Blog - Fab City Montréal

The city of the future is a remodel, not a rebuild

By Patrick Tanguay|2023-01-05T12:23:58-05:0015 November 2022|Cities|

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.

Efficient walls made of agricultural waste

By Patrick Tanguay|2022-12-16T11:52:33-05:001 November 2022|Fabrication|

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.”

Major transformations to solve urban inequality

By Patrick Tanguay|2023-01-05T12:23:38-05:0025 October 2022|Cities|

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.

Bikes roundup

By Patrick Tanguay|2022-11-30T04:01:33-05:0012 October 2022|Mobility|

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.

Food production in a planetary city

By Patrick Tanguay|2022-12-16T04:37:53-05:004 October 2022|Agriculture|

SPIN Unit is a research and innovation practice dedicated to discovering urban values. In this piece they discuss the challenges of food production in a planetary city. In this case the term “planetary city” refers to a city that lives according to the “planetary diet,” one that would make it possible to respect the 1.5-degree target set in the Paris Agreement, i.e. much less meat and dairy, and a much greater focus on fruits, vegetables, and plant protein. The goal of the project was to look at the various challenges to the food supply chain in a changing climate and crumbling ecosystems.