Design
Social housing is good. But let’s make it beautiful too
Ostentatious parsimony was the phrase used by Kate Macintosh, the woman responsible for some of the most ambitious local authority housing of the 1960s and 70s, to describe the spending environment for the social architect. Housing ministers would speak with pride of stripping out unnecessary Read More...
Meet Mexico city's first bike mayor
Mexico City falls far short of the cycling infrastructure that bike activists dream of: as many residents say, it’s no Amsterdam. Although only 30 percent of daily trips in the city are made via private car (the other 70 percent are made by public transportation, by bike, or on foot), Mexico Read More...
Possibility: Refugees drive affordable housing innovation in Europe
From The Intelligent Optimist Magazine Fall/Winter 2016 European nations are finding that by working on one problem—sheltering the waves of refugees in ways that help integrate them into their new homes—they also can address other, seemingly intractable problems: Affordable housing for Read More...
Ode to Abeer Seikaly, Amman, Jordan
From The Optimist Magazine Fall 2015 A new kind of mobile home People move. It’s what they have always done and what they will keep doing. Architect, artist and cultural producer Abeer Seikaly, from Amman, Jordan, designed an elegant and practical home for people who are forced to move on to a Read More...
How self-driving cars will profoundly change real estate
Menlo Ventures managing director Venky Ganesan says that urban spaces will change dramatically once self-driving cars become widespread. "The average house is roughly 3,000 sq ft and it's been going up. The size of your garage is roughly 500 sq ft. That means roughly 15 to 20% of your living space Read More...
Beijing mega-region plan aims to alleviate poverty, but some are wary
Ming Jun snaps some dusty twigs and drags them indoors to cook lunch for his daughter and heat his mud brick home. The Chinese farmer is down to his last pile of firewood, and he can't afford any more. It's just ahead of the Lunar New Year, but Ming says he feels no holiday cheer. "Other families Read More...
This Argentinian artist is building a "pantheon of banned books" in Germany
Ever since the printing-press was invented, different regimes have tried to censor books they found controversial. In fact, Argentinian artist Marta Minujín worked with researchers from the University of Kassel to identify over 72,000 forbidden titles going back to the early 1500s. As a massive Read More...
Ants mastered sustainable agriculture 30 million years ago
Ants cultivated designer crops in controlled environments millions of years before humans figured out how to push seeds into the ground to grow food, scientists reported in a study Wednesday. It has long been known that dozens of ants species tend and harvest fungi in subterranean farms, mostly to Read More...
How Rotterdam became a world leader in sustainable urban design
When Helly Scholten makes dinner, if she needs a tomato or squash or an onion, she heads upstairs–the top floor of her house is a 440-square-foot indoor vegetable garden. She starts cooking before the sun goes down, while warmth is still flooding through the glass walls of the kitchen Read More...
A Swedish suburb is being redesigned to make it 'more feminist'
A suburb of Stockholm is being redesigned to make it more feminist. Housing company Svenska Bostader (SB) is remodelling the area of Husby in the Swedish capital in an attempt to attract more women and make female residents feel safer. Changes are being made in the district, which is on a Swedish Read More...