When we think of urban landowners, our minds (or mine, anyway) may jump to picturing vulture real-estate investment funds and greedy businessmen in black profiting from gentrification. While the links between these private investments and the housing crisis have been long documented, we (or I) can’t forget that government entities own and control typically larger areas for public infrastructure, parks, and government buildings. And that land ownership determines much more than just real estate markets.

Repair cafés are nothing new, but the post is quite useful for all the details the authors provide and the great idea of holding it at a University with tables from different disciplines, offering repairs for different kinds of products.

If your start thinking about a Fab City (or any city, really), what are some places you might walk into freely, meet a variety of people, and learn something? There aren’t all that many places like that, are there? Public libraries fit that description and a lot of the things people want to experience and learn about in terms of strengthened social fabric and projects leading to a locally active and globally connected are already happening in libraries.

We’ve already covered the idea of Doughnut Economics a couple of times here so this will be a short post. This book club guide by DEAL with lots of tips to help you read through the book as a group is very well done, so I’m pointing it out for a few of reasons. First of course, because it’s excellent subject matter that adresses a number of our societal challenges, like consumption, inequality, environmental impact, etc. It’s a framework already put into action in a few cities around the world.