Consider: 1. By 2050 we can project that about 70 percent of the world's population will live in urban centres, and the majority of urban growth will occur in developing nations. [1. Population Reference Bureau, Human Population: Urbanism.]

2. By 2050, to feed a global population projected at nine billion, "we will need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000". [2. Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Quoted here.]

6.3 billion urban dwellers, mostly in poorer nations, within the next 40 years. Urban growth and sustainability depends not only on rural sustainability, but on imbrication of producer and consumer systems – the two must be considered as a whole. Initiatives like the New City Market are the beginnings of a re-imagining of our food systems based on an understanding that there can be no urban/rural divide in a strong food economy. Indeed, that this divide, which assumes consumption as separate or even as wholly divorced from production, is the root of our failing food systems. The competition for resources and land between cities and farms only exacerbates this.

Forward-looking urban policy must understand and incorporate food systems as a primary and foundational precondition to any and all growth. This change can not be limited to just land-use issues, but institutional food procurement policies, tax and fee incentives, waste management, urban food production, transportation infrastructure, regulatory change, downstream/storm water pollution abatement and so on. An urban system based on an understanding of, and integration with, its surrounding food systems can work as an engine of food security instead of an ecological and economic liability.

We not only need to think of the food economy as an endangered ecosystem that exists right on the borders and shores of our cities and act as if a city's continued prosperity depends on the survival of that system (it does), we also need to act with the understanding that cities are a part of and can strengthen that system as well.

UPDATE: This timely video from the WWF illustrates the above mentioned situation with stunning efficacy.

More videos here.

Meanwhile, Andrés Duany, whose New Urbanism is a form of postmodern city planning, noted that what the New York intelligentsia belittles as postmodernism is really the style preferred by the vast majority of Americans. If most buildings with traditional motifs are poorly executed, he said, it is because the architectural elite has refused to design them

Ah yes, the New York intelligentsia. Interesting how someone, allegedly progressive, uses the same anti-intellectual boogeyman as the likes of the Tea Party. Another great argument is the suggestion that since a style is "preferred by the vast majority of Americans" it must be somehow more correct than other less popular styles – how very High School. And, just in case you missed the opening anti-intellectualism, Duany rounds his argument off with a stab at the "architectural elite".

What a maddening waste of time. Dormers aren't going to solve climate change. Conferences where "experts" discuss the architectural equivalent of angels dancing on pins are not going to house the homeless. It's astonishing to think that these types of discussions still take place in these times. Are we really going to worry about offending "the vast majority of Americans" architectural taste when considering the catastrophic impact of rising sea-levels?

If Postmodernism has achieved anything it has been the elevation of the absurd and the trivial at the expense of the serious and meaningful.

Link.

The thing that’s so wonderful about using beautiful, appropriate tools is that they become an extension of you, your body, you fingertips, and your mind. They get out of the way and let you directly interact with the problem you are solving.

Everyone’s tried to remove a screw without a screwdriver; a task quickly becomes impossible that otherwise would be trivial.

- Luke Crawford. Developer of Muxtape.

I love good tools. For me, there are few joys greater than working with a well-made tool – the way a good tool disappears into your intention, gets out of your way so you can focus on the act rather than the action.

Everything, in my current incarnation as an environmental designer, has been made on one tool, a Mac. The Mac, and it's extension the iPhone, are the only electronic devices that have ever achieved that "disappearance" for me. The tool should always be and extension of the act and not an act in itself, or, as Steve Jobs put it, "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works".

Steve Job's contribution to the tools Apple created was to think as a user. To identify the needs that the tool must address and then use rigorous and uncompromising design to meet those needs. Why else would you make a tool? People use Macs because they are made to be used – designed to be used. So few tool-makers understand this, so few designers understand this and no other computer company does.

Thanks, Steve. RIP.

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born on this day 100 years ago.

McLuhan’s work with Quentin Fiore not only influenced generations of thinking but generations of designers as well – myself included. Happy birthday, Marshall.