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Three favourites
This week I happened to find new articles about three of my favourite measures to transform cities, make them more resilient, reduce CO2 emissions, and make them more liveable. Each of these could be a separate post but they also make sense together as examples of how to achieve large impacts without having to invent anything, simply changing how things are done.
Additive houses
Although we often hear about our own individual carbon footprint and of the airline business, a huge part of our collective emissions actually come from building construction, especially making concrete and the day to day energy use of buildings. 3D printing, or additive manufacturing, is not the solution, but perhaps a part of a mix of solutions. At the very least, it’s one evolving field of research that’s worth keeping track of, in part because certification of new materials and techniques takes time and represent a pretty high barrier to entry, so anything as new as 3D printing is bound to hit restrictions, or show a path forward for other innovative ideas.
What’s so good about speed? Slow down cities.
Sometimes, you find articles that have a certain twist of phrase or formula that you know you’ll use again and again. This short piece on the benefits of ‘slow cities’, by the authors of a book on the same topic, includes such a phrase. Instead of “mobility” (how far you can go in a given time), the goal of the “slow city” is accessibility (how much you can get to in that time).
Tree canopies and shaded canyons
Even though humans build cities, in a way creating our own habitats, we don’t completely understand the interactions of this built environment with nature and how much comfort or discomfort we might experience. Throw in the climate weirding, which brings more frequent extremes of heat, precipitation, as well as quick variations, and you quickly see how this understanding must be much more detailed and the lessons applied. The Science Museum of Virginia and the Portland State University SUPR Lab teamed up with a network of local collaborators, volunteers, and newscasters to measure Richmond’s heat island effect.
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