Bringing Efficiency to the Infrastructure

IN the mid-1990s, the Internet took off because its technological time had come. Years of steady progress in developing more powerful and less expensive computers, Web software and faster communications links finally came together.

A similar pattern is emerging today, experts say, for what is being called smart infrastructure — more efficient and environmentally friendlier systems for managing, among other things, commuter traffic, food distribution, electric grids and waterways. This time, the crucial technological ingredients include low-cost sensors and clever software for analytics and visualization, as well as computing firepower.

Wireless sensors can now collect and transmit information from almost any object — for instance, roads, food crates, utility lines and water pipes. And the improved software helps interpret the huge flow of information, so raw data becomes useful knowledge to monitor and optimize transport and other complex systems. The efficiency payoff, experts say, should translate into big reductions in energy used, greenhouse gases emitted and natural resources consumed.

Smart infrastructure is a new horizon for computer technology. Computers have proven themselves powerful tools for calculation and communication. The next step, experts say, is for computers to become intelligent instruments of control, linking them to data-generating sensors throughout the planet’s infrastructure. “We are entering a new phase of computing, in which computers will be interacting with the physical world as never before,” said Edward Lazowska, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington.

Computer-enhanced infrastructure promises to be a lucrative market. And the outlook has seemingly improved in the economic downturn, as governments around the world embrace stimulus spending that relies heavily on public works projects, both high-tech and low.

A handful of big technology corporations, including I.B.M., Cisco and General Electric, have major initiatives under way — I.B.M. has even branded its campaign, “Smarter Planet.” Yet many other companies, both large and small, are also pursuing opportunities.

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City's plans for research center on Holy Cross campus still faces major hurdles

The Louisiana Recovery Authority cleared the way Tuesday for the city to use $2 million to purchase the hurricane-damaged Holy Cross School site in the Lower 9th Ward.

Dr. Kevin Stephens, the city's health director, wants to create what would be called the National Center for Community Health and Research on the site.

But once the city buys the 12-acre site using federal recovery dollars, it still must count on receiving competitive grants to pay for repairs, construction of new buildings and the creation of the proposed center.

The city has applied to the National Institutes of Health for $30 million to $40 million in federal stimulus money, and officials are also counting on as much as $10 million from a United Nations Humanitarian Foundation grant to turn the historic Holy Cross site between Deslonde and Reynes streets into a groundbreaking health research facility.

A Catholic school for boys, Holy Cross School had been an anchor in the Lower 9th Ward since 1879. The school relocated to Paris Avenue in Gentilly after Hurricane Katrina wiped out most of the neighborhood. The college-style campus suffered extensive structural damage.

Stephens said that as soon as the property is sold, Health Department staff will start working in trailers that are already set up on the site.

At the 15-acre riverfront tract, Stephens envisions a nationally recognized center where researchers would pursue studies that address the needs of poor, inner-city communities. Instead of merely studying the effects of a vaccine, for example, they would offer a proven treatment to community residents and study why some refuse to take it.

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An Effort to Save Flint, Mich., by Shrinking It

Dozens of proposals have been floated over the years to slow this city’s endless decline. Now another idea is gaining support: speed it up.

Instead of waiting for houses to become abandoned and then pulling them down, local leaders are talking about demolishing entire blocks and even whole neighborhoods.

The population would be condensed into a few viable areas. So would stores and services. A city built to manufacture cars would be returned in large measure to the forest primeval.

“Decline in Flint is like gravity, a fact of life,” said Dan Kildee, the Genesee County treasurer and chief spokesman for the movement to shrink Flint. “We need to control it instead of letting it control us.”

The recession in Flint, as in many old-line manufacturing cities, is quickly making a bad situation worse. Firefighters and police officers are being laid off as the city struggles with a $15 million budget deficit. Many public schools are likely to be closed.

“A lot of people remember the past, when we were a successful city that others looked to as a model, and they hope. But you can’t base government policy on hope,” said Jim Ananich, president of the Flint City Council. “We have to do something drastic.”

In searching for a way out, Flint is becoming a model for a different era.

Planned shrinkage became a workable concept in Michigan a few years ago, when the state changed its laws regarding properties foreclosed for delinquent taxes. Before, these buildings and land tended to become mired in legal limbo, contributing to blight. Now they quickly become the domain of county land banks, giving communities a powerful tool for change.

Indianapolis and Little Rock, Ark., have recently set up land banks, and other cities are in the process of doing so. “Shrinkage is moving from an idea to a fact,” said Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective Program at the University of California, Berkeley. “There’s finally the insight that some cities just don’t have a choice.”

City moving closer to work on creating Lafitte greenway

By Emilie Bahr at New Orleans City Business

The city has chosen a contractor to plan and design a long-anticipated greenway for a mostly derelict stretch of land connecting Mid-City, Tremé, the French Quarter and Lakeview.

Proponents say transforming the Lafitte Corridor, a ribbon of land that passes through some of the city’s most historic and storm-damaged neighborhoods, into an alternative transportation corridor would offer residents a valuable new amenity while reinvigorating surrounding communities.

