flynn050

When the Yale University's U.S. Health Justice Collaborative recently organized an event under the title “ Paved With Good Intentions: White Saviorism and the Nonprofit Industrial Complex " they hit a nerve. The event space wasn't large enough to hold the nearly 1,300 people that had declared interest and had to watch a live-stream of the event. Yale event In September of 2017 the Haitian government announced that it had banned the operations of 257 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Haiti because they were disconnected from the priorities and needs of the Haitian people, according to the announcement. The Minister of Planning and External Cooperation (MPCE), Aviol Fleurant, [said] that it was necessary to get Haiti out of the conceptual state of welfare, to move it into real development, [he]said that the 257 organizations had violated a September 14, 1989 decree regarding their functioning. Mr. Fleurant said that these institutions must finance what the Haitian pe...

No matter that EPA chief Scott Pruitt wants to roll back the phase Corporate Average Fuel Economy ( CAFE ) standards of 2015 which require  fleet gas consumption to be cut in half over 2010 values by 2025, this horse is out of the barn.  It will matter little what Pruitt does with the CAFE standards The brewing federal fight is not just between California, which vows to maintain the higher standards,  but also with the rest of the world. Chiefly it won't be a fight about regulations but fighting economics and technology. Clearly the US government doesn't have an enviable position in this. It can't possibly win because nothing that becomes as uneconomical as the privately owned internal combustion engine car will endure in the long run, no matter how many incentives it has been given and no matter how long it already endured in spite of its inherent non-sustainability. The US is also in a bad position because its auto-industry makes most of its profit from pick-up trucks ...

"Everybody talks about the future of transportation - we don't." One is tempted to think that is developers adaptation of the nineteen-seventies slogan of the German Rail in which it claimed "everybody talks about the weather - we don't". Parking everywhere, even on waterfront piers How else to explain all the cranes towering over buildings sitting on top of giant parking garages which keep on being constructed either above or below ground, frequently even with those efficient sloping floors which prevent any other use than driving and parking cars on it. When asked about the dead investment that these garages represent, developers usually shrug their shoulders and refer to the banks who just want to see parking before funding a project. In a recent exchange between a Baltimore design review panel and a developer panelists asked if a 10 floor 550 space garage was really needed for the proposed 20 story office building. The developer said: "You need to s...

The Car of the Year designation bestowed by automotive magazines feels just as anachronistic as beauty queens or the Man of the Year title that the Time awarded before they discovered that women are people, too. But this year and last year the car of the year has been electric, a fact that urban planners need to pay attention to, no matter that the car in general has long been pushed from its pedestal as the sole driver of development supremely shaping everything in its path. Cities need to prepare better for electric cars. Car of the Year 2017: An all electric Tesla 3 (Photo: Automobile ) The magazine Automobile gave the crown of Car of the Year to the Tesla model 3, a nod to hipsters and tycoons alike and a nod to a hyped brand whose stock value is higher than that of General Motors. The Tesla legend has reached new heights since February 6 when a Tesla Roadster began navigating through space atop SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. A feat that is derided as the ultimate obscene stu...

Customs Road in Calicut, Kerala is short, beginning at a T intersection with Beach Road at the Arabian Sea and ending at another T junction just two blocks inland. Its name stems from British colonial times when there must have been secondary custom functions here related to international trade in spices. The local nickname is Kashtam, Malaylam for "what a pity", a not entirely inept description in spite of a promising lighthouse on the foot of the street marking the coastline. Calicut (Kozhikode), the 45' lighthouse from 1903 which replaced a 90' older lighthouse (Photo: Philipsen) Regardless whether one sees the road as one to be pittied, or one that goes back to times when Calicut at the Beypore river was a global port and trade center for spices, it was elevated to being an object for research as part of a project for architecture students from Baltimore's Morgan State University conducted together with students from the local MES architecture school. Research...