The Green Living Lab

Featured image

The Green Living Lab is a living lab in a nature where education & research into healthy urban living takes place. We believe that every city could have a Green Living Lab, a place in nature where local universities, students & the public connect with entrepreneurs & pioneers in sustainable living to explore, experiment & to invest in a healthy sustainable society.

Partners

What is the goal of the project?

The Green Living Lab is a living lab in a nature where education & research into healthy urban living takes place. Science confirms that we need direct contact with nature in our cities for health & well-being. How might nature be integrated with the urban environment where we work, live & play in a sustainable way that benefits our health? We have integrated our facilities into our garden's natural environment, creating balance with our natural location in order to encourage relaxation, learning, creativity & social connection. Our facilities include a transparent geodesic dome, a venue for learning & creativity enhanced by the surrounding natural environment.

Through our education initiatives we bring entrepreneurs, experimenters & students together to discuss how we can co-create a healthier, sustainable urban environment & encourage healthier lifestyle choices. Our education initiatives are focused on applied learning & co-creation in nature. Initiatives in 2016 include the Green Student Bootcamp Challenge, March - June 2016 & The Community Compost School in autumn 2016. By offering holistic education programmes & facilitating research into healthy urban living, we aim to assist with the transition to a healthier, more sustainable environment for urban residents.

What is the result of the project?

Green Student Bootcamp Challenge 2016: March - June 2016
The Green Student Bootcamp Challenge selected 45 university students from diverse universities in the Netherlands to take part in a 12 week programme designed to encourage students towards sustainable & healthy lifestyle choices. Students learned from experts how to grow their own food at home, compost their food waste, create healthy plant-based recipes from the plants they grow in our garden and at home, how to brighten up their urban environments, to think about sustainable business values & how they can apply these values in their own lives. Last but not least, they were given practical tools to manage stress for their well being.

Students worked together in the Green Living Lab organic garden to learn how to design a balanced & healthy garden, grow plants for food & pollinating insects as well as the affect of seasons & climate on what we grow & eat. Each week the students received a different challenge - from bringing a ‘worm hotel’ composting container home to compost their organic waste at home, to creating healthy seasonal recipes using ingredients from the organic garden they created together. The students’ final challenge was to co-create their graduation party. Here they worked together to make healthy snacks using the harvest from the organic garden they created for fellow students, educators & programme sponsors.

The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam launched the 'Green and Healthy Students' research programme in 2016 in order to investigate the needs and wishes of students with respect to a greener & healthier university environment. Researchers liaised with the students taking part in the Bootcamp Challenge to collect research data throughout the 12 week programme, an example of research & education working together in synergy to explore healthier urban living for students.

In exchange for the education and the fun activities on offer, students were asked to share what they learned with their friends & families, informing & encouraging a wider audience towards healthy lifestyle choices.

The Green Student Bootcamp Challenge was co-funded by Triodos Foundation, NME Fonds, Le Compostier, Green Co-creations & The Green Living Lab. We are currently seeking sponsors for our next programme in May 2017. If you would like to help us inspire students towards healthier lifestyle choices please contact: info@greenlivinglab.org

Community Compost School: Autumn 2016
The Community Compost School is a joint initiative of the Green Living Lab & Le Compostier, a designer of customised urban composting solutions including worm hotels. This initiative brings the Green Living Lab’s neighbours together, including student organisations & local businesses to turn organic waste into compost. By creating compost from organic waste we can actively capture carbon in our urban environment, improve the quality of our local soil and support our local food chain.

Organic waste can be turned into valuable compost in the city in an easy, fast & odour-free way using a worm hotel. The resulting compost is a rich natural fertiliser that can be used for growing food locally. Making compost out of organic waste helps reduce the carbon footprint in our local food chain & brings neighbours together to create value out of their organic waste.

The aim of the Community Composting School initiative is to encourage students, local businesses & city residents to create value out of waste by composting. Le Compostier’s worm hotels can currently be found on various streets in Amsterdam, where communities are processing their organic waste into compost together. Plants are also grown on top of Le Compostier’s worm hotels for food, local pollinators & to brighten up the urban environment.

Education Programmes:
Our workshops & education programmes aim to inspire a healthy urban environment in balance with nature & healthy lifestyle choices. We organise team building days & workshops including vegetarian cooking, composting, bushcraft, nature meditation & creating with natural materials.

