Word: gas
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These are pretty challenging sites, but architects and landscape designers are treating them as opportunities to rethink what a park should look like and what it can say. Seattle was already a pioneer in this area by 1975, when the city opened its 20-acre Gas Works Park on the site of an abandoned plant that had once extracted gas from coal. Instead of tearing down the industrial buildings, the city refurbished and repurposed them as play barns and picnic sheds. But while the Gas Works Park includes a big rusted factory, the surrounding greenery doesn't much engage...
Five years ago, the city of Duisburg, Germany, vastly upped the ante when it completed its huge Duisburg-Nord Landscape Park, a 570-acre site occupied by massive relics of the former Thyssen Steelworks. Blast furnaces, rail lines, gas tanks--corroded ruins of the industrial age--were reborn as archaeological monuments among newly planted groves and grasslands. And the designer, Peter Latz, didn't hesitate to directly invade the factory precincts with trees and smaller plantings, playgrounds and rock-climbing walls. By that means the derelict factory was woven back into the world of the living. The past, instead...
...respect, not too much has fundamentally changed since then; China's economy is still racing along, car bombs are still exploding in Baghdad and Americans are still hooked on their gas-guzzling SUVs. But one crucial thing is changing: oil prices are actually falling. Crude oil futures fell below $50 a barrel Thursday afternoon, their lowest level since May of 2005. Gasoline prices are down too, to around $2.25 a gallon on average, from a peak of just over $3 last summer. It's all good news for the economy, since lower energy prices traditionally help tame inflation and could...
...recently questioned Chinese officials about their plan to invest $16 million to develop a natural gas field in Iran. "We've made clear the downsides of investing in Iran," she said. While the secretary hasn't asked China point blank to abandon the plan, she has let Chinese officials know that investing in Iran while it is under U.N. Security Council sanctions for refusing to stop its suspect nuclear activities is "a financial risk and a reputational risk...
...Azerbaijan grow richer without growing freer? Some Azeris believe Western governments prefer energy security to political freedom, as was sought in the 2004 revolution in Ukraine--a major transhipper of natural gas to Western Europe. "The U.S. will never support democrats in Azerbaijan because of their oil interests," says Guluzadeh. But Azeris might start to demand more democracy if oil revenues do not trickle down. The country is listed as one of the world's most corrupt by the Berlin-based Transparency International. "The average citizen is very suspicious of the government," says a Western official in Baku...