text:
According to the employment website Simply Hired, job advertisements for "developer evangelists" grew by 38% in 2013. The average salary for these new jobs was between $80K and $120K per year. With new vacancies from Twilio, Pebble, and HelloSign all being advertised this month, there is no end in sight for developers who want to combine marketing and business development skills with their programming expertise. ProgrammableWeb surveyed the career field and spoke with Context.io Developer Evangelist Tony Blank about what the job involves.
Simply Hired shows an annual growth of 38% in positions being advertised for developer evangelists; the majority of these positions involve evangelizing a business's or service's API. These hires are given the responsibility to build a strong and loyal developer community by encouraging developers to integrate the API into their business model.
Demand for Developer Evangelists
There are several drivers that will increase demand for developer evangelists in 2014.
- Increased competition among API providers: One of last year's most inspiring comments came from Steve Willmott, who argued that the API economy needs to prepare for the widespread release of a million APIs. API stakeholders were captivated by this vision and began thinking through the real implications of industry-shifting to an API-enabled marketplace. With more APIs being launched than ever before, the recognized need for developer evangelists to help businesses get their APIs noticed will grow.
- Greater sophistication in B2D marketing strategies: In 2013, many API providers changed their marketing strategies to focus primarily on business-to-developer (B2D) engagement strategies. These included an improved life cycle management approach for open APIs that moved from landing pages to private beta to general availability, coupled with a focus on providing an engaging developer experience via more intuitive sandboxes, better API documentation, and detailed error messaging. As more API providers will need to build developer communities around their products -- whether those will be specific developer communities targeting their business partners or more open developer communities -- developer evangelists will be seen as the linchpins in the engagement process and will act as the "human APIs," connecting a business with external partners.
- Greater number of new connected devices needing an ecosystem: Connected devices are swamping the annual International CES held in Las Vegas this year from January 7 to 10. As new wearable technology, smart fabrics, connected homes, and connected car devices come on to the market, each will need to build an ecosystem quickly that shows how their devices can work well with others and meet the needs of multiple customer market segments. Wearable tech leaders like Pebble are already preparing to scale up against increased competition -- they are currently hiring a new developer evangelist.
As businesses continue to reposition their product and service offerings to provide data and functionality via APIs, more developer evangelist positions are expected to be advertised. January and February also seem to be key months for advertising new vacancies, as businesses bring on board new talent at the start of the year.
Image: Topsy Analytics tweets mentioning developer evangelism in the last month
Key Skills for Developer Evangelists
Current job vacancies for developer evangelists focus on several main skills:
Brandon West, a developer evangelist at SendGrid, confirmed what API providers are looking for in new hires in his start-of-year blog post. He mentions the importance of having a breadth of programming language skills, rather than being highly proficient in just one or two languages. Instead, he focuses his attention on the knowledge transfer skills of developer evangelist applicants. West is looking for new hires to be able to clearly explain solutions with developers, alongside a passion and an ability to inspire developer-consumers.
"A developer evangelist is an outfacing person in the company," says Thomas Sarlandie, Developer Evangelist at Pebble. "He or she needs to have strong communication skills, both written and orally. We often have to deal with very different environments so a generalist with experience on different OSs and languages is a must. Finally, he or she must enjoy reading other developers' code. It's not always easy!"
All job vacancies shared a common desire for entrepreneurial and hustle skills. Companies want to see proof that developer evangelists are at home dogfooding their own product.
Developer Evangelism at Context.io
Tony Blank has been a developer evangelist at Context.io for the past nine months. The Context.io API is a product to help end customers tease out the value of their e-mail data and contact information: for example, being able to use e-mail for improved productivity, customer market research, and relationship network analysis.
