World Water Week Theme: Urban Water (via Water For People DC News)

Old Town Chinatown’s Public Hygiene Lets Us Stay Human (PHLUSH) was a co-comvener of this special session at World Water Week in Stockholm. Surprising to see a little group included among the likes of IWA, UNICEF, EAWAG and SEI. Could it be that there are precious few grassroots citizens’ groups working on sanitation issues? Come to think of it, are there any others that really started from the bottom up?

Yesterday marked the conclusion of World Water Week in Stockholm, during which 2,600 global water experts met for over 100 sessions to discuss the issues was water and sanitation around the globe. “We face an unmitigated disaster. Jaipur, India is out of water. What’s going to happen to places like that?” said Paul Reiter, executive director of the International Water Association (IWA), at the closing ceremony in Stockholm this morning. “We’re ad … Read More

via Water For People DC News

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1

Restroom Interior, 1912 (via Vintage Portland)

Thanks to Dan Davis who blogs at Vintage Portland, we know how glorious public toilet facilities used to be. And this is the women’s room at a time when most public restrooms served only men.

Going downstairs from yesterday's restroom entrance would have taken you to this amazing underground "comfort station." The women's room provided an attendant, tile mosaics, steam heating, and marble stall dividers. The restrooms were "restored to original" during the transit mall construction in the 1970s but vandalism forced permanent closure shortly thereafter. (University of Oregon Libraries) … Read More

via Vintage Portland

Restroom Entrance, 1912 (via Vintage Portland)

Dan Davis has a couple of great posts this week on the historic underground comfort station near Pioneer Courthouse. Dan does his homework, turning over stones and single handedly making Portland more fascinating than anyone expected.

I “like”d this post and now I find I may be able to reblog it. Lazy blogger’s road to happiness! Let’s see if it works.

Early 20th Century Portland provided a pair of underground restrooms at SW 6th and Yamhill that were almost elegant, especially by today's standards. This women's room entrance looks west, with the Portland Hotel in the background and the Pioneer Courthouse to our immediate right. A matching men's room is just around the corner on 6th. In fact these entrances, and restrooms below, still stand. Long closed, you can peek through the door cracks and … Read More

via Vintage Portland

Recycling Bin Urinals: Would they work as a stop gap measure?

Imagine an ordinary plastic recycling bin with a hinged lid and wheels of the type seen curbside and on sidewalks throughout the US. Fit into the side is a wide mouth funnel which functions as  urinal.  A tube extends to a compartment underneath the usual bin which converts the urine into high quality natural fertilizer.

Swiss designer Stephen Bischof has field tested his innovative prototype on the busy streets of South London, where video monitoring confirmed its acceptance by users.  The press, the design community, and experts in ecological sanitation have all taken note.

Considering the challenge of dealing with public urination in US cities, the Recycling Bin Urinal merits serious consideration.  First, it presents an opportunity to decriminalize public urination when people simply cannot find an available toilet.  Granted, a recycling bin meets neither the standards of dignity nor the privacy criteria expected of a public toilet.   But in areas of cities where homeless people gather at night for their safety, these emergency urinals are likely to be welcomed.

Even when public toilets are available within a reasonable distance, homeless men and women are understandably reluctant to go to them if it means packing up their belongings and or leaving them behind. The bins can be discretely rolled to a nearby alcove at night. Women can use the facility to dump urine collected in a drugstore urinal or directly with the assistance of any of a number of inexpensive cardboard or plastic funnels available on the market.

Environment activists and advocates for the rights of homeless people might do well to think out of the box and embrace this idea. Decriminalize urination, collect trash and recycle urine using the same small footprint receptacle?  Maybe this is a place to start.

APTs disappear in favor of old fashioned, hand-washed toilets. Didn’t PHLUSH say APTs would never work?

The New York Times reports another failure of the European automatic public toilets, or APTs.  This time the 34th Street Parternership, an NYC  business improvement district, learned the hard way.  Their $500,000 toilet cost $100,000 per year to maintain and very few people were brave enough to use it.