Research:
Our LAB programme invites students and pioneers in sustainable living to share their research & experiments in healthy urban living with a wider public at our location.

Facilities Integrated With Nature:
Each part of the Green Living Lab has been co-created organically with the help of volunteers. Every volunteer has helped shape the outcome and made the Green Living Lab what it is today.

Geodesic Dome: A Venue for Learning & Creativity in Nature
Our transparent geodesic dome is a venue for lectures & workshops to promote healthy urban living. The dome is fully transparent, offering guests a 360 degree view of the surrounding garden. The form of the dome is a truncated icosahedron, the natural form of the Carbon 60 molecule. The dome’s structure has been constructed from Lexan & Accoya to ensure durability. We worked with the creative collective Sober Industries to design & build our dome. The dome has been integrated into the surrounding garden with a green slope circling the base of the dome. This not only provides a space to grow plants & herbs but also offers a comfy place to sit & relax, study or work while enjoying the garden.

Le Compostier designed a special ‘Worm Hotel’ for the Green Living Lab, a unique worm composting container with a glass panel at the front so visitors can observe the worms busy doing their composting work. In this way our organic kitchen waste is recycled into high quality compost, which is then used to grow vegetables and herbs in our education garden. Learning & cooking together, watching a film or enjoying a cup of tea with a view of the surrounding garden are highly recommended experiences!

Organic Education Garden
The organic & pesticide -free garden of the Green Living Lab has been designed and maintained according to permaculture principles, with help from Green Living Lab volunteers. Our garden is an outdoor classroom for urban gardening & composting workshops as well as team building events in nature.

Food Forest:
Our Food Forest has been created to demonstrate how we can landscape food production into our urban environment. By mimicking the diverse natural layers of vegetation in a forest, we are exploring how we can make most efficient use of small spaces in urban environments to produce local organic fruit, vegetables & herbs with perennial plants.

Living Willow Structures & Barefoot Circle:
Our willow structures create a special natural ambience at our location. One of the willow structures provides shade for the dome while the other creates a unique natural space for relaxation & learning in nature, a barefoot willow circle. We invite you to visit our willow circle, kick off your shoes & relax on the grass, surrounded by a crescent of native herbs & flowers.

The Green Living Lab Biomeiler: Harnessing Heat from Compost
Our biomeiler has been designed and realised by Rowin Snijder of Le Compostier, with help from Green Living Lab volunteers.

What is a biomeiler? We built a container to hold 50m3 of woodchips and the woodchips were constantly soaked with water from a ditch that runs alongside the biomeiler in our garden. 500m of water pipe was placed in the middle of the woodchips and this pipe was then connected to 300m of water pipe placed under the floor of our dome. As the woodchips decompose heat is created, and this heats up the water in the pipes. This warm water can then be pumped under the floor of the dome to provide additional heat when required. The composting process is a biological one, dependant on the presence of a healthy mix of bacteria in order for the woodchips to compost evenly.

We built a terrace on top of the biomeiler in order to integrate it into our location and enable the space to be used for workshops and events. Usually biomeilers are made with much larger volumes of woodchips (for example, 250m3) & so need a lot more space to be realised. Our biomeiler is an experiment to explore the possibilities of creating a functioning biomeiler in an urban environment with limited space. Sensors have been inserted into the biomeiler to record its temperature & the highest temperature recorded so far is 70 degrees Celsius at the centre. The temperature fluctuates depending on the location of the sensor, how much light the biomeiler has received & according to weather conditions.

Who initiated the project and which organizations are involved?

The Green Living Lab is an initiative of Aveen Colgan, with assistance from Arthur de Smidt of Green Co-Creations & Rowin Snider of Le Compostier. Aveen, Arthur & Rowin are currently supported by a growing number of volunteers, keen to learn how we can work towards a healthier urban environment, in balance with nature.

What is the next step?

We are currently seeking sponsors to support the Green Student Bootcamp Challenge 2017. We would love to hear from Cleantech design students who could be interested in working with us on a new project in 2017!

What can other cities learn from your project?

