Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The Eastern Market cooperates with community groups and charitable organisations across the city – from garden initiatives helping growers to Detroit Kitchen Connect, which supports food entrepreneurs every step of the way.
Start with wherever they’re able to get to start to say yes. And then you get to the next yes. And the next yes. Until the process begins.
Wanderbaumallee’s walking trees take over Stuttgart, Germany bringing green spaces and shelter, nature, biodiversity and community spaces to the city while championing for citizens’ freedom to change their neighbourhoods.
While the growing instability of our biosphere and global civilization are worrying to say the least, the prospect of a rise in city power is an exciting silver lining because it is in self-governing city-states that civilization has historically been born and reborn.
It’s often been said that we’re living through an unprecedented moment. But in city centres, the coronavirus crisis has merely accelerated trends that have been unfolding for some time.
Sharing learnings between vulnerable cities can ensure the implementation of best practices from around the world. Taking the knowledge from Mumbai’s fight against flooding into other sectors also presents a significant opportunity.
After coronavirus, a key question emerges: what in essence, is a city for? Is it to pursue growth, attract inward investment and compete against global rivals? Or is it to maximise quality of life for all, build local resilience and sustainability? T
Natural disasters, economic crises and viral outbreaks have greatly impacted our cities in the past. Today, we witness this effect with the COVID-19 viral outbreak. It has heavily impacted food, accommodation, livelihoods, public transport, economy, and other public amenities available to cities globally.
For us, it is good to know what we are against, but if we are to fight for something better, then we really need an alternative vision. Our idea is to work with those that come on that. What comes out of it will depend on the level of interest, enthusiasm, creativity and commitment to do further work.
Planning scholars have for years studied and criticized the mechanisms of urban land transformation that drive national economic growth. Urbanization is not the consequence of economic growth but the actual driver of it. The enlargement of cities, their number of jobs, estates and infrastructures, is a driving force behind growth.
There is solid evidence that privatisation costs more and undermines human rights. The resistance to privatisation has turned into a powerful force for a positive cause, that of (re)municipalisation, which refers to reclaiming and creating new public services on a municipal level.
We have a way in the modern world of rediscovering things that humans have always done but branding them as something trendy and a little alien. So it goes with the explosion of interest in “tiny houses” as an answer to what ails cities struggling to house and attract people.
The ironic thing about tiny houses is that they’re nothing new; it’s just that, in surprisingly recent memory, our culture had a different name for them. We called them “houses.”
