Smarter Than Car - An Open-source Bicycle Urbanism Think Tank

We are gladly launching Smarter Than Car as a Think Tank engaged with questions of Bicycle Urbanism and Future Urban Mobility.

See our new beautiful website:

As an open-source Think Tank we reagulary host events bringing together people to discuss ideas and brew up projects. We are also preparing some projects for the upcoming months so keep an eye out on the new website. I will also keep some updates on flolo.org.

Talk "The Promise of Bicycle Urbanism" @ TEDx Vienna - The City 2.0

I recently gave a talk at the TEDx Vienna City 2.0 event. Running through this process and meeting the inspiring team and other speakers made me learn a lot. Thanks to everybody who supported me in preparing the talk and of course to the whole team at Smarter Than Car! :)

Here is the video.

"The mainstreamed bicycle as a tool for creating future cities is just starting to take-off. Can we imagine a city where the benchmark for successful urban development is how we are able to use pedal-powered vehicles?
The idea of such a bicycle urbanism is what Florian is working on with the Chinese-Austrian NGO Smarter Than Car. He will make you understand why the bicycle is the most effective way to restructure our cities to become fit for future urban challenges.
Florian explains why he believes that the bicycle is still massively under-explored in contemporary urban planning and administration. He shows examples of what we can learn from bicycle cultural exchange with a city like Beijing to re-think our cities along the lines of pop-up urbanism on two or three wheels."

Mycelia Digested Materials for a Better World

I was very excited today during a TED talk of Eben Bayer, CEO of the company 'ecovative design', who presented ecovative's decomposable materials made with the help from fungi mycelia. Two materials are on the market already, 'ecocradle' for packaging and 'greensulate' for insulation purposes.

 [source]

The process is as smart as it is easy and environmentally benign. A wide array of lignocellulosic feedstock can be fitted into molds where its overgrown by the fungal mycelium which is partly processing the material and gluing it together. It takes five days to produce small packaging elements with a fraction of the energy used to produce a comparable styrofoam element. Ecovative materials are as well a perfect example of the 'craddle-to-craddle' concept as they can be readily composted in your backyard (if available) or centrally after collection. The 'ecovative' business model for global expansion foresees distributed production facilities which each use a local lignocellulosic feedstock.

There are some untold benefits as well. Carbon is stored temporarily in the products and it is easy to imagine how many CDEs can be put into a slower carbon cycle while being used as packaging material. From an urbanistic point of view these materials can be, amongst others, a way to enhance urban soils by decomposing a fraction of the material inflow to cities, thereby saving considerable amounts of primary energy used today for production and disposal of packaging products. The landscape field should be wide opened for these materials as well. There are so many materials used in landscape construction which would actually function in a better way if they became over time a structural component of the soil. hm...lets imagine.

It is good to know that a market-ready product is out there to compete with today's environmentally adverse packaging materials. I wish the team of ecovative all the best in their future development and am curious about more products which can be developed from mycelia-molded lignocellulosic materials. !!!

Talk: 'Creating Bioenergy Landscapes: An Ecological Perspective' at HKU

I will give a guest lecture on next Tuesday, 9th of February at the Division of Landscape Architecture in the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Hong Kong. The talk will elaborate on bioenergy as design strategy within landscape architecture practice.

Synopsis
Society increasingly seeks to address climate change, energy security and peak oil by using biomass as ‘biofuels’ for energy production. This has created ambivalent reactions from both scientists and environmentalists. Landscape architects are still underrepresented in this discourse, but may create bioenergy landscapes as multiple-use green spaces, infrastructure areas or on temporarily unused land. Bioenergy promises like green house gas savings, ‘clean’ energy or environmental sustainability will have to be considered by landscape architects with an informed and critical mind, to be able to truly assess bioenergy potentials of any given site.
This talk will therefore present benchmarks for bioenergy landscapes in terms of ecological functioning, energy
efficiency and possible green house gas savings. A review of landscape projects addressing bioenergy shall stimulate the discussion about landscape architecture practice in the context of bioenergy production. Finally, perspectives will be presented for bioenergy landscapes to become a vital element of landscape architecture projects.

Permafrost and Soil in Siberia

ecosystem carbon balance

:)