To get the position, Blank had to prove his mettle with using APIs as well as demonstrate his ability in sharing information and getting ideas across:
"After a few one-on-one interviews, I had to do a panel interview as if it was a hackathon. I was asked prior to the interview to pick an API I was familiar with. I chose FullContact's Person API. I had used that API at a previous job. I presented to my future coworkers FullContact's API as if we were at a hackathon. I prepared a handout on FullContact's API that I used while I presented, which I think set me apart. I also believe it's important to convey an openness and honesty as an evangelist. During the interview, I was asked a few questions I did not know. Rather than guess what the answer was, I admitted that I did not, and then proposed a few ways we could reach a solution."
Since being in the role, Blank of course demonstrates how to use the Context.io in his everyday work. In one example of dogfooding his own product, Blank mentions how, while waiting at an airport for a flight to a developer conference, he was able to build a quick Python script around the Context.io API and sort through his e-mails to identify those who had sent RSVPs to the conference on Eventbrite. As a result, he was able to arrange to meet his warm leads at the conference while also being able to demonstrate another business value of Context.io.
Much of Blank's work initially is on reframing what Context.io does: People tend to make assumptions immediately about what the product offers. "Developers hear e-mail, so a lot of it is education," Blank said. "We share a few use cases around e-mail productivity apps, how to build a profile of their users, how you can look at contacts and turn e-mail into a social network, looking at the sort of friendship/relationship networks a customer might have. People begin to understand, but perhaps it's not quite the full lightbulb."
"So I ask what they do, and then I put on my product manager hat and say 'OK, you want to provide a social sharing component' or 'you can use Context.io to see the 20 e-mail contacts that you communicate with the most,' and I show you how you can use one API call to get there," Blank commented.
Rather than try to drive a greater understanding of the Context.io product, Blank sees his role as developer evangelist as understanding the developer-consumer's potential business need, as well as understanding his developer-consumers' end customers. For example, Context.io customers include SaaS providers like Contactually, which in turn offer an e-mail-as-CRM-type product. Their end customers need to authorize Contactually to access their Gmail accounts to populate the CRM functionality of their service. Blank's role as developer evangelist includes the need to understand both Contactually's business model and the incentives that Contactually's end customers need to have before allowing authorized access to their Gmail accounts.
"You need to be creative: That is the challenge. E-mail is so pervasive, but the one thing you have to keep in mind is that people view e-mail as their sacred, private thing, much more so than social media.
"So every end user has that trade-off around what is the benefit versus what personal information am I sharing. Many technical people are a lot more security conscious, so I need to be aware of that. I need to demonstrate that Context.io will have a lot of value to our customers' end users. For example, a marketing company would love to know which e-mail newsletters you subscribe to and what payments you have made online, but I have to educate this type of client on why providing high value to their end customers is necessary to get access to that sort of information.
"There are tons of use cases across verticals, but, at the end of the day, our customers need their end-customers to want to share their e-mail details."
Image: Tony Blank (Context.io) in center with fellow developer evangelists Kunal Batra (left, from Sendgrid), and Jonathan Gottfried (right, from Twilio) judging HackRU
Blank has been strategic in the types of customers he is focusing on on-boarding: "I have been focusing on early stage start-ups, as they often have not solved this problem yet. Start-ups have limited runways, and they usually have Gmail in place (or Yahoo, Comcast, etc.). These are companies that are still in the ideation phase, where they know the pain point, and then I can suggest a killer feature we have.
"But overall, the market is wide open to build apps on top of what Context.io can offer."
Developer evangelists also need the patience for a medium-to-long-term win mentality, according to Blank. "API evangelism and customer acquisition are such a slow play. Adopters might agree that there is an awesome feature they want to use, but then they must have a road map to build it, and that's a challenge. I have been doing this job for nine months now, and about six months is the fastest turnaround to integrate these services; even if it takes only a week or two for the development end, it takes a long time to integrate a new service.
"One of the things I've learned very quickly as an evangelist is that it's kind of a biz dev sales job, but you can't approach it as biz dev for developers. The approach of a developer evangelist can't be 'let me sell this to you.' What you have to do is say 'how can I help you, how can I enable you to do things that you can't do otherwise. For technical reasons -- things you can't do or time problems -- let us do that since it is not your core competency. Let me inspire you, let me understand your unique value, and let me figure out how we can help you build these really cool features.'
