This past Tuesday, we had a post about the city of Helsinki’s project to enable participatory budgeting with a card game. Both the budgeting aspect itself, and the card game, could be loosely grouped under the concept of “civic design.” To go a bit further on that, this short article by the team at Local Peoples can give us some useful pointers and closes with an overview of a framework.
Participatory budgeting has been a “thing” in cities for a while now; assigning a small budget to citizens ideas, and giving them some agency in choosing to which projects the money goes to.
This article about Geofencing some vehicles in Sweden is quite short, yet the topic connects to multiple opportunities and challenges. Let’s look at the pilot project first and then at some of those connected issues.
Another one of those “it existed before, but the pandemic accelerated it” stories (not that there’s anything wrong with that). The concept of “bike buses” has been around for years, but the slower or even closed streets that various cities implemented in the last couple of years provided new opportunities.
New materials can be quite fascinating. Although some of them are not completely new but re-invented, which is often done by integrating things nature does by itself. Dezeen has a great list of ten future materials that could change the way we build. Favourites in this list: 3D-printed mycelium, hemp rebar, and carbon-sequestering Carbicrete (ok, the last one might be in part because it's from a Montréal company).
