Sometimes articles don’t necessarily bring new facts, but they attach some exiting ideas together in a useful synthesis. This is what this article on people not returning to the office is doing. We already know that on typical days offices are still sitting half-empty, “the Kastle Back to Work Barometer currently hovers around just 41%.”
Rewilding, which consists of “conservation efforts aimed at restoring and protecting natural processes and wilderness areas,” is usually done away from cities, in more rural areas and involves, to simplify greatly, letting land go back to its natural state. The word still seems fitting though, for the two short articles below, where man-made structures are replaced with hybrid ones, bringing more nature back into, and around cities.
One of the defining features of Fab Cities is the idea of acting locally and connecting globally. For the last year+ of posting here, we’ve featured a lot of international projects. Now, even though we’ve always featured local projects too, we’re going to spend a little more time highlighting local initiatives that, whether they realise it or not, fit under the umbrella of the Fab City.
Electric bikes are booming, you can see them on the streets, see the new stores specializing in them, and you can see media outlets talking and writing about them. The Financial Times even produced this nice short video overview of the phenomenon, including a couple of factory visits, and traveling to two cities in Germany where e-bikes are making great inroads. After decades and decades of devastating car-centric city development, are e-bikes the next great technological transformation for cities?
There are a lot of grassroots and human-centred aspects to Fab Cities, but it’s also an intersection of fields where technology tends to play a large role. Even with better maintenance, re-use, repair, upcycling, and recycling, a lot of our electronics end up in the trash or supposedly recycled but actually shipped elsewhere to be disposed of in less than ideal situations.