In 2006, Bart Everson helped start Friends of Lafitte Corridor, one of the groups advocating for a linear park that has at its center a paved bicycle and pedestrian path.

“It’s not just a bike and pedestrian path,” Everson said. “It’s also an economic revitalization plan for the surrounding neighborhoods.”

The corridor runs along a former shipping channel that once connected the northern edge of the French Quarter with Bayou St. John. The canal was filled in 1938, and part of the site was converted to a rail line.

Plans to convert the largely abandoned, three-mile industrial strip into a public greenway have been floated since the 1970s, but the proposals never gained much mainstream traction until Hurricane Katrina.

Jake Wagner, an urban planning specialist helping shape greenway plans, said the storm provided the impetus for translating what for years seemed little more than an idealist’s fantasy into a real possibility. Since the storm, a revitalized Lafitte Corridor has been incorporated in all of the city redevelopment proposals.

The city has chosen Design Workshop of Austin, Texas, to do the planning and design work on the project, which is slated to be built in phases. The trail portion of the greenway will be completed in the first phase, said Debravka Gilic, director of strategic planning for the Office of Recovery and Development Administration.

According to FOLC, about $3 million has been set aside for planning, design and construction, including about $2.6 million in community development block grants.

Everson said the eventual cost of the greenway will depend on the scope of the final proposal.

“The cost is so variable depending on how you want to do it,” he said.

Completion of the trail portion of the greenway could likely be accomplished for about $3 million, but more money is needed to make the project “the true community amenity it can become,” said Billy Fields, director of the Center for Urban and Public Affairs at the University of New Orleans.

“It’s the low-hanging fruit,” said greenway advocate Geoff Coats, formerly of the Urban Conservancy, which has worked with FOLC, other organizations and area residents to get the project going.

At a time of deep public frustration over few visible signs of post-storm recovery, Coats sees the greenway project as one city officials can point to as a success story.

“I think it’s one of the most fully baked, fully developed projects,” he said. “There’s no downside to it at all that I can see.”

Planners envision locals using the greenway for recreation and bicycle commuting, while tourists would make their way from their French Quarter hotels to City Park, the New Orleans Museum of Art and Bayou St. John.

Wagner believes the greenway could be incorporated into cultural heritage tourism.

“You can explain most of the major phases of New Orleans history in that small three-mile stretch,” he said. “You’ve got the entire architectural history of the city” represented.

Fields, former research director for the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy in Washington, D.C., said the greenway could serve as a model for trail-oriented development, a concept that plays on transit-rooted development, or the idea that private investment naturally follows public investment in major transportation nodes.

“You see this in New York, in Tokyo on a massive scale,” Wagner said, referring to the concentrations of commercial development that can be found in those cities around large subway stops.

Charlie Doerr, owner of the Bayou St. John store Bayou Bicycles, is among the business owners hoping to reap the greenway’s benefits.

“Our backdoor opens out basically right on to it,” said Doerr, sitting in his office looking through a window at what is currently vacant land. But he is optimistic that one day, he’ll be watching bicyclists, walkers and runners move by. He’s already started thinking about starting a bike rental service to tap into the influx of new visitors.

“Once the thing is open, people are gonna use it and we’ll be right in the middle of it,” he said.•

Old Water Pipes Becoming Hard to Ignore

It has been 2,000 years since the Romans built their aqueducts, and 200 years since Philadelphia began using cast-iron water mains. But the 6-inch-wide city pipe that still delivers drinking water to a block on Nixon Street here uses an even more primitive technology: wood.

Its wooden planks are lashed together with a coil of metal as if each section of pipe were a long, narrow barrel. And while the small stretch beneath the ground here may seem more Swiss Family Robinson than 21st century, it is not unique to Chelan.

Water officials say they believe that a handful of wooden water mains are still in use in South Dakota, Alaska and Pennsylvania, among other places. The old wood pipes offer a vivid reminder of the age and fragility of the nation’s drinking water systems, many of which rely heavily on old pipes that often remain out of sight and mind — until they burst.

And they are bursting with alarming frequency in many areas these days, particularly in systems coping with septuagenarian, octogenarian, and even century-old pipes. There are an estimated 240,000 water main breaks each year in the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Aging Water Infrastructure Research Program, and some water experts fear that the problem is getting worse.

“We believe that the number of breaks is increasing,” said D. Wayne Klotz, the president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He warned that the breaks not only waste millions of gallons of clean, treated drinking water, but also can cause tremendous damage, pointing to a major break in Maryland just before Christmas that stranded motorists on a flooded road. “When most people think of a leak, they think of a drip in their sink,” Mr. Klotz said. “These are not like that. They were rescuing people by helicopter!”

The new federal stimulus law provides $6 billion for water projects, with $2 billion of that directed to drinking water systems. But that money is only, well, a drop in the bucket: a report released last month by the E.P.A. estimated that the nation’s drinking water systems require an investment of $334.8 billion over the next two decades, with most of the money needed to improve transmission and distribution systems.

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Engineered Crops Won't Feed World, New Report Says

Proponents and critics of genetic engineering in agriculture usually agree on one thing: The technology is powerful, whether for good or ill. Today, the Union of Concerned Scientists broke ranks and asserted that genetic engineering is simply ineffective, at least in increasing crop yields.

