due process

Due process clause comes from the Fifth Amendment that “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” The first clause is called due process clause, and the second taking clause. The Fourteenth Amendment essentially repeats the same clause, but applies to the states and their creatures -- local governments.

According to Land Use Planning and Development Regulation Law by Julian Conrad Juergensmeyer and Thomas E. Roberts, there are two types of due process: substantive due process and procedural duo process. “Substantive due process limits the exercise of the police power by requiring that a land use regulation promote the health, safety, morals, or general welfare by a rational means. It protects against arbitrary or capricious actions.” However, compared to substantive due process which deals with “why a deprivation occurred,” procedural due process “asks how the deprivation came to be.” Procedural due process attaches to administrative and quasi-judicial decisionmaking, rather than legislation which substantive due process attached to. An example of procedural due process is a proper notice on public hearing during the rezoning process. 

Ultra Vires

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, ultra vires, originally Latin, means “beyond the scope or in excess of legal power or authority.” (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ultra%20vires) Usually than not, the power/authority here refers to the Constitution. Ultra vires is a statutory claim; once the court finds a law exceeds the power granted by the Constitution, it will declare the law to be ultra vires. Two conditions can lead to ultra vires: either substantive (the law is beyond the power), or procedural (the process is not proper). Under the circumstance of zoning, the Board of Zoning Appeals (ZBA) plays the quasi-judicial role to hear the appeals on the administrative decisions. It is ZBA who judges whether a law (such as a rezoning) is ultra vires or not. 

Building insulation

(http://www.wall-lag.co.uk/wp-content/themes/walllag/images/house.jpg)

Building insulation refers broadly to any object in a building used as insulation for any purpose. The most common one is thermal insulation, which is an important factor to archive thermal comfort for its occupants. Insulation reduces unwanted heat loss or gain and can decrease the energy demand of heating and cooling systems. In a narrow sense insulation can just refer to the insulation materials employed to slow heat loss, such as glass wool, polystyrene ETC. The effectiveness of insulation is commonly evaluated by its R-value. 

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_insulation)

As a rule, insulating homes is important in any climate and, typically, the more insulation (i.e., the higher the R-value) the better. Properly installed, insulation decreases unwanted thermal gains or losses through the envelope throughout the year.

In general, insulating the attic or roof should be the first priority since the most extreme boundary conditions or temperature differences typically occur at or around these areas. However, other hidden areas need to be insulated by home builders and contractors. These spaces include finished and unfinished attics, all exterior walls including those between living spaces, and floors above cold spaces, even slab floors built directly on the ground. 

Urban agriculture

Urban agriculture is the growing of plants and the raising of animals for food and other uses, and related processing and marketing activities, within and around cities and towns. Urban agriculture has received increased attention in the past few years from development organizations and national and local authorities in developing countries. With its multiple functions, urban agriculture plays an important role in urban poverty alleviation and social inclusion, urban food security, urban waste management and urban greening.
The most striking feature of urban agriculture, which distinguishes it from rural agriculture, is that it is integrated into the urban economic and ecological system: urban agriculture is embedded in -and interacting with- the urban ecosystem. Such linkages include the use of urban residents as labourers, use of typical urban resources (like organic waste as compost and urban wastewater for irrigation), direct links with urban consumers, direct impacts on urban ecology (positive and negative), being part of the urban food system, competing for land with other urban functions, being influenced by urban policies and plans, etc. Urban agriculture is not a relict of the past that will fade away (urban agriculture increases when the city grows) nor brought to the city by rural immigrants that will loose their rural habits over time. It is an integral part of the urban system.
(from http://www.ruaf.org/node/512)

(picture from http://www.cityfarmer.info/2010/02/07/urban-orchard-prizing-winning-concept-for-the-growing-up-design-competition-2009/#more-3800)

Urban agriculture and urban farms benefits a lot to city and dwellers. First, they offer working opportunities for citizens. In many developed countries, cities are where poor and unemployed dwellers concentrated. Urban agriculture provides a complementary strategy to reduce urban unemployment. Second, groceries produced by urban farms can be directly sent to markets in cities without the long shipping and distributing. Growing urban farms are efficient and economic way for transporting farm products. Third, urban farms are places for citizens to gather and have fun. The activities of growing vegetables and crops involves different people to meet. And they offer opportunities for people to get in touch with earth and traditional agricultural activities and are good educations for kids.

