As a growing number of people realise, climate change isn’t just about large-scale, somewhat slow change; it’s also about more frequent and more extreme “weather events,” like “hundred-year storms” happening two or three times in 15 years, for example.
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.
The Fab City is, of course, a lot more than technology in the city. It’s about a future-forward vision of the urban landscape that creates and produces locally while connected and collaborating globally. That being said, it’s no surprise that technology occupies a big space in that vision and that it also now overlaps with more “classical” visions of urbanism and architecture.
We’ve written about regenerative cities before; in this article at Future of Cities, we can take a closer look at how regenerative placemaking was used in practice in various projects around the city of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, which has gone from a depressed economy with declining public health, to becoming the world’s most liveable city according to The Economist. Here’s how the authors define the process.
Those three questions are asked in a short article, by way of pondering if cities can thrive in turbulent times. The authors start with the sobering fact that so many of us have already taken stock of; even with all the good intentions of the beginning of the pandemic, we can’t take the hoped-for positive feedback loops for granted. Australia’s recovery for example was largely gas-powered. Calls for growth and the prioritizing of rebuilding the economy as it once was are already supplanting calls for rebuilding different and better.