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In early 2006, PHLUSH argued that APTs were NOT the way to go, even in a huge city market where they could be supported by advertising.  This was before the Seattle APT fiasco.   How long was it that the five expensive potties remained on Seattle’s streets before they were flogged on e-Bay for $89?

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And what inspires confidence in toilet users?  The presence – full time or ocasional – of an attendant.  Says Jerome Barth, the 34th Street Partnership’s Vice President,  “It’s an attendant who knows what’s going on and has functions that go from sanitation to exchanging a few words with you to generally having a sense of what should be done.  People see them, and they know the bathrooms are clean.”

BTW we’re surprised that in her Blogtown post,  the normally astute Sarah Mirk gets it wrong: Fancy self-automated toilet’s like Portland’s loo are still mistrusted in NYC. The Portland Loo, while hefty and polished, is neither fancy nor “self-automated”.   It’s minimalist and  non-intimidating.  It’s got a sidewalk for a floor. And it gets a hand-washed by the folks from Clean and Safe .  (Also, Sarah, grammar alert: what’s with the random apostrophe?)

News from the [complete, walkable] Street

Byrne, Bluemenauer and Sadik-Khan at Cities, Bicycles, and the Future of Getting Around event in Washington DC WashCycle summarizes remarks by the star studded panel at the December 8 event.   New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan’s called for a federal framework for urban street planning, saying local frameworks are too easily tied up in red tape and applauding Cities for Cycling.

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NACTO launches Cities for Cycling The National Association of City Transportation Officials’  Cities for Cycling initiative will catalog, promote and implement the world’s best bicycle transportation practices in American municipalities.  According to the press release:  Cycling is booming in cities across the nation. Based on the American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. census bureau, cycling as a share of transportation is up in major cities by as much as 72% from 2007-2008, with an average growth rate of over 30%…. From protected cycle-tracks to bike boxes and special traffic signals for bikes, Cities for Cycling seeks to share these best practices among leading cities and encourage State and Federal governments to adopt the new design treatments as standard practices, opening up funding and technical support opportunities and cutting red tape.

Mind the Gaps. Picture =1000 words. Connecting cul de sacs streets to form a grid is easy to visualize; a no brainer.  But can it happen in suburbia?   We hear the screaming already.  Maybe just easier to abandon dead houses on dead streets.  Sad.

New Urban News aggregates articles on Walkable Streets. Is it just our imagination, or was 2009 the year when Walkable Steets and the 20 minute neighborhoods became kitchen sink concepts?  And concepts that beg so many other questions: transportation policy, design standards, connecting the grid, the need for motorists,  razing freeways, multi-modality, shared streets, pedestrians and cyclists dealing with one another more intuitively.   Great stuff.

Complete streets fundamentals and policy guidance.  The National Complete Streets Coalition also has a bunch of basic tools for activists working with planners and city officials. There are FAQs, fact sheets on a whole slew of sub-issues, and  community workshops.

Walmart rejects idea of integrating store in walkable community.

Hurricane Katrina wrecked a WalMart in a Mississippi town, opening the way for new ideas about what WalMarts should look like.  Local architects presented three different plans, all with a full-size store and housing  above ground-level parking. Residents would have had views of the Gulf of Mexico and protection from hurricane-driven water. But Walmart reverted to a single-use building elevated six feet higher than the one ruined by Katrina with no on-site housing.

Byrne, Bloomberg, Moses and Videos from Chinatown

Location as Destiny? What is it about certain cities and places that fosters specific attitudes? .. To what extent does the infrastructure of cities shape the lives, work, and sensibilities of their inhabitants? Quite significantly, I suspect, writes David Byrne in his new Bicycle Diaries.  All this talk about bike lanes, ugly buildings, and density of population isn’t just about those things, it’s about what kinds of people those places turn us into… Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so. Check the excerpt for musings on what may account for developments in Hong Kong. After missing Byrne at the talking bike heads book shindig to  last week at the Baghdad, it was good to catch him being interviewed this morning by Jacki Lyden on Weekend Edition.

