Over the decades, a number of important and interesting sites and landmarks have been lost, many due to urbanization of cities, sometimes demolished due to rising maintenance costs after falling into disrepair , and sometimes they will fall prey to natural disasters.
The years between 1880 and 1920 changed American cities that went through a period of industrial progress, and to make room for more important buildings, many of the old ones were torn down.
The timing is finally right
The five-day week that most of us consider natural is actually less than 100 years old. Although British factories began in the late 19th century to add a half-day Saturday to workers’ day off on Sunday, the full two-day weekend as we know it was first adopted by an American steel mill in 1908, and didn’t become standard in the United States until the Great Depression.
Since then, a handful of countries and companies have further shortened the working week. Although its legal requirement is 37 hours, Denmark’s average weekly total, for example, fell below 34 hours in 2002 and remains so to this day. But resistance to more widespread transformation has long been the norm. “I published my first book on this in 1997,” says Boston College economist and sociologist Juliet Schor, who leads the research for 4 Day Week Global, “but then I wasn’t able to find companies willing to reduce the load workforce of its staff”. That started to change several years ago when a handful of companies started experimenting. “But nothing like what’s happening now,” says Schor. “Now, it’s actually a real thing.”
Chicken Tractor
The Chicken Tractor is a popular design that works like a very old-fashioned, yet very natural lawn mower. The coop is mobile and has no floor, allowing the hens to forage, peck and fertilize the soil directly under the coop. Once the surrounding area is used up, the chicken coop is moved to a new location with fresh soil. We love the idea of chicken tractors, but find that for small urban lots you may have to devote your entire yard to chickens to provide enough fresh soil.
Within two or three hours, chickens can eat all the vegetation in a tractor. We think a better application of a tractor design is in an agricultural environment, where there is plenty of room to move the tractor, allowing sufficient time for the vegetation to regenerate before the chickens join us again.