Brownfield

Brownfield sites are abandoned or underused industrial and commercial facilities available for re-use. Expansion or redevelopment of such a facility may be complicated by real or perceived environmental contamination. Innovative remedial techniques used at distressed brownfields in recent years include bioremediation and in situ oxidation. Often, these strategies are used in conjunction with each other or with other remedial strategies such as soil vapor extraction.In this process, vapor from the soil phase is extracted from soils and treated, which has the effect of removing contaminants from the soils and groundwater beneath a site. Some brownfields with heavy metal contamination have even been cleaned up through an innovative approach called phytoremediation, which uses deep-rooted plants to soak up metals in soils into the plant structure as the plant grows. After they reach maturity, the plants – which now contain the heavy metal contaminants in their tissues – are removed and disposed of as hazardous waste.
A newer technology for remediating brownfields involves an in situ injection of an iron-embedded organosilica material that creates a permanent soft curtain barrier underground. Groundwater passes through the barrier, which absorbs toxins and solvents while the iron dechlorinates them to non-toxic
products. Research is under way to see if some brownfields can be used to grow crops, specifically for the production of biofuels.

( from wikipedia)










An excellent example of remediation of brown field is the Gasworks Park in Seattle. The site previously belongs to the former Seattle Gas Light Company. It is located on the north shore of the Lake Union, having a good view of Seattle city. Through bio-phyto-remediation techniques the soil and water is cleaned and "greened". And the old plants, structures and paths are preserved to honor the rich industrial history. Now the park holds a lot of different public activities.
(Pictures from wikipedia)

bioswale

                                                                           (http://www.lakecountyil.gov/Stormwater/LakeCountyWatersheds/BMPs/PublishingImages/bioswale.jpg)

Bioswales are vegetated open channels specifically designed to attenuate and treat stormwater runoff for a defined water volume. They consist of a swaled drainage course with gently sloped sides and filled with vegetation, compost and riprap. Depending upon the geometry of available land, a bioswale may have a meandering or almost straight channel alignment. 


A common application is around parking lots, where substantial automotive pollution is collected by the paving and then flushed by rain. Two early examples of scientifically designed bioswales for large scale applications are the bioswale for Willamette River Park in Portland, Oregon and one at Carneros Business Park, Sonoma County, California.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioswale)

Even where soils have very poor hydraulic conductivity, a 4 meter swale could reduce the volume of runoff from a typical local road to about 25% of total rainfall. Also, as storm water runoff flows through bioswales, pollutants are removed through filtering by vegetation and soils. In most development situations, bioswales are well- suited because of their linear nature and because they are designed to receive storm water runoff via distributed sheet flow.

However, some researchers point out that when the slope of bioswales become too steep (up to 10%), runoff velocities become fast enough to cause erosion, and prevent adequate infiltration or filtering in the channel. Besides, bioswales also do not seem to be effective at reducing bacteria levels in storm water runoff.

Successional plan

“Succession is the change of species and ecological systems over time, and in the context of landscape architecture, the purposeful manipulation of this transformation to create stable ecosystems. It is often paired with restoration efforts to foster new and stable ecosystems where there previously were none, or that had been affected by a natural disaster or man-made construction. It relies on many sequential actions executed over a longer period of time, anywhere from 10 to 200 years, allowing the species involved to grow and stabilize. Succession planning typically takes place within the context on regional processes that form and manipulate the environment. The system is not so much constructed as it is manipulated within these parameters.”

 http://nymag.com/realestate/features/2016/17149/

Succession is a landscape architecture topic. The vegetation grow in a dynamic and constantly shifting with the environment thus create dynamic space and landscape. It is a landscape plan that use plant associations, plant growth habits and planned landscape maintains to create an environment benefiting the ecosystem.To archive a good succession plan, we should know the vegetation well and analyze the bio environment, such as soil, air, water, of the site before make the design.