"You also need to understand the whole developer evangelist world. Many start-ups are integrating a lot of APIs (i.e., API aggregation), so often I need to show that this is how you can do cool stuff with these three APIs. It's cool because I'm helping you do whatever you want to do, and the solution might be an API that I am not actually selling. For example, yesterday I asked about what one person did, and he needs a lot of information about an e-mail address. So I was able to point to FullContact, for example, as addressing exactly that pain point he wanted to solve.
"So, often it is like: 'I can help you network; I can help you navigate,' and from a bird's eye perspective, that's how I see my job."
By Mark Boyd. Mark is a freelance writer focusing on how we use technology to connect and interact. He writes regularly about API business models, open data, smart cities, Quantified Self and e-commerce. He can be contacted via e-mail, on Twitter, or on Google+.


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Seville City Council Adopts Strategic Plan 2030
350 participants of all sectors contributed to the drafting of the document
- April 14, 2019 20:00
- Aseniya Dimitrova
The City Council of Seville has approved on Friday a strategic plan for the urban development until 2030. More than 350 representatives of the local government, employers, employees, citizens and academics have joined forces during ten thematic tables and discussions that took place over three years. The mayor of Seville, Juan Espadas, praised the work of all social and economic agents for the realisation of the strategic document and underlined the importance of the City of Seville. The document defines the guiding principles for the projects to be executed in the next ten years in the city, in line with the Sustainable Urban Development Goals of the United Nations. It is also the first time that the City Council Plenary approves a strategic document in Seville. This Strategic Plan Sevilla 2030 has set the following six objectives:
- Generate employment and economic development.
- Fight against poverty and inequalities.
- Create a sustainable city that mitigates and adapts to climate change.
- Develop governance and citizen participation.
- Promote the exercise of citizen rights, community life and civic values.
- Promote culture, creativity and favour diversity in the city.
These objectives contribute to the achievement of the SDGs through the pursuit of local agenda. This half-dozen objectives are broken down into 36 strategies and from these will depart the concrete projects and sector plans to achieve them. Seville thus becomes one of the first Spanish cities to have drawn up a strategic plan focused on achieving the SDGs.
In turn, the document integrates and acts as an umbrella of the 44 strategies and sectoral municipal plans, plus all previous reports in the fields of population, social, labour, economic, business, comparison with other European cities. This plan, among others, is vital when it comes to defining projects that aspire to attract funds from the European Union. The Seville of 2030 as defined in the document is a space for economic dynamism, social innovation and urban sustainability, a city that governs and promotes rights and fights against economic inequalities.
Find complete document from the City Council of Seville.
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
Labels: Alvin Area Garden Tour, Alvin Garden Club, Alvin Museum Society, Alvin Texas, flowers, Garden Tour, gardens, museum, Senior Citizen's Center
The Marguerite Rogers House Museum
The Alvin Historical Museum
About Me
- Name: Alvin Museum Society
- Location: Alvin, Brazoria County, Texas, United States
The Alvin Museum Society's constitution was adopted on April 12, 1976. The Society's stated mission is "to preserve the history of Alvin and its immediate area by heightening residents' awareness of the value of saving the past for the benefit of the future. Exhibits, programs, and activities that educate the museums' patrons are offered. Selected for preservation are structures, objects, documents, photographs, oral and visual histories, and all artifacts that add to the telling of Alvin's story." The Society owns and operates the Marguerite Rogers House Museum and the Alvin Historical Museum both of which are open for touring.
Home (AMS) |
The Cottage House Museum |
Alvin Historical Museum
Alvin Historical Museum Gift Shop | Contact Us


text:
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People say we'll never have peace in the Middle East.
