• Hope, confidence and friendship at a repair café. Image by Sara Brouwer

Hope, confidence and friendship at a repair café

By Patrick Tanguay|2022-05-17T07:30:58-04:0024 March 2022|Education|

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.

Online shopping might reshape cities

By Patrick Tanguay|2022-08-05T08:13:27-04:0022 March 2022|Cities|

We’ve covered this topic before, but how online shopping might reshape cities is definitely worth revisiting both for the phenomenon itself, and as an example of “software eating the world.” Digital companies, or simply the use of new technologies by incumbents, not only disrupt their competitors but often have much broader impacts.

  • Illustration by Toni Demuro for the World Majlis series of essays

Cities as constructed ecosystems

By Patrick Tanguay|2022-05-17T07:34:43-04:0017 March 2022|Territoire|

This article actually reads quite a bit like a manifesto so it’s hard and perhaps a disservice to the author to try summarizing it, but let’s highlight a few points. In Reinventing our cities as constructed ecosystems, Ken Yeang, a Malaysian architect who describes himself as “ecologist first, architect second,” considers the various systems human society is built on, especially the natural ones, and what we need to change in facing the climate crisis.

  • Adjaye Mass Timber Plants Quayside Toronto- Dezeen

Mass-timber building covered in plants for Toronto’s waterfront

By Patrick Tanguay|2022-08-05T08:14:59-04:0015 March 2022|Territoire|

Very short post since there isn’t that much to say yet about the project and I haven’t looked into potential pushback (this replaces the infamous Sidewalk labs plan which looked good but was very problematic). But for now this new version of Toronto’s Quayside project, which includes a design for a mass-timber building covered in plants, certainly looks fantastic. So have a look at the vision, perhaps we’ll revisit later.

  • Zanelli © Fab Lab Barcelona

Manufacturing in cities

By Patrick Tanguay|2022-05-17T07:37:06-04:0010 March 2022|Fabrication|

With industrialization, and then globalization, most cities in North America and Europe have moved away from local manufacturing. This has resulted in a disconnect between making and citizens, much like the disconnect with nature, and the animals we eat. As a “consequence manufacturing only takes a little role in the urban life in European cities today, shifting the focus on services rather than production.” That’s a problem on multiple levels and there are good reasons to bring back more local manufacturing, not the least of which being resilience.

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