chief executive of Goldman Sachs Asset Management. It describes itself as a “sustainable investment” firm and its strategy is based on the premise that sustainable development will be one of the main drivers of economic and industrial change in the future.

[Interestingly enough, Goldman Sachs is behind the buyout of North Texas based TXU which was recently announced in the news. They also pledged not to build any of the scheduled coal plants.]

Sustainable Cities
Smart growth is newly fashionable. But what will it take to turn fashion into national policy?

A “green revolution” is burgeoning in America’s cities and towns.
And it’s a surprise. Six years ago, as we exited an economically exuberant but perilously polluting 20th century, the idea would have seemed chimerical. True, by the 1990s we’d begun to talk about community and global sustainability; President Clinton even appointed a White House council on the topic. But the conversation proved to be a tad ahead of its time. It exhibited little of the intensity with which the green ideal is today being talked up, and in some places, truly implemented.
A set of mix-and-match developments explain the change. Foremost and scariest among them is the mounting scientific evidence of fast-advancing, potentially cataclysmic global climate change. Then there is the growing realization of oil’s short-term future in the dangerous world that September 11 dramatized. Among the results are heightened interest in hybrid cars and renewed focus on wind farms, solar energy, biofuels, and other renewables; a burgeoning “smart-growth” movement in our states and regions; worry on the health front about sedentary lifestyles, obesity, loss of natural connections; green roofs and strong revival of urban parks; and breakthroughs to pinpoint waste and pollution in our great infrastructure systems, enabled by more sophisticated geographic information system (GIS) technology.

tag: Gore, goldman sachs, TXU, sustainability, cities, city, climate change, green, global warming, policy, stock, investments

:: Interactive Architecture: A Museum ::

2007-02-11T22:02:51Z

I find this to be very interesting technique to bring the viewer into the whole design process and put them into the project.

.: Robert Dowling's "Won't You Burn Me Down"

2007-01-16T19:47:29Z

A version with Laurie Jones as the background tune:

And, a longer version with a song by Tool:

Check out Robert Dowling amazing series of paintings: Robert Dowling Studios

:: Reducing carbon dioxide emissions in a a 35 year old home ::

2006-11-25T16:45:17Z

I currently reside in a 2,600 square foot single story 100% masonry home that is 35-years old. The home and roof are heavily shaded by Oak and Pecan trees. I’ve been considering ways in which an older home can reduce carbon dioxide emissions (and energy loss via upgraded insulation), a threat as great as that of vehicles to the atmosphere in advancing global warming.

We just replaced the complete heating and air system with the highest rated one on the market (or available in Texas anyway). This also prompted me to begin considering our inexpensive leaky aluminum frame windows, many of which have broken seals and which are single-pane. Plus, as a cost-cutting measure, these are what were selected at the time the house was built. It’s time they were replaced. Recycled aluminum, double paned, UV rated, UL rated, etc. windows which are better looking as well.

According to UK sources, cost-cutting and energy savings, as well as emissions reduction can occur in older homes as well as those built today.

Residential energy saving measures could cut millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions and save householders billions in fuel bills, a new Government report has shown this week. The initial report from the Review of the Sustainability of Existing Buildings found that practices as simple as cavity wall insulation could help contribute to the green benefits if implemented on a widespread basis.

Up to 7m tonnes of carbon per year could be saved from household emissions by introducing measures with the ‘fastest payback’ such as cavity wall insulation and boiler replacement, states the research.

“This research suggests our existing homes and buildings could offer some of the most cost effective ways to cut our national emissions over the next few years. After all, many of the measures needed to cut carbon from our homes also help cut our fuel bills as well,” commented Yvette Cooper, Housing and Planning Minister, in a speech to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Climate Change.

“To make the difference we need by 2050 we will need radical changes to the way we heat and power our existing homes as well as new ones. Whether it be turf on the roof, wind turbines in the garden, heat pumps below the basement or micro CHP boilers, the homes of the future will need to be powered in a completely different way. And we need to develop the technology to support our Victorian terraces and sixties tower blocks as well as our modern new homes,” added the Minister.

On Transportation & Shaping Landscapes, Cities, & Lives

2006-11-22T20:00:04Z

Volumes 1 -4 of Robert Sullivan’s series on how transportation shapes the way we live from Dwell Magazine.