But now that I've been to Israel, I know only one thing in life is impossible - and that's trying to sleep off a hangover in a Scottish hotel by the Sea of Galilee. It just can't be done.
Yes, there is a Scottish hotel in Israel, but more on that later.
First, you should know that Israel saved me from a nightmare. I'd foolishly moved into a basement with a woman I'd briefly dated.
She had cold, assassin eyes. On our first date, she said she wanted to be pregnant within three months. Then she borrowed 50 bucks. After a few awkward dates, we quickly agreed to be "friends."
I needed accommodations. She had a spare room and offered me discounted rent. I'd get my $50 back, so I moved in. Seconds later, we attacked each other's zippers. Terrible idea.
She was stormier than the North Atlantic. One day I think I made her mad by breathing. I felt like Israel before they walled off the West Bank. I didn't dare enter parts of that basement for fear of gunshots or suicide bombing.
Then she bluntly said we were platonic again.
"No problem," I said. Then she sent me a scathing email from the next room that ordered me to GET OUT.
As I packed my things, I received an invite from Israel's tourism office. Would I like to visit on a Bloggers-Only Press Trip? I didn't have a blog at the time, so naturally I replied, "Oh God, yes."
Now, if you take a Bloggers-Only trip to the desert during a harsh Canadian winter, know this:
1. If anyone asks to read your blog that doesn't exist, just give them any madeup URL. If they say, "Um, your site won't open," say, "Grrr, I'm so going to fire my webmaster when I'm back. Hey, what's that?" then point at whatever.
2. Bloggers don't make money. But people will give you gallons of free alcohol. Downside: Israel's national alcohol is Arak, an aniseed-flavoured liquor that tastes like rotting licorice. It's nicknamed the "milk of lions," probably because you feel mauled when you drink it. Horrible, beautiful stuff.
3. When you travel to Israel for the first time, you finally get to see what all the fuss is about. All the love, fear, loyalty and venom of the world's only Jewish-majority state.
I met my five new travel buddies at JFK airport. These blogger-journalists - and this is the crazy part - all have actual blogs. They were young, fun, liked to drink, and we got along like a peace treaty on fire.
Quick Israel facts:
Formed in 1948, it's approximately the size of New Jersey. Population: 7.59 million. Capital: Jerusalem. Jews: 76.2%; Arabs 19.5%.
When seen from outer space (or, say, if you look at a map), Israel looks like the down arrow in an elevator. And like the starving actor glaring at the live chicken in the film Withnail and I, Israel is surrounded by countries that are thinking, "How can we make it die?"
That reality struck me at Tel Aviv's airport. The customs officer said I could decide if she stamped my passport or not. I didn't understand. But my friend explained that some Arab/Muslim countries like Syria and Oman might bar you if you recently visited Israel.
This annoyed me, so I got the stamp. Suck it, Syria.
Our driver, Uri, and guide Gideon, were ex-Israeli military officers. Their taut arms looked like they'd snapped necks in foreign jungles. They spoke a zillion dialects, I figured they were Mossad, and when they strolled off during lunches, I assumed they were strangling another enemy of Israel.
They escorted us for the whole six days. Highlights included:
- Haifa city, where we toured the world centre and gardens of the Baha'i Faith. This religion accepts people of all faiths and backgrounds, so it's too nice to be a major religious player.
- Wine and chocolate pairings at Tishbi winery. Did you even know Israel made wine? Neither did I. But owner Jonathan Tishbi is justifiably proud. His organic syrah is so delicious, it's served in bars in Gramercy Park, New York City.
- Tel Aviv beaches are surfing heaven. We also toured Tel Aviv's Dan Hotel where the manager showed us a toilet used by Madonna.
- A raucous Jerusalem bar crawl, a.k.a. the Slurring Blogger Gong Show. Forget the rocking and wailing at the Western Wall, because Jerusalem's nightlife is OUT OF CONTROL - and that was on a Sunday. Recommended: Mia Bar had more than 100 whiskies and 60 beers, HaKatze on Shoshan Street had live bluegrass, and at Bell Wood Bar, three young Palestinian women danced on the bar. They were probably plants to entertain us Important Bloggers, but we cheered them on anyway.
