Hello ACGA list members! My name is Georgia Silvera. I am a PhD student in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at UC Berkeley. I am the organizer for the department's Spring Colloquium (/http://laep.ced.berkeley.edu/events/colloquium)/. For those of you who will be in the San Francisco Bay Area on February 7, please consider attending the Colloquium. The speaker will be Shay Salomon, author of /Little House on a Small Planet/.
Please forward to anyone who might be interested. Thank you! * Shay Salomon* Wednesday, February 7, 2007 Wurster Hall Room 315A UC Berkeley Campus 1 p.m. - 2 p.m. *The Book Talk* Live in less space but have more room and enjoy it. Does that sound like a contradiction? Smart readers will discover that on the contrary, living small can free up your mind, your wallet, and your soul. With the cost of living rising, the environment suffering from excessive building, now is time to scale back. Join the small house movement. In Shay Salomon's newly published book, with a foreward by Francis Moore Lappe, _Little House on a Small Planet_ <http://www.littlehouseonasmallplanet.com/> is a guidebook and an invitation, with floor plans, photographs, advice, and anecdotes. Discover how to build, remodel, redecorate, or just rethink your needs. Live close and simple and apply spiritual and social needs to your material desires. Pockets of people all over the continent are realizing the benefits of scaling down. You too can build a joyful, sane life that emphasizes home life over home maintenance. /Little House/ is split into three sections; building small houses, altering existing houses, and the politics of housing and lifestyle choices. The book is informative and hopeful, even empowering. Salomon takes a refreshing approach, instead of focusing intently on the problem of current housing trends, she provides the data needed to understand them, then spends her energy on drawing out solutions that each one of us can choose to follow through on. In fact, the politics of housing is a theme threaded throughout the entire book. Reading news coverage after Hurricane Katrina, Salomon learned that in Houston, where many of the refugees were headed, 14% of all housing units (homes, apartments, duplexes, etc) were vacant. Salomon did some research on how this compares to the rest of the country. She found that in the year 2000 there were 10.4 million vacant units and 250,000 people sleeping in homeless shelters. This meant there were nearly 45 homes that were completely empty per person sleeping in shelters. Salomon asks, "How is it that we have a housing crisis? Maybe a homing crisis, or a sharing crisis, but this isn't a housing crisis." *Shay Salomon* Shay Salomon is a natural builder who incorporates mindfullness practise into her building and teaching work, where she tries to reconnect the mind and body of self and world. She is a cofounder of the _Small House Society_ <http://www.smallhousesociety.org/>, and has written the popular self-help/home improvement guide, /Little House on a Small Planet. /All are welcome. The event is free and open to the public./ Georgia Silvera Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning University of California, Berkeley http://localecology.org/ // -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.communitygarden.org/pipermail/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org/attachments/20070129/749ddde9/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 10716 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://list.communitygarden.org/pipermail/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org/attachments/20070129/749ddde9/attachment.jpe