We believe that every city could have a Green Living Lab, a place in nature where local universities, students & the public connect with entrepreneurs & pioneers in sustainable living to explore, experiment & to invest in a healthy sustainable society. The VU University Amsterdam has donated the use of our location to us to facilitate research & education programmes into healthy urban living. We have also connected to local sustainable businesses, student organisations & creative individuals to form a network of like-minded people, focused on making healthier living in the city a reality.

www.greenlivinglab.org

Comments

Topics

Maybe you will also like these updates

Herman van den Bosch, professor in management development , posted

Will the 15-minute city cause the US suburbs to disappear? 6/7

Featured image

Urbanisation in the US is undergoing major changes. The image of a central city surrounded by sprawling suburbs therefore needs to be updated. The question is what place does the 15-minute city have in it? That is what this somewhat longer post is about
 
From the 1950s, residents of US cities began moving en masse to the suburbs. A detached house in the green came within reach for the middle and upper classes, and the car made it possible to commute daily to factories and offices. These were initially still located in and around the cities. The government stimulated this development by investing billions in the road network.
From the 1980s, offices also started to move away from the big cities. They moved to attractive locations, often near motorway junctions. Sometimes large shopping and entertainment centres also settled there, and flats were built on a small scale for supporting staff. Garreau called such cities 'edge cities'.
Investors built new suburbs called 'urban villages' in the vicinity of the new office locations, significantly reducing the distance to the offices. This did not reduce congestion on congested highways.
 
However, more and more younger workers had no desire to live in suburbs. The progressive board of Arlington, near Washington DC, took the decision in the 1980s to develop a total of seven walkable, inclusive, attractive and densely built-up cores in circles of up to 800 metres around metro stations. In each was a wide range of employment, flats, shops and other amenities . In the process, the Rosslyn-Balston Corridor emerged and experienced rapid growth. The population of the seven cores now stands at 71,000 out of a total of 136,000 jobs. 36% of all residents use the metro or bus for commuting, which is unprecedentedly high for the US. The Rosslyn-Balston Corridor is a model for many other medium-sized cities in the US, such as New Rochelle near new York.
 
Moreover, to meet the desire to live within walking distance of all daily amenities, there is a strong movement to also regenerate the suburbs themselves. This is done by building new centres in the suburbs and densifying part of the suburbs.
The new centres have a wide range of flats, shopping facilities, restaurants and entertainment centres.  Dublin Bridge Park, 30 minutes from Columbus (Ohio) is one of many examples.
It is a walkable residential and commercial area and an easily accessible centre for residents from the surrounding suburbs. It is located on the site of a former mall.
 
Densification of the suburbs is necessary because of the high demand for (affordable) housing, but also to create sufficient support for the new centres.
Space is plentiful. In the suburbs, there are thousands of (semi-)detached houses that are too large for the mostly older couples who occupy them. An obvious solution is to split the houses, make them energy-positive and turn them into two or three starter homes. There are many examples how this can be done in a way that does not affect the identity of the suburbs (image).
New construction in suburbs
 
This kind of solution is difficult to realise because the municipal authorities concerned are bound by decades-old zoning plans, which prescribe in detail what can be built somewhere. Some of the residents fiercely oppose changing the laws. Especially in California, the NIMBYs (not in my backyard) and the YIMBYs (yes in my backyard) have a stranglehold on each other and housing construction is completely stalled.
 
But even without changing zoning laws, there are incremental changes.  Here and there, for instance, garages, usually intended for two or three cars, are being converted into 'assessor flats' for grandma and grandpa or for children who cannot buy a house of their own.  But garden houses are also being added and souterrains constructed. Along the path of gradualness, this adds thousands of housing units, without causing much fuss.
 
It is also worth noting that small, sometimes sleepy towns seem to be at the beginning of a period of boom.  They are particularly popular with millennials. These towns are eminently 'walkable' , the houses are not expensive and there is a wide range of amenities. The distance to the city is long, but you can work well from home and that is increasingly the pattern. The pandemic and the homeworking it has initiated has greatly increased the popularity of this kind of residential location.
 
All in all, urbanisation in the US can be typified by the creation of giant metropolitan areas, across old municipal boundaries. These areas are a conglomeration of new cities, rivalling the old mostly shrinking and poverty-stricken cities in terms of amenities, and where much of employment is in offices and laboratories. In between are the suburbs, with a growing variety of housing. The aim is to create higher densities around railway stations. Besides the older suburbs, 'urban villages' have emerged in attractive locations. More and more suburbs are getting their own walkable centres, with a wide range of flats and facilities. Green space has been severely restricted by these developments.
 