The next morning, we were all horribly hungover. As Uri drove us to the Sea of Galilee, the van bouncing along the highway, it felt like Jesus had turned all the wine in my brain into five puffy loaves and two angry, shouting fish. I badly needed a nap.
To my surprise, in the town of Tiberias, we checked into a Scottish themed hotel called The Scots Hotel. The Church of Scotland owns it and their Ceilidh Bar has 80 types of whisky. You only know you're in Israel by the palm trees out front, plus the bellhops all have guns strapped to their kilts. It's true.
Now, if you're the spawn of penny-pinching Scottish kin like me, you're probably thinking, "Och away wi' yi! A Scottish hotel in Israel must be tha' stingiest hotel on th' planet. I bet tha' mints on tha' pillows are made o' Dead Sea mud tha' they bake into tasty wee rectangles."
You may be right. I was too tired to tell. I dragged myself to my suite. Fell like timber onto the bed. But just as I was dropping into a coma, I was jolted awake by a wretched caterwauling. Out the window, some wannabe clansman (I dubbed him "MacLoud") was strangling a bag of cats by the gazebo, a.k.a. playing bagpipes.
Ach, the pipes are just the worst. I tried drowning them out with earplugs, pillows, running water. Nothing worked. I didn't sleep that afternoon and not much that night.
The next day was our last. So Uri drove us to the lowest place on Earth. The Dead Sea is hidden 419 metres below sea level in the world's deepest valley. It's not even a sea - it's a dying, evaporating lake. Its high saline content (33% salt) cures so many ailments, it'd probably bring your iPod battery (or Steve Jobs) back to life.
My joints were thrashed from surgeries and banging around in the van. My brain cells were shrieking a sleep-deprived playback of bagpipe squawks. So I covered myself in the black mud and walked into the lake up to my knees. Then I followed Gideon's advice - I turned to face Mineral Beach, then slowly fell backwards onto the water. The lake suspended me! It was so viscous, I literally floated on the surface.
Suddenly, all pain faded away. Joints, back, rolling two-day hangover. All cured!
I grinned, perfectly at peace, my body and mind healed. I was having the vacation of a lifetime. As the sun warmed my alabaster flesh, I thought back to My Year of Going Hobo. I thought about the angry woman I'd lived with in that grungy, cat-furry basement. Her place was just the latest in a long line of chesterfields, basements and car seats I'd slept on since my marriage ended 12 months before.
At that moment, as I floated in paradise, I looked over to the shore of Jordan. A country where political parties compete to see who can hate Israel more than the other. The lessons I learned: Having a safe home to call your own is pretty damn essential, and you can go far in life these days - and nearly walk on water - if you just pretend you're a blogger.
- Follow Ken on Twitter @KenHegan.
- Ken was a guest of the Israel Ministry of Tourism. He drank red wine on El Al Airlines, which he paired with a preposterous action film about a hitman who gets chased by hitmen.


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TEQs & PAS 2050 : Carbon Labelling
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Joined: 20 Oct 2007
Posts: 184
Location: London
Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2008 12:04 pm
Post subject: TEQs & PAS 2050 : Carbon Labelling
Some new legislation from Defra seems to be leading down the road of total carbon accounting throughout industry and manufacture, something essential for TEQs to operate. You'll soon be able to calculate the Carbon content of all supplies into your production process : just what you need for full Carbon labelling :-
Industry voices fears over PAS 2050 carbon footprint standard
Josh Brooks, packagingnews.co.uk, 04 September 2008
Concern is mounting over the implications of a new carbon footprint standard that is due to be published next month.
A number of senior packaging industry sources have expressed doubts over Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 2050, a standard being developed by Defra, the Carbon Trust and BSI British Standards that will measure the exact carbon footprint of any given product.