Perpetual Motion: Vol. 1

Story by Robert Sullivan / Photos by Matthew Monteith

What does the interstate have to do with your house or apartment and the food in your fridge? What does the widened state highway down the block have to do with the shape of your town or city? What does the automobile have to do with where kids hang out on the weekend? Why are bus routes a reflection of the quality of social justice? It is these and other questions I have been thinking about while traveling the country for the past few months, checking out cities and towns and seeing how people get around. And I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but you should know right off that even though the word “transportation” might make your head fall toward to the pillow or make you roll your tired-from-commuting eyes, there’s nothing that could be more elemental to the state of your community (or to the lack thereof). The roads—and the routes and the paths, the trails and the rights-of-way—take us away and they bring us home. They make us who we are and they make the places where we live.

So on this, my very first excursion, I am off into the past, kind of—to think about where we have been, as corny as it sounds. And then to come back, to return home, in this case to the city, in my case New York. In the morning, I climb into the family station wagon, and in a time-machine kind of way, I set out into the east, to New England’s (and America’s) oldest highways. For help in road explication, my destination on this roads-for-roads’-sake day is a little town in Connecticut—Guilford, the home of Dolores Hayden, a professor of architecture and American studies at Yale, and the author of such books as Redesigning the American Dream and Building Suburbia. She is a kind of naturalist of modern road-inspired building, especially with her latest book, A Field Guide to Sprawl. “Words such as city, suburb, and countryside no longer capture the reality of real estate development in the United States,” she writes. Thus, she has given us a list of new ones: logo building, sitcom suburb, zoomburb.

As I set out—in a very tame Kerouacian kind of way—to meet this New England–based diviner of meaning in the interstate existence, I am on a side street in New York City, a street run with row houses, delis, little stores, and restaurants, a street laid out for streetcars and horses, and taken over by the auto. Then on Atlantic Avenue, I touch the border of Brooklyn Heights, the first commuter development in New York City, an 1820s precursor of the suburb—and then in a few blocks I head onto an interstate highway, I-278, a.k.a. the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a.k.a. the BQE. My soundtrack is the news radio station, blaring the traffic report that is the traffic report of all America, the car unifying us as rush-hour beings: “jammed… backed up… starting to move… bumper to bumper.” I drive north, toward the Bronx, to the beginning of what in the mind of many road historians is the first modern roadway, the road that led to the interstate—the Bronx River Parkway.

.: Animation: Kiki :.

2006-11-14T01:36:24Z

Kiki is a wonderful animation thesis by Dony Permedi Character Animator. According to the creator: “My Master’s Thesis Animation. Created using Maya, After Effects, and rigged using The Setup Machine by Anzovin studios.

.: Art: Using the Tools You Have :.

2006-11-13T04:17:40Z

This artist, and he is an artist uses sand as his palette. Beautifully done, but oh, so temporary. Ephemeral, as art can sometimes be.

.: Citizen Participation: Barriers, Obstacles & Levels of Participation :.

2006-11-13T03:44:15Z

Barriers and Obstacles to Increased Citizen Participation

Obstacles to citizen participation include trust and respect between officials, staff and citizens. Mechanisms that control economic development programs and specific projects can be territory for citizen debate with extreme points of view. Motivating citizenry to participate in government is one of the hardest obstacles to overcome for a governing body. Finding willing and able bodies to fill various boards and commissions is incredibly difficult. Gaining participation from those within a certain race or ethnic groups is even harder. The nationwide decline in voting participation makes this even more difficult. In some quadrants, people join groups based on their interests, which may have political and/or social agendas. These groups are supported financially to allow experienced and trained staffs to educate, inform and implement programs to achieve certain interest goals and objectives. This appears to be a more recent trend in participation with volunteerism falling off. Public participation often occurs when controversy is exhibited in individual actions, programs or projects – people can show up in angry droves, often at the end of the decision-making cycle, having never attended consultation meetings. It is a rare thing for citizens to show up when they are happy or supportive of a program or project. Often, local governments do not have set policies for citizen participation, other than those legally required by law. This is problematic and can be easily solved in preparation of guidelines for levels of participation necessary for different projects, programs or scenarios. Entities could even ask their particular public how much participation they want. Decentralization and fragmentation of government reduces communication and makes participation difficult, at least on an individual basis, especially when overlapping responsibilities confuse the public. Conspiracy theorists, paranoia and fear of government also preclude involvement. Regionalism may be a mechanism to allow diverse groups to participate and actually take action on major regional issues. Building equity is also an issue for consideration in public participation efforts. Redistribution of power in this process allows the have-nots (problematic elements in participation) to be deliberately included in the process. Poor populations believe that government is not accountable, corrupt and leaves them without a voice. (Ross and Levine, 2001; Galston and Levine, 1997; Ohio State University, 2003; participation.net, 2003; McGovern, 1997; Silveira et.al., 1993; and Lando, 1999)