Making Parking Cool. Bike lane building Michael Bloomberg reaches out to the frustrated motorist trying to find a parking place.   In his opinion piece in the Daily News this week, the New York Mayor challenges app developers to make parking and parking revenue collection more efficient.   How would you like to use your mobile device to see a map of available parking spaces in your neighborhood – and also use it to pay your meter? Or how about getting a text message as your meter is about to expire, so you can get back to your car before getting a ticket?

Dead Freeway Reference Work Sarah Mirk’s discussion of  never built Portland area got the attention of a lot of folks, including us.  Now the Mercury journalist has located the study of Portland that Robert Moses did 66 years ago with all of its now very quaint-looking hand drawn map and gentle watercolors of what might have been.  Writing from the other Portland, blogger Christian McNeil provides a nice review .

Chinatown Past and Future. New talking pictures this week!   Brought to you by the Portland Development Commission and staring, among others, our own Stephen Ying, is Portland’s Old Town/Chinatown.   And Ivy Lin,  the energetic chronicler of the neighborhood and creator of Pig Roast and Fish Tank, Ivy Lin has issued an invitation to her next premiere. Coming Together Home, the story of the Chinese interred (not interned, as the sub title suggests) at Lone Fir Cemetary screens at 7 pm October 11, 2009 at Someday Lounge.   See you there.

Reining in the energy costs of sprawl

Reining in the energy costs of sprawl

The senselessness of embedding energy-efficient buildings in energy-squandering suburban neighborhoods was driven home again by NPR’s Steve Inskeep on Houston: Texas-Sized Sprawl, No End In Sight.  Sweating with humidity and weighing in at 620 square miles – the size of Chicago, Phildelphia, Baltimore and Detroit combined – Houston forces its residents to use more energy than almost any other American metropolis.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112896915

In contrast to the energy-loving Texas city that keeps building more roads, Portland, Oregon has a proud history of tearing them down or not building them in the first place.    Sarah Mirk’s The Dead Freeway Society is a fine little history of this phenomenon, which can be forgiven for the   rhapsodic tone typical of so many accounts of Portland urban planning

http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/the-dead-freeway-society/Content?oid=1676323   Mirk notes the intergenerational dynamics which have made  contrarianism mixed with public consensus building such a fundamental part of the city’s culture:   While other American cities have built, built, built, Portland’s freeway history is boom and bust: massive road projects were planned, mapped, and sold as progress by one generation, then killed by another. When current transit planners visit from exotic Houston and DC to admire Portland’s progress, what they are really admiring are the roads not built—freeways erased from the maps decades ago.

The senselessness of embedding energy-efficient buildings in energy-squandering suburbia was echoed by NPR’s Steve Inskeep in Houston: Texas-Sized Sprawl, No End In Sight.  Sweating with humidity and weighing in at 620 square miles – the size of Chicago, Phildelphia, Baltimore and Detroit combined – Houston forces its residents to use more energy than almost any other American metropolis.

In contrast to the energy-loving Texas city that keeps building more roads, Portland, Oregon has a proud history of tearing them down or stopping them in the first place.    Sarah Mirk’s The Dead Freeway Society documents this phenomenon, if a bit in the rhapsodic tone typical of so many accounts of Portland urban planning

Mirk notes the intergenerational dynamics which have made  contrarianism mixed with public consensus building a fundamental part of the city’s culture:   While other American cities have built, built, built, Portland’s freeway history is boom and bust: massive road projects were planned, mapped, and sold as progress by one generation, then killed by another. When current transit planners visit from exotic Houston and DC to admire Portland’s progress, what they are really admiring are the roads not built—freeways erased from the maps decades ago.

Containing sprawl is not without its battles.  The Cambridge, Mass-based Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, which specializes in research and training, has teamed up with Boston-based Northern Light Productions to produce Portland: Quest for a Livable City.    A special screening of the documentary is planned for October 14, 2009 at 7 pm Portland State University.