Brand owners will be able to show that carbon footprint, which includes the impact of packaging, on labels. The measurement is designed to inform consumers of the greenhouse gas emissions of a product over its complete lifecycle.
Details of the final specification, which are due to be published in October, are so far unclear and a spokeswoman for Defra refused to be drawn on what it may contain.
However, packaging sources are privately concerned over the standard and the methods early versions have used to calculate a product's carbon footprint.
In particular, the industry believes that the standard would be almost impossible to administer as it would require each product line to be individually measured, including differences where separate batches of a product are packed or produced in more than one factory.
One source said it would be unlikely that PAS 2050, which will be voluntary, would be adopted by retailers due to the "horrendous complexity" of measuring individual products and the likely expense.
"If you have to carbon footprint every line of products coming from every factory in which they are produced, it will be incredibly expensive," the source said.
Some are worried, however, that if one supermarket adopts the labelling system then all the rest will quickly follow suit. One source predicted: "The retailers are going to tell us to do this, whether its a legal requirement or not. It just becomes a big headache."
Concerns have also been raised over the methodology of calculating carbon footprints, both in terms of the definition of a products lifecycle and claims that the original methodology does not include provision for recycling.
Another source added that the two-year validity of any measurement would also make it too costly to administer.
A spokeswoman for Defra said that the standard would be published in October, as planned, but refused to be drawn on how the new calculations would differ from previous versions of the methodology.
It is understood that technicians have been working on the specification since the end of a consultation on the last version in March.
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Joined: 20 Oct 2007
Posts: 184
Location: London
Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2008 11:20 pm
Post subject: PAS 2050 : BBC article
The BBC reports that the Carbon Trust has gone public on this :-
Page last updated at 00:08 GMT, Wednesday, 29 October 2008
UK unveils CO2 footprint standard
By Mark Kinver
Science and environment reporter, BBC News
A new standard that allows UK firms to measure the size of their goods' carbon footprints has been launched.
It is hoped the new audit will show customers how much CO2 has been emitted during the production, consumption and disposal of a range of products.
Some schemes that measure carbon emissions have been criticised in the past for being inconsistent, confusing or lacking transparency.
The system, known as PAS 2050, will be managed by BSI British Standards.
"PAS 2050 has been developed using BSI's rigorous consultation process, involving almost a thousand industry experts from within the UK and internationally," said Mike Low, director of BSI British Standards.
"The result is a robust framework within which businesses and public sector bodies will be able to assess the greenhouse gas emissions of their goods and services in a consistent manner."
Mr Low added that he hoped the new audit tool would be used by organisations of all sizes.
'Carbon labels'
The precursor to PAS 2050 was initially launched in 2006 by the Carbon Trust, a government-funded organisation, in response to a growing number of consumers who wanted to know the size of products' carbon footprint.
Trials, involving companies such as Walkers and Boots, led to "carbon labels" appearing on some goods in April 2007.
Despite the issue creeping up the political agenda in recent years, a survey by the Trust in December found that just 1% of firms questioned knew the size of their operation's carbon footprint.
Carbon Trust chief executive Tom Delay said he hoped making the scheme publicly available would improve the situation.
"For the first time, businesses have a robust, consistent standard for measuring the carbon footprint of their goods and services," he observed.
"This development will help businesses really understand the carbon impact of their products and to follow this up with tangible ways to cut carbon emissions across the supply chain."
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) co-sponsored the scheme, and Environment Secretary Hilary Benn said he hoped firms would use the tool.
"Companies have said that they want to be able to count their carbon emissions in a better way, and we have responded to that," he added.
"Consumers want to know that emissions are being cut by businesses and this standard will help businesses do that."
Later this year, the Climate Change Bill is expected to become law and will commit future governments to reducing carbon emissions by 80% from 1990 levels by 2050.
