Meanwhile I’m aiming to go back to Burlington and New York in September – this time with the family, which will be a blast. This should be a study visit to the Champlain Housing Trust to get more information about how the Trust interacts with the market and its key partners, plus a presentation at a cohousing symposium at the New School. I’m also hoping to see more of the community supported agriculture schemes at the Intervale in Burlington and will have a biit more time in NYC this time, so am hoping to catch up with more folk actually building things this time as well.

All good.

Why is there a bunny? I love this one:

This is definitely the architecture of the apocalypse:

But redemption is at hand. Check out the excellent things at Mariposa Grove. Chooks, solar, veggie gardens…

And this helps:

And let’s look out the window. Everyone say “Hello Post St!” Three Thai restaurants on da block. Woohoo!

Come with us now on a journey through time and space…

Let’s pretend we’re in Boston again. So, here’s my favourite local abode:

and here’s Sarah in Darwin’s. Note conspicuously large pile of CDs (I deny everything) and TEA.

Right, time for breakfast. I endeavour to not be a ratbag at the symposium today. But I can already feel a stirring desire to wear my Google Peak Oil or Die t-shirt. I think I need to go clubbing.

I am getting thoroughly fed up with conferences. I am currently avoiding the opening reception for the Ecocity summit (but it’s raining!) and am seriously considering some shopping over at Haight tomorrow instead of the morning sessions. Ooooh burnout.

However, I did meet some fine folk today, including an excellent young chap with SunWorks NY who is working on horizontally and vertically integrated agriculture. Hooray for urban agriculture.

I demand images.

I don’t know what these are, but there are dozens of them feeding over on the East Bay.

OK, so the entirety of SF is on Free the Net right now so it’s breakfast blogging for me.

I tried.

I tried…

I was up in Burlington, Vermont, a couple of weekends back, where all sorts of excellent things have been afoot for quite some time now involving these people. They are the biggest community land trust in the US and have developed over 1200 units of affordable housing, as well as community infrastructure like a legal aid centre and meals centre on Trust land. This is Burlington Cohousing, on Trust land – woohoo!

I also visited DUDLEY ST which those of you who have had to put up with my blathering over time would recognise as the folk I have been wanting to catch up with for some 8 years now. I would show lots more nice photos at this point, but the dodgy free WiFi in this hostel seems to stuff up the image uploading, which sucks quite a lot.

The AAG was large. Several times I restrained myself from getting into crowded lifts full of geophiles and exclaiming “ooh look! A spatial concentration! What an anomaly!” There were something like 7000 geographers in Boston for the duration and it got truly surreal here in the hotel, which was ground zero for the whole event. Roughly 1000 people got turned away from a session with Chomsky. There was a beautiful moment of crowd organisation where a hotel staffer called out “Chomsky on the left!”. As the geographers scattered on the winds, me new friend Sarah and I took off to Cambridge to get a load of the Dresden Dolls up to shenanigans in Newbury Comics on Record Store Day (yay!), which prompted me spending WAY too much money on CDs that are simply impossible to get in Oz. I don’t regret a cent. Tea and sandwiches followed, via Hootenanny, which nearly caused further eruptions of consumerism.

So now I’m in San Francisco and it’s damn cold and windy. Spent this morning at Bridge Housing, then went via the Ferry markets to the Northern California Housing Trust and wound up at Mariposa Grove, a cohousing retrofit in NCLT land. Oh boy does that site rock. I have mountains of photos which I will endeavour to get visible somehow…

Favourite architectural incongruity:

Argh. Now I’m on sodding reserve power as well. Good bye my pretties…

I’m melting….

Question: why is coffee so goddawful over here, and why the hell is there NO WAY* of making tea in my hotel room??? Don’t these people realise what a lack of access to quality caffeinated products will do to me? I won’t be held responsible for what comes. Likewise, they want to charge something like $50+ for a load of washing, which I refuse to pay. As I said, I won’t be held responsible. And while we’re at it, why can’t I get beans for breakfast? I know everyone around here went all bean-phobic after drowning themselves in molasses but that was 1919 and I want beans, dammit. If I have any more eggs for breakfast (with/out “optional breakfast meats” – I shit you not) I will follow it up with a prompt coronary.

Oh yeah, this is my lofty abode. Note conspicuous absence of tea:

And here’s what Boston is doing:

I may need to go buy jeans.

*OK, so there’s an electronic drip filter coffee maker that they suggest you put a teabag in the top of, ie., let the water run through the baggie before the water gets warmed up. Beside the utter travesty to tea-making this represents (Caroline, back me up here), note I don’t say “boiled” as we don’t go anywhere near boiling in crummy drip filter world. And the bar fridge froze my milk. Which leaves me with brie and pastrami as tea additive options. Assuming the brie hasn’t frozen. Mmmmmmm cheese icecream. The uni is paying US$200+ per night for this joint and they can’t provide a jug??? I understand I am supposed to hand my credit card over to the Starbucks downstairs, but oh no, they’re not gonna get me… and besides, THAT’S NOT COFFEE.

So. Got into hotel at midnight after 28 hours in transit with those sleeps that only plastic molded airport seats can provide. Hotel room is enormous and the bed is in a cupboard. From up here (floor 36) we can see:

Yep. Boston, and a crappy reflection due to early morning light. And I have no idea why this image won’t resize properly.

So I went to Harvard to meet with Roz Greenstein of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. These guys rock and Roz is excellent. Besides all of the amazing work they do in supporting community land trusts, they are developing GIS tools for local community groups. Ohhhhh yeah. They will also be running an online CLT course soon. Whee! On the train over, I saw this:

Woooo!!!!! Community Land Trusts in action. The meeting with Roz was incredibly useful and I will post about that when I can think again.

I found a pleasingly OTT deli to get an overpriced sandwich, bought intelligently sardonic action figures and sat in a conspicuously public place to eat lunch. Note: Americans don’t seem to sit outside eating lunch. Or at least not in Harvard in April. Pleasing things about Harvard Square:

1) The public phones are hidden inside poles.

2) There is a huge deli/cafe with some French name emblazoned all over its outdoor sunshades, which were all folded up, so the only word visible on the banana-yellow phallic protrusions was “Pain”. In front of which a manic street preacher was holding forth with some of the more dire extracts from the Good Book.

3) The 28-second pedestrian crossings. OK, so rather than a little green man or any other neo-pagan pedestrian signals, we have a flashing countdown from 28 seconds. Why 28? New post-apocalyptic zombie thriller: 28 Seconds Later, where the hollow-eyed, backpacked undead mill about on congested streets until run over by a convoy of SUVs.

Seems every park in Boston has a raving preacher and every subway station has a crap busker on guitar. The guy at Copley Station was engaged in some high-end iPod subterfuge: he had an amp. Shoulda seen the cranky kids

Meh. I go. Tea beckons. I have a meeting with Rachel Bratt in an hour and am really starting to lose track of things. Post back to me. Garn.