According to Christopher Leinberger, professor of real estate and urban analysis at George Washington University, there is no doubt that in the US, walkable, attractive cores with a mixed population and a varied housing supply following the example of the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor are the future. In addition, walkable car-free neighbourhoods, with attractive housing and ample amenities are in high demand in the US. Some of the 'urban villages' are developing as such.  The objection is that these are 'walkable islands', rising in an environment that is anything but walkable. So residents always have one or two cars in the car park for when they leave the neighbourhood, as good metro or train connections are scarce. Nor are these kinds of neighbourhoods paragons of a mixed population; rents tend to be well above the already unaffordable average.
 
The answer of the question in the header therefore is: locally and slowly

Herman van den Bosch's picture
News
#Citizens&Living
+
Herman van den Bosch, professor in management development , posted

The global distribution of the 15-minute city idea 5/7

Featured image

A previous post made it clear that a 15-minute city ideally consists of a 5-minute walking zone, a 15-minute walking zone, also a 5-minute cycling zone and a the 15-minute cycling zone. These three types of neighbourhoods and districts should be developed in conjunction, with employment accessibility also playing an important role.
 
In the plans for 15-minute cities in many places around the world, these types of zones intertwine, and often it is not even clear which type of zone is meant.  In Paris too, I miss clear choices in this regard.
 
The city of Melbourne aims to give a local lifestyle a dominant place among all residents. Therefore, everyone should live within at most 10 minutes' walking distance to and from all daily amenities.  For this reason, it is referred to as a 20-minute city, whereas in most examples of a 15-minute city, such as Paris, it is only about <strong>the round trip</strong>. The policy in Melbourne has received strong support from the health sector, which highlights the negative effects of traffic and air pollution.
 
In Vancouver, there is talk of a 5-minute city. The idea is for neighbourhoods to become more distinct parts of the city. Each neighbourhood should have several locally owned shops as well as public facilities such as parks, schools, community centres, childcare and libraries. High on the agenda is the push for greater diversity of residents and housing types. Especially in inner-city neighbourhoods, this is accompanied by high densities and high-rise buildings. Confronting this idea with reality yields a pattern of about 120 such geographical units (see map above).
 
Many other cities picked up the idea of the 15-minute city.  Among them: Barcelona, London, Milan, Ottawa, Detroit and Portland. The organisation of world cities C40 (now consisting of 96 cities) elevated the idea to the main policy goal in the post-Covid period.
 
All these cities advocate a reversal of mainstream urbanisation policies. In recent decades, many billions have been invested in building roads with the aim of improving accessibility. This means increasing the distance you can travel in a given time. As a result, facilities were scaled up and concentrated in increasingly distant places. This in turn led to increased congestion that negated improvements in accessibility. The response was further expansion of the road network.  This phenomenon is known as the 'mobility trap' or the Marchetti constant.
 
Instead of increasing accessibility, the 15-minute city aims to expand the number of urban functions you can access within a certain amount of time. This includes employment opportunities. The possibility of working from home has reduced the relevance of the distance between home and workplace. In contrast, the importance of a pleasant living environment has increased. A modified version of the 15-minute city, the 'walkable city' then throws high hopes. That, among other things, is the subject of my next post.

Herman van den Bosch's picture
News
#Citizens&Living
+
Madara Lace, International business , posted

Supporting Sustainable Technology Education Through E-Waste Recycling

Featured image

🌍✨ Join Us in Making a Difference! ✨🌍
We're excited to launch a groundbreaking project aimed at transforming e-waste into educational opportunities! 🚀📚 As part of our commitment to sustainability and digital literacy, we're collecting smartphones, laptops, and other electronics to support vibrant educational workshops in Rwanda.
Why join us? By participating, you'll:

  • 🌱 Support environmental sustainability by helping reduce e-waste.
  • 📖 Contribute to enhancing digital literacy among underserved communities.
  • 🤝 Be part of a global movement advocating for responsible technology use.
  • 🎓 Help provide essential skills that can transform lives and foster long-term growth.

We're looking for individuals and organizations to donate devices, share expertise, or sponsor our efforts. Every contribution makes a real difference, and together, we can create a more sustainable and inclusive future. 🌟
Let's reshape the future, one device at a time. Join us in this exciting journey and be credited in our upcoming documentary that highlights the collective efforts of our incredible partners from Germany, Latvia, and the Netherlands. 🎥🌍
CONTACT US THROUGH EMAIL - madaralace1999@gmail.com

Madara Lace's picture
Request
#Citizens&Living
+
More projects

Shaping better cities
as an open collective

Shaping better cities as an open collective Shaping better cities as an open collective