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Shaun Chamberlin
Joined: 04 Feb 2007
Posts: 120
Location: London
Posted: Thu Mar 12, 2009 7:24 pm
Post subject: Re: TEQs & PAS 2050 : Carbon Labelling
jo wrote:
Some new legislation from Defra seems to be leading down the road of total carbon accounting throughout industry and manufacture, something essential for TEQs to operate.
Just a little correction - carbon accounting is definitely not necessary to the implementation of TEQs. It was this mistake that led the Lib Dems to argue that it wouldn't be possible to implement it for many years to come.
In terms of carbon measurement, all that is needed to implement TEQs is knowing how much fuel and electricity is sold at retail outlets (which they of course already know in order to charge their customers). Since all fuel and electricity would be carbon-rated this provides all the info necessary for the TEQs scheme.
So in fact carbon labelling might be made somewhat redundant by a TEQs scheme operating within a sufficient carbon cap. Although it might possibly still cause increased behavioural change..?
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Joined: 20 Oct 2007
Posts: 184
Location: London
Posted: Sat Mar 14, 2009 8:51 pm
Post subject: It depends on point of use
If you want to restrict Carbon Accounting to (a) Energy and Fuel used by (b) Citizen End Consumers, then yes, it can all be done at the pumps and in the utility bills.
But if you want to account for Carbon "embedded" "embodied" in manufactured goods, and other things such as clean water provision, then you need to move backwards up the Carbon Chain, to include (a) Energy and Fuel used by (b) Manufacturing Consumers.
The easiest way to account for Carbon at this stage, in my view, is to adopt the PAS 2050.
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Shaun Chamberlin
Joined: 04 Feb 2007
Posts: 120
Location: London
Posted: Sun Apr 12, 2009 4:21 pm
Post subject: Re: It depends on point of use
jo wrote:
If you want to restrict Carbon Accounting to (a) Energy and Fuel used by (b) Citizen End Consumers, then yes, it can all be done at the pumps and in the utility bills.
But if you want to account for Carbon "embedded" "embodied" in manufactured goods, and other things such as clean water provision, then you need to move backwards up the Carbon Chain, to include (a) Energy and Fuel used by (b) Manufacturing Consumers.
The easiest way to account for Carbon at this stage, in my view, is to adopt the PAS 2050.
In my opinion one of the most beautiful aspects of the TEQs design is the brilliant way it accounts for all emissions in the economy while only requiring direct accounting of primary energy and electricity. That is a big part of what led me to devote much of my time to supporting it over the past few years.
In this way it gets rid of the apparent choice between the simple solution of accounting only for end use and the comprehensive solution of dealing with all embedded energy. As outlined in David's
Energy and the Common Purpose
, TEQs does account for all the embedded emissions, but is able to do while, as you say, restricting the overt carbon accounting to primary energy and electricity purchase, and without requiring the complicated processes of carbon labelling, measuring point emissions etc.
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Albert Speer, Model of Nuremberg Marching Grounds (1937); John Powers, Penn Station Counter-proposal, (2001)
What happened at 9/11 of course changed the scale of all this... It became an issue about fear, and our horror at looking, as I did, out of our windows onto the buildings that were burning. The horror we had in our hearts from this, allowed us... to give up basic freedoms. I'm not just talking about the ones the papers talk about all the time, our democratic and constitutional rights, but in the way we live, the way we block our streets.
—David Childs (Chief Architect of SOM's Freedom Tower"), Building and Fear, 08:20 (2007)
I am a sculptor, my work is abstract and more often than not described as "post-minimalist." Recently I was asked to contribute a work for a group show in Hong Kong. The curatorial frame of the show is "the ways objects produce space." Rather than contribute a sculpture and hope for some sort of latter-day phenomenological experience between 'object' and 'subject' however, I suggested revisiting an urban design project that I had not worked on for over a decade. Eleven years ago I made a modest proposal to create a series of three massively flat and empty superblocks (two in New York and one in Washington DC). I last showed these proposals as three large architectural site models, just six months before September 11th attacks. Because my proposals seemed to foreshadow the 16 acre gap left in Manhattan's grid, I was urged to revisit the project. I didn't, not because I didn't feel I might have something to contribute, but because I was struck dumb horror. I refused to speak publicly about the project, and although the original show of models had been based on a long essay on the subject of art and public space, I stopped writing for years. Anyone familiar with myblogwill understand that this is not my usual MO. But looking back I am now very glad I shut up.
