Flexible Outdoor Urinal Doubles As A Composter
By Joop de Boer
French design studio Faltazi has presented a highly flexible outdoor urinal that recycles the pee of festival visitors into usable compost. The so-called Uritonnoir is designed as an eco-friendly way for outdoor sanitation for those moments it’s most needed.
Read more →Futuristic Trash Can Gives A Call When It’s Full
By Bob Wiebes
The so-called Big Belly is a high-tech solar-powered trash can that automatically compacts trash and recycables, and sends city cleaners a notification when it’s full.
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A Pigeon Fertilizing Tower Made Of Paper Bricks
By Joop de Boer
Some weeks ago we highlighted the Freezing Favela, an artist community in Amsterdam that’s building an indoor favela in a huge industrial hall. Different kinds of projects are stacked together here, creating an interesting urban micro-climate. One of the projects built during the Freezing Favela event is a pigeon tower made out of recycled paper.
Read more →Bitponics