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20.01.2022 (Re)Building cities from the neighbourhood up. "Vauban is celebrated internationally as a ‘green’ neighbourhood, scoring high on nearly all sustainability criteria. It is known for its ‘passive houses’: houses that produce more energy than the households themselves require; for its mobility strategy, privileging bicycles and public transport; and for its soft relationship with the natural environment surrounding it. Yet, standing at the corner of the Kurt-Tucholsky-Straße and... the Vauban Allee in Freiburg, and seeing how people socialize, the social qualities of this neighbourhood are arguably at least as remarkable. Above all, Vauban leaves you with a sense of possibility; the feeling that there are alternatives to how we usually build cities; the awareness that making our cities climate-proof and making them more sociable and pleasant places to live in at the same time, is possible. Shops are locally-owned. Philipp points at a large wood-fired pizza oven that was built in one of the pocket parks in between the housing blocks. It was expensive to construct and the municipality was reluctant to put it in, wary of vandalism and the cost of maintenance. ‘It is there for anyone to use. You just pick up the key from that shop over there, unlock it and it is ready for use. We have never had any trouble. On the contrary, people are proud of it and cherish it." Read more: https://www.foreground.com.au//rebuilding-cities-from-the/

16.01.2022 Does a future of driverless cars spell the end of human-centred design? Simon Sellars reflects on a new book that looks at how humans will act in a future with cars in control.

08.01.2022 Abandoning Indonesia's sinking mega city: "Although it is clear that the dynamics of atmosphere, land, and water do not obey geopolitical borders, like politicians, designers have yet to fully develop the capacity to attentively engage with the multiple scales of spatiality and temporality that anthropogenic climate change requires. More frequently, design professionals are complicit in and profit from their willingness to perpetuate illusions of escape and separation. As par...t of our ongoing documentation of both the psychosocial and geophysical aspects of capital relocation in Indonesia, we offer this brief case study of climate change escapism in order to examine accumulation in the making. Engulfed as we now are among the vicissitudes of disaster capitalism, how can we design for emergent political geographies otherwise?" Read more: https://www.foreground.com.au//abandoning-indonesias-mega/

04.01.2022 A new book argues that if our cities are to cope with the challenge of climate change, they will need to be reinvented from first principles, with ecological urbanism in mind.

03.01.2022 "It is no surprise that the urban wilds are weakly imagined in urban civilization futures, if considered at all. Thoreau’s famous dictum ‘in wildness is the preservation of the world’ referred not to wilderness but instead to a state of humanity. Nature, like the wild, is not ‘out there’ separate from cities, but instead deeply integrated into our cities and lives as part of everyday situatedness, living and interaction. This is a continuum that positions separateness and alienation from nature/each other at one dystopian end of the cityscape spectrum, versus connectivity and entanglement with nature/each other at the other as a pathway for shared urban and earthly futures."