Energy Efficient Community Gardens

Community gardens are a good way of demonstrating energy efficient technologies and finding practical ways to reduce the amount of energy used.


Bett Midler opened East Harlem's Community Garden, an energy efficient community garden in New York City last October with solar panels powering LED lights, a rainwater harvesting system and their own composting system using domestic waste reducing the amount of waste going to landfill.

Community Gardening

Community gardening in the UK is a recent thing and they are generally found on areas of derelict land or waste land that is not being used for anything and run as a non-profit organisation.  They have been developed due to a lack of access to green space, a wish to create a strong community  and an awareness of gardening.

"Gardening is a joy that recognises no restrictions of race or class or wealth or education: it unites and enriches us all.  What community gardeners have in common is their determination and their biggest resource is ingenuity." Gardening Which? magazine

Culpeper Community Garden in Islington, London was developed from a derelict site in 1982 and has since become an important community garden in the area and is run as a non-profit organisation.

Hulme Community Garden Centre in Manchester is a garden centre and community garden. Upcoming for 2009 are sustainable courses which is part of their LILI (Low Impact Living Initiative). Their mission is to "help people reduce their impact on the environment, improve their impact on the environment, improve their quality of life, gain new skills, live in a healthier and more satisfying way, have fun and save money".

Tetris for buildings

Tetris on buildings  originates from a puzzle video game from the 1980s in Russia.  It has been expanded so that it can be played on the side of buildings. In this film Russian students have fun playing tetris.  The french can dial on their mobiles to play tetris on the Bibliotheque Nationale de France 

Graffiti Research Lab

Graffiti Research Lab "is an art group dedicated to outfitting graffiti writers, artists ... with open source technologies for urban communication".

They are famous for inventing LED throwies.  LED throwies are LED lights with an earth-magnet taped to it which are then thrown against metal surfaces to create beautiful light shows.  They are very pretty...

Organic Concrete

Betao Organico or Organic Concrete blends organic and inorganic material together to create a living surface.  Concrete retains water, so during droughts it can provide water for plant life growing on it.  So now it's possible to grow grass in concrete slabs as well as between slabs.

Green Growing Concrete

Grass can be grown directly in green-growing concrete.  It can be planted into different structures on roofs and also on the side of river banks.

"Green-growing concrete has the strength and durability of concrete, as well as the ability to grow plants like soil.

Not only can lawn or grass be grown on the concrete, but it can also take medium-sized trees."

Castleford Regeneration

Castleford in Yorkshire was in the spotlight earlier in the year as Kevin McCloud's Big Town Plan televised the regeneration of this former mining town.

Today I went to Castleford and saw the famous bridge and the Tickle Cock Underpass.  The bridge works really well and has some cleverly designed seating right the way across the bridge.  It curves across the bridge and there are four lots of seating.  

I was intrigued to see Tickle Cock Underpass because of the flocked wall and seating.  The Underpass itself is very well designed but the immediate problem as you can see from the photos above is that the flocked seating has been vandalised.   It was only opened on 27 June 2008 so what will it look like in another six months?

 Martin Richman selected this material so it will be interesting to see what materials he uses for the London Olympic bridges commissions.