Most of what was said about architecture in the immediate wake of the attacks struck me as tone deaf, some of what was said by artists was unintentionally cruel.
That is not to say I didn't take interest in the site and the conversation around it. I followed the competition to choose an master plan, and still feel Sir Norman Foster's unapologetically hard edged "kissing" chisels were the best of the lot. Most of what I saw and heard however, reinforced the observation that had inspired my proposals in the first place: the widespread inability to know the difference between what can and cannot be changed when it comes to architecture. By wide spread, I mean architects, politicians, critics and loudmouths at parties. Even after Modernist architecture's fall from grace, the expectation is that big challenges must be addressed by massive projects, and that symbolic meaning trumps straight talk (observe Libeskind vs Foster).
While I sympathized with architect's desire to respond to the attacks, I did not understand their responses. Architecture isn't a symbol (that was the hideous confusion the attackers made), it is an expression; a concrete expression of an idea, an ethic, a desire. Modernists plazas are often characterized as "fascist" — the idea being that they are symbolic projections of power. Architects seldom, if ever, discuss lawns, park benches, or flower arrangements as expressions of power. Looked at as concrete ethical expressions, rather than symbols, we can begin to see these things for what they are: impediments, barriers, place holders, and dividers.
I: Double Zero
Soft Power: Jeff Koons, Puppy (1992); Tiananmen Square Olympic flower arrangement (2008)
For the show in Hong Kong I ended up showing recreations of my three original counter-proposals, and a fourth proposal that has been gestating for almost a decade, but has suddenly taken on new relevance. I proposed building nine "Freedom Towers" arranged in a tight grid formation and completely occupying the available open space of Tiananmen Square.
A decade after I proposed paving flat large portions of New York and DC, I want to "occupy" Tiananmen Square with a formation of Freedom Towers. These may seem like two very different projects and two very different political contexts, but in fact they are the same. In 2001 I was suggesting that we had lost an important variety of public space and that our cities and our republic were lessened by that loss. That in the 40 years since the civil rights and ant-war protests of the 1960s American authorities have altered the landscape of our cities –— through changes in the rules that concerning public assembly (a process Naomi Wolf calls "overpermiticisation"), but also through bricks and mortar construction. Our public space has been "developed" out of existence.
In the wake of the massive protests in Wisconsin, the "Arab Spring," and the Occupy movement in New York (and everywhere else), it feels important to once again raise the question of public space as a built environment. Rather than continue to argue that we build a new kind of space here, I am suggesting that we imagine what it would mean if we exported our current development schemes to other countries; to imagine them as the work of foreign regimes. What if the National WWII Memorial, with its heroic Speerian colonnade, sunken plaza, and ground-covering fountain, had been built in Tahrir Square rather than midway between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument? How would we feel if Russian authorities were to announce the construction of a large Frank Gehry designed Guggenheim be built over, Bolotnaya Square, the site of last December's ballot-rigging protests in Moscow?
To mashup SOM's Freedom Tower and China's Tiananmen Square may, at first glance seem arbitrary, but it isn't. Both New York's Ground Zero and Beijing's "Zero Point" are symbolically loaded sites. non-mainland Chinese associate Tiananmen with the 1989 pro-democracy protests, but for the Chinese it was already a site loaded with meaning when protesters chose that space to take their stand. In his book Remaking Beijing, the author Wu Hung describes the formation of Chinese end of this symbolic East-West axis....