"Bonheur"

I took the pieces of my bicycle out of its travel case yesterday and put it back together.  I was staying with a friend in Paris and I'd found some shade in the courtyard of her apartment building; I was hurrying to be done before the temperatures went into the 90s.  (And here I'd thought I'd be escaping Washington D.C.'s heat when I got to Paris.)  At one point, I dropped a small screw.  I found it again right away, but it occured to me then how much this whole project depends on this seemingly fragile machine.  One piece missing or broken and all the planning is up in the air.

Maybe if I gave the bike a name it would feel more like part of the family and be on its best behavior.  But I've had it for nearly ten years without knowing it as anything other than "the Hampsten," so it's probably too late for that sort naming, personification thing.  In any case, as long as I don't lose critical pieces, the bike has always (knock on wood) been highly reliable.

So I'm off for a month or riding down the Loire River.  Last night, the apartment across the courtyard seemed to offer what I'm glad to take as an encouraging sign of what's ahead.

The Minister takes her leave

Well, she certainly didn't just hand over the keys to her office and go home.  Delphine Batho, recently dismissed from her position as French Minister of the Environment, gave a press conference today in which she took aggressive shots at the Prime Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault and certain "economic lobbies" that wanted her out.  Her remarks have been called "politically naive," and they probably were.  All of the blame was directed elsewhere, for example, none her own way.

But her political inexperience and lack of press conference skills shouldn't obscure the fact that the Hollande/Ayrault government, when it chose her ministry to take the largest budget cuts in its 2014 budget, announced that, to put it mildly, environmental programs were way, way down on its list of priorities.  That, to me,  has a lot more significance than Ms. Batho's press conference.

The government's priorities may be jobs, and correctly so.  But, more like socialists of 40 or more years ago, they seem to act as if jobs mean infrastructure and regional economic development.  It's as if they're out to recreate the "Trentes Glorieuses" the 30 years of post-war economic growth.  Thus Ayrault's Notre-Dame-de-Landes airport project just west of Nantes where he was mayor for many years, justified as critical for economic growth in that part of western France.  No one in the government seems much interested in what all this does to land and water resources, or whether the jobs being created will still be around in five or ten years.

Meanwhile, Ms. Batho retains a seat in the National Assembly as a deputy from the Deux Sèvres, a largely rural district directly south of Angers and the Loire River.  I don't have the impression she was particularly identified with environmental issues before being name to her ministerial position.  Nor has she been that close to EELV (Europe Écologie Les Verts) party members.  It will be interesting what role she plays now.

Budget cut, environment minister gone

French president François Holland's government recently announced its budget for 2014 with more cuts in public spending; the agency taking the biggest hit turned out to be the Ministry of the Environment with a seven percent reduction in funds.  Who knows what was going on behind the scenes, but this turned out to be too much for the Minister, Delphine Batho.  She publicly criticized her own government, calling it a "bad" budget.  On Tuesday she was sacked.

The budget cuts together with Ms. Batho's firing, even allowing for her failure of collective responsibility, says nothing good about the Holland government's interest in the environment.  And this is not the first time Holland and Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault have axed a head of the department that seemed to taking a commitment to the environment too seriously.  Holland's first Minister of the Environment, preceding Ms. Batho, was Nicole Bricq.  But shortly after being named to the position, she suspended oil exploration permits in the waters around Guyane.  The oil companies complained and Ms. Bricq was gone.

Ms. Batho has been replaced by Philippe Martin, a PS deputy from the Gers and until now a member of the Assembly's commission on sustainable development.

Apparently Ms. Batho wasn't particularly close to the EELV members of the government or environmentalist members of her own Socialist Party.  But after the government's severe downgrading of environmental policy as indicated by the budget -- quite apart from Ms Batho's firing -- one wonders at what point the EELV members of the government will decide their project may be better served by leaving.

Bosco Verticale

These look almost real.  And, remarkably, they're about to be.  The two apartment towers, referred to as the "Bosco Verticale" (Vertical Forest), are currently under construction in the Porta Nuova neighborhood of Milan, Italy.  Hines Italia, the project developer, expects they'll be finished and ready for occupancy later this year, or perhaps early next year.  Already, they report that 60 percent of the units have been sold.  The neighborhood, about 10 minutes north of the landmark Duomo and between the Garibaldi and Centrale train stations, in the midst of a major redevelopment effort including new commercial and residential buildings and park space.

© Stefano Boeri Architects

 





Clearly, their distinctive feature is the greenery.   Could they have been inspired by the Torre Guinigi in Lucca (below)?  Maybe.

© Richard Mounts, 2006

More likely the inspiration would have come from a contemporary building like this one, the Royal Park on Pickering Hotel in Singapore.  Stefano Boeri, the architect for the Bosco Verticale, and a few others seem to be dramatically extending the idea of a green building.

© Singapore Air

Statistics for the Bosco Verticale are impressive.  Together the two towers, one 262 feet (80 meters) and the other 367 feet (112 meters), will include the equivalent of a two-and-a-half-acre woods.  Once planted, a gardening service will be responsible for some 730 trees, 5,000 shrubs, and 11,000 groundcover plants.  To reduce the weight of normal dirt, gardeners developed a lightweight substrate material.  Besides the sense of being in the woods even at 300 feet over Milan, it's expected that all of this greenery should reduce building energy usage by nearly a third.

A complication developed at the end of May when the firm doing the construction filed for bankruptcy.  But it's reported the developers have found a new firm to take over and they should be able to finish construction more or less on schedule.