Urbanization
City trends of today and tomorrow.
Gain insights into urban development all over the globe.
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Categories: Sustainability
5 Stunning Low or Zero Energy Buildings
The built environment contributes to nearly half of all global CO2 emissions each year. The lion’s share of this environmental impact belongs to the day-to-day running and energy needs of our buildings such as homes, offices, schools, or hospitals: The building operations, including their energy consumption, accounts for approximately 27 percent of the world’s annual CO2 emissions. […]
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Categories: Urbanization
6 Sustainability Lessons from the World’s Happiest City
“[T]he role of the city is to make the lives of the people as easy and pleasant as possible,” said former Helsinki mayor, Jan Vapaavuori. For many of the 1.3 million residents of the Helsinki metropolitan area, daily life unfolds like a symphony of Nordic beauty and urban grace. In this city, serenity marries sophistication, as vast green parks […]
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Categories: Urbanization
Urban Rewilding: How These 5 Cities Brought Nature Back to the City
Due to the skyrocketing urbanization, industrialization, and population growth globally, our planet is losing its biodiversity at an alarming rate, faster than at any time in human history. Since the beginning of the 20th century, as the cities kept booming, the average population of indigenous species in the majority of significant ecosystems has declined by […]
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Categories: Urbanization
What Modern Cities Can Learn From London’s Deadly Smog of 1952
“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river where it flows among green airs and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city … Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog […]
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Categories: Sustainability
How Buildings Can Contribute to Urban Biodiversity
“It’s surely our responsibility to do everything within our power to create a planet that provides a home not just for us, but for all life on Earth,” says the legendary natural historian and broadcaster David Attenborough. However, as cities claim an increasing amount of land and resources, rapid urbanization is one of the significant drivers of biodiversity loss […]
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Categories: Architecture
From Trash to Treasure: 4 Facades From Recycled Materials
Over the last decades, sustainability has become one of the most defining forces across all industries, and architecture is no exception. A growing number of architectural firms and practitioners aspire for their buildings to be as green as possible. To do so, they utilize new digital technologies, innovations, and materials — and also tap into their own […]
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Categories: Urbanization
These 5 Latin American Cities Are Embracing A Smart Future
Smart cities are among our best bets for a livable and prosperous future. By leveraging technology to solve problems, smart cities can improve the quality of life for residents, promote sustainability, increase efficiency, enable better decision-making, create new opportunities, and foster economic growth. Hence, it’s no surprise that smart cities have rapidly spread worldwide. In […]
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Categories: Architecture
How Indigenous Wisdom Can Inform Modern Architecture
The greatest injustice of climate change is the fact that those who are most vulnerable to it are the people who contributed the least — such as the indigenous communities around the world. On the other hand, these communities also have the wisdom, experience, and the technologies to construct buildings in a way to minimize the notoriously high environmental impact of […]
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Categories: Urbanization
Virtual Playgrounds: How “Gamification” Can Help Us Solve Urban Problems
“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing,” said George Bernard Shaw, the celebrated Irish playwright who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925. Playing is human; likewise, games have been a fundamental tool for human evolution. Throughout history, they helped us to learn, create social bonds, release stress, and […]
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Categories: Sustainability
Beyond Timber: 5 Natural Construction Materials for Sustainable Homes
As a material, concrete has been the backbone of the modern construction industry thanks to its versatile and durable nature. It’d be hard to imagine the 20th century without concrete. However, there’s also a rising awareness about concrete’s significant adverse environmental impacts: Cement is the source of about eight percent of global carbon emissions. The construction and demolition of […]
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Categories: Urbanization
Bats Can Help Us Design Better Cities. Here’s How.
Popular culture doesn’t always portray bats in a favorable light. In many of the stories we consume about bats, they’re spooky and scary animals commonly spotted in the horror genre. When bats populate a scene, it’s usually bad news for the characters. Most recently, the world’s only flying mammal species have been in the limelight […]
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Categories: Urbanization
Here’s Why Japan Decided to Build Smart Cities From Scratch
Japan is arguably going through the biggest demographic challenge of modern history. After lingering around zero growth at the beginning of the 21st century, Japan‘s population has continued to shrink since 2010, with the decline rate accelerating in recent years. In 2022, the island nation, with a population of about 125 million, recorded its largest decline due to the combination […]
