One “boring” aspect of how we built cities going forward is also a very old one, concrete. A material that’s been around since the Romans, humanity has produced an astonishing volume of it and is still doing so at a no less astonishing rate.

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.

Provenance is quite an interesting organization, they want to help companies to track the provenance of their products and their impact. They recently released an excellent initiative, the open-source Provenance Framework, which is “is made up of 50+ shopper-facing claims spanning 5 focus areas: climate, communities, nature, waste and workers”.

Replacing fossil fuel cars with electric cars is not the solution to our climate woes, we need way way fewer cars. However, those that do get replaced could have benefits beyond emission reductions, like plugging back into the power grid and acting like mini power plants.

There’s often talk, including here, of the importance of citizen involvement, mobilization, organisation, support, basically of people coming together. But we also know that inequality and divisiveness is present and growing in many places. So how can neighbourhoods bridge that gap between the current state of things and the communal goals we know are needed? Tessy Britton of Participatory City knows a thing or two (or hundreds) about doing just that and gives an excellent introduction to how organizations can design neighbourhoods for cohesion.