A recent review and trailer shows the wrangling behind the rhapsody.  Energy conservation and the reduction of carbon emissions ultimately depend on complex measures to rein in car-dependent sprawl, maintain farmland, and promote density.   Public policy reform in these areas is arduous because it forces a reevaluation of long-held individual and community values.  But it’s safe to say Portland has made progress along the road (“bike path” ?) that Houston has not even started to build.

Restroom design work wins PHLUSH invitation to international summit

Public Hygiene Lets Us Stay Human, or PHLUSH, has been invited to make two presentations to the prestigious World Toilet Summit in Singapore in December 2009.

Old Town Chinatownʼs public restroom advocates are busy preparing 20-minute presentations entitled Public Restroom Design for 21st Century US Cities: The PHLUSH Principles and Innovations in Sustainable Design: Case studies from Portland, Oregon.

The invitation came as surprise to PHLUSH, a committee of the Old Town Chinatown Neighborhood Association whose efforts have focussed on downtown Portland. World Toilet Summit organizers had noticed the groupʼs work in urban restroom design on their website www.phlush.org . In order to participate, PHLUSH must now raise funds to permit two of its Co-Founders to travel to Singapore.

Tax-deductible donations are being received by Neighbors West-Northwest, a coalition of twelve Portland Neighborhood Associations that serves as fiscal sponsor for PHLUSH. Neighbors West-Northwest is a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization accepting donations on line (at www.nwnw.org/Donate.html : add special instruction “PHLUSH” before hitting send ) and by check (to Neighbors West-Northwest, 2257 NW Raleigh St., Portland, OR 97210; put PHLUSH in memo line).

For the past four years, PHLUSH has worked to increase public restroom availability through well-focused citizen advocacy and practical, informed collaboration with local officials. The only organization of its kind in the United States, PHLUSH now has the opportunity to promote Portland and its acclaimed urban design and livability. Furthermore, participants will become familiar with the latest sustainable sanitation technologies and gain access to technical experts on issues ranging from composting toilets to proposed amendments to plumbing codes.

Please help PHLUSH take advantage of this extraordinary opportunity to exchange expertise with participants at the 2009 World Toilet Summit.

Public Hygiene Lets Us Stay Human, or PHLUSH, has been invited to make two presentations to the prestigious World Toilet Summit and Expo in Singapore in December 2009.

Old Town Chinatownʼs public restroom advocates are busy preparing 20-minute presentations entitled Public Restroom Design for 21st Century US Cities: The PHLUSH Principles and Innovations in Sustainable Design: Case studies from Portland, Oregon.

The invitation came as surprise to PHLUSH, a committee of the Old Town Chinatown Neighborhood Association whose efforts have focussed on downtown Portland. World Toilet Summit organizers had noticed the groupʼs work in urban restroom design on their website www.phlush.org . In order to participate, PHLUSH must now raise funds to permit two of its Co-Founders to travel to Singapore.

Tax-deductible donations are being received by Neighbors West-Northwest, a coalition of twelve Portland Neighborhood Associations that serves as fiscal sponsor for PHLUSH. Neighbors West-Northwest is a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization accepting donations on line (add special instruction “PHLUSH” before hitting send ) and by check (to Neighbors West-Northwest, 2257 NW Raleigh St., Portland, OR 97210; put PHLUSH in memo line).

For the past four years, PHLUSH has worked to increase public restroom availability through well-focused citizen advocacy and practical, informed collaboration with local officials. The only organization of its kind in the United States, PHLUSH now has the opportunity to promote Portland and its acclaimed urban design and livability. Furthermore, participants will become familiar with the latest sustainable sanitation technologies and gain access to technical experts on issues ranging from composting toilets to proposed amendments to plumbing codes.

Please help PHLUSH take advantage of this extraordinary opportunity to exchange expertise with participants at the 2009 World Toilet Summit.