If you’ve been interested in Fab Cities, definitely pay attention to this article by Tomas Diez on the distributed learning space being built for the Fab City foundation’s new “Master in Design for Distributed Innovation, in collaboration with the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), Fab Lab Barcelona, and local nodes in Montréal, Paris, Puebla, Shanghai, Bali, Hamburg, and Lima (with more to come.)”
Most people interested in cities would, I believe, agree that hydroponic farms will very likely be part of the mix of solutions for food cultivated in and around cities. Probably vertical hydroponic farms. Skyscraper height farms, especially ones integrating other amenities like office space, a supermarket and a food court? Now that definitely remains to be seen!
Some mistakes are irreversible, and some are quite tame, all of them are opportunities to learn. We’ll see if city planners can learn from the mistakes of their forbearers. As virtually everyone is pushing for a transition to electric vehicles, it’s an opportunity to right the mistake of fossil fuels in cities.
We’re usually focused on positive solutions in this space but this really excellent (if somewhat bleak) article by Lev Kushner and Greg Lindsay at Bloomberg’s CityLab is very much worth a read, as it exposes a glaring need for more pro-active and forward looking governance in cities.
We can apply regenerative philosophy to design and ask: how can we put life — human life, the planet, and everything it sustains — at the centre of everything we do?
