We’ve already written about cities for children. Now, following a similar line of thought, architecture firm Arup have release a new report, Cities Alive: Designing Cities that work for women. The basic argument for both is roughly the same: cities are designed for white men going to work. That’s a great oversimplification on my part but broadly correct as a center point to multiple issue. If we design cities for a broader range of people, more of them will be comfortable, be able to safely do a greater number of things within cities, and everyone will benefit.

Earlier this year, Open Future published their views concerning a public data commons and presented it as a public-interest framework for B2G (Business to Government) data sharing in the European Data Act. It is quite a long read and might seem somewhat incongruous to a blog about fab cities, but it’s an important issue well covered here. Important because, regardless of which visions or ideals one promotes for cities (and society more broadly) everything is more and more digital. What’s digital produces data. Data is easy enough to collect and can be assembled as insights and knowledge. Who controls it matters. A lot.