Here’s a duo of articles that feel both old school (a conversation between blogs) and very much of today, where someone talks about a problem in the future and someone else reminds them, and us, that the problem is actually already here. First with Duo Dickinson who explains the coming challenges requiring adaptive reuse, and second with Lloyd Alter showing that these challenges are very much already here.

To change a city, one should first better understand it, right? That’s the premise for this post about a thesis project by D.J. Trischler, a master of design student at the University of Cincinnati. Graphic design and branding might not be the first things we might consider changing in a city, but Trischler’s idea for, and exploration of neighbourhood-centred design is a great short trip into one way of understanding a neighbourhood and its citizens. His process was quite thorough.

This past Tuesday, we had a post about the city of Helsinki’s project to enable participatory budgeting with a card game. Both the budgeting aspect itself, and the card game, could be loosely grouped under the concept of “civic design.” To go a bit further on that, this short article by the team at Local Peoples can give us some useful pointers and closes with an overview of a framework.

Participatory budgeting has been a “thing” in cities for a while now; assigning a small budget to citizens ideas, and giving them some agency in choosing to which projects the money goes to.

A better urban future There are a lot of great directions to ponder