As the number of calls and projects to rewild the countryside multiply, it’s important to remember that our cities replaced ecosystems and are themselves habitats for their populations, which means they could benefit from rewilding too. This piece at The Guardian looks at beauty, biodiversity and the biophilic cities movement.
If you want to know what Fab City is really about, the history and thinking behind it, the implications, and some of the directions the community wants to take it, you could hardly do better than this paper by one of the co-founders, Tomas Diez.
More and more people are living in cities, scientists predict that noncommunicable diseases will account for 77% of the global burden of disease by 2030, and now research from the University Medical Center in Mainz, Germany, shows that urbanization exacerbates the risks of such diseases.
Ok, so this series ended up being very very irregular, but here’s another few maker projects of interest.
Sometimes, to discover opportunities to change our surroundings for the better, it’s just a question of reassessing what we are used to, looking at the defaults, and then finding what’s actually needed and appropriate to the current context and needs. The Nouveaux voisins / New Neighbors project does exactly that, by looking at something we barely notice, private yards, and finding ways of re-inventing them. They want to facilitate socio-ecological transitions and community-based climate action with a platform that brings together functions that are “pedagogical, actionable, evaluational, financial, and regulatory.”
