It’s a lot more common in recent years to hear how we need to reinvent the economy, change cities, rethink how we live within planetary boundaries. However, actual examples to follow seem to be very small-scale and dreams of change project large-scale visions. “Real life” examples beyond hobbies or purely volunteer models are a bit harder to find.
Alfred Twu, an artist and architect who works on housing and transportation projects, wrote a guest post for Noah Smith’s newsletter with lots of interesting views on the evolution of cities. It’s mostly a sequence of statements of a few paragraphs, so a bit hard to summarise, but here are some outtakes to encourage you to read through, plus there are quite a few of his illustrations spread out along his writing. Twu wrote about renovation, the economy, lifestyle, shopping, colleges, transportation, and dreams.
Straw buildings are nothing new, but sometimes revisiting old solutions can provide useful options. In this article on building efficient walls with agricultural waste, ArchDaily gives us a nice overview of such a look back and shows how “straw buildings can be sustainable, comfortable, and, above all, solid and resistant.”
This blog post ends up being a synthesis of a synthesis, so you might want to click through to the article explaining seven major transformations to solve urban inequality, or even to the World Resources Report Towards a More Equal City. But here are some of the highlights.
Bicycles can play (are playing) a great part in the decarbonizing of our cities. Their affordability and repairability, and the way they allow a closer, more intimate way of traveling neighbourhoods, are all greatly aligned with the values and investigations around Fab Cities. As great as they are though, in our context they’re not that original, so instead of spending multiple posts on the topic, here’s a quick roundup of three recent articles on bikes and micromobility.