UCS's Doug Gurian-Sherman searched the scientific literature for side-by-side comparisons of conventional and genetically engineered lines of corn and soybeans. He found that in almost all cases, genetically engineered crops did not produce larger harvests. The one exception was insect-resistant Bt corn, which produced higher yields only when neighboring plots of conventional corn suffered infestations of a worm called the European corn borer. Crop yields have increased significantly over the past decade, he says, but almost all of that increase was due to traditional plant breeding or other agricultural practices.

These results won't surprise most farmers. They plant crops that have been genetically modified to tolerate doses of the herbicide glyphosate (widely known as Roundup) mainly because that trait makes it easier and sometimes cheaper to control weeds, not because it increases yields. The UCS study is instead aimed at the general public, in an effort to counter claims by the biotechnology industry that genetic engineering offers the best solution to global food shortages.

from Science Magazine


the report from Union of Concerned Scientists

Can 'biochar' save the planet?

Over the railroad tracks, near Agriculture Drive on the University of Georgia campus, sits a unique machine that may hold one of the solutions to big environmental problems like energy, food production and even global climate change.

"This machine right here is our baby," said UGA research engineer Brian Bibens, who is one of a handful of researchers around the world working on alternative ways to recycle carbon.

Bibens' specialty is "biochar," a highly porous charcoal made from organic waste. The raw material can be any forest, agricultural or animal waste. Some examples are woodchips, corn husks, peanut shells, even chicken manure.

Bibens feeds the waste -- called "biomass" -- into an octagonally shaped metal barrel where it is cooked under intense heat, sometimes above 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the organic matter is cooked through a thermochemical process called "pyrolysis".

In a few hours, organic trash is transformed into charcoal-like pellets farmers can turn into fertilizer. Gasses given off during the process can be harnesed to fuel vehicles of power electric generators.

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The Big (Green) Apple

As flat as a pool table and barely a mile wide at its narrowest, the Rockaway Peninsula--a tongue of land that sticks into the Atlantic Ocean at New York City's southeastern corner--is already vulnerable to storm surges and floods. Global warming, with its rising seas and harder rain, will only intensify those threats. That's what has Vincent Sapienza, the city's assistant commissioner for wastewater treatment, so worried. The Rockaway Wastewater Treatment Plant, which processes 25 million gal. (95,000 cu m) of sewage a day, sits next to the beach, and its pumps are below sea level. In a major flood, parts of the plant could be submerged, shutting down sewage treatment. "If you lose these pumps, you're done," says Sapienza, standing in the plant's churning basement. "This is a really vulnerable place."

To prepare for climate change--and growth--the city is spending $30 million to raise the pumps and other electrical equipment at the Rockaway plant well above sea level. The overhaul is just one part of New York's groundbreaking PlaNYC--a long-term blueprint to grow the U.S.'s biggest city green in the age of global warming. "This is about making the city more sustainable," says Sapienza.

Though it's caricatured as a concrete jungle, New York is already surprisingly eco-friendly. Thanks to its density and public transit, the city has a per capita carbon footprint 71% smaller than the U.S. as a whole. With more than 8.2 million people calling New York home, surpassing a historical high set in the 1950s, the city's infrastructure--its crowded subways, traffic-choked streets, aging water mains--is being pushed past its limits. City planners realize that New York is on track to gain an additional 900,000 people by 2030. If that growth isn't managed properly, the result will be an environmental and economic mess. "New York is growing, and we have to think more effectively," says Rohit Agarwalla, director of the city's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability. "We can't just build more power plants. We can't just grow on the edges."

The answer to the question of where the city will put nearly a million extra people is PlaNYC. Unveiled by Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Earth Day 2007--and pushed since then with all his considerable political capital--PlaNYC includes more than 120 green initiatives that range from planting a million trees to cleaning up every square mile of contaminated land in the city.

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S.F.'s scraps bring joy to area farmers

Every morning, garbage trucks swing by the Hotel Nikko, the Palace Hotel and MoMo's, picking up food left on dinner plates and in San Francisco chefs' kitchens. Green crews hit neighborhoods from the Mission to the Sunset, collecting oatmeal, chicken bones and dead tree leaves.

About 2,000 restaurants, 2,080 large apartment buildings and 50,000 single-family homes have embraced the city's environmentally friendly green bins. The scrap is turned into gold, a rich compost that boosts the region's bounty of food while curbing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

San Francisco's garbage and recycling companies are leading the way in producing a high-quality, boutique compost tailored for Bay Area growers, experts say. In one year, 105,000 tons of food scraps and yard trimmings - 404 tons each weekday - get turned into 20,000 tons of compost for 10,000 acres.

The compost is in such demand from nearby growers of wine grapes, vegetables and nuts that it sells out at peak spreading season every year.

One big payoff comes from the crops that return to feed the Bay Area, making a full circle of food returning to food. The composted crops are sold in farmers' markets to restaurants such as Chez Panisse in Berkeley and in wine made by Sonoma and Napa vintners.

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