News
Bikes roundup
Bicycles can play (are playing) a great part in the decarbonizing of our cities. Their affordability and repairability, and the way they allow a closer, more intimate way of traveling neighbourhoods, are all greatly aligned with the values and investigations around Fab Cities. As great as they are though, in our context they’re not that original, so instead of spending multiple posts on the topic, here’s a quick roundup of three recent articles on bikes and micromobility.
Cities that work for women
We’ve already written about cities for children. Now, following a similar line of thought, architecture firm Arup have release a new report, Cities Alive: Designing Cities that work for women. The basic argument for both is roughly the same: cities are designed for white men going to work. That’s a great oversimplification on my part but broadly correct as a center point to multiple issue. If we design cities for a broader range of people, more of them will be comfortable, be able to safely do a greater number of things within cities, and everyone will benefit.
The architectural challenge of adaptive reuse
Here’s a duo of articles that feel both old school (a conversation between blogs) and very much of today, where someone talks about a problem in the future and someone else reminds them, and us, that the problem is actually already here. First with Duo Dickinson who explains the coming challenges requiring adaptive reuse, and second with Lloyd Alter showing that these challenges are very much already here.
“Society in mind”
Sometimes words taken from another language can provide a useful little perspective shift on a topic. Tsundoku, the Japanese word for “the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them” gave a tiny bit of a rallying cry for those of us who buy books left and right, the Danish “hygge,” which roughly translates to “a quality of cosiness” became a decoration trend and life style for many homes. During the pandemic, the Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen rekindled “samfundssind”, a compound noun of “samfund” (society) and “sind” (mind) to bring citizens together and encourage them to put “the good of the greater society above your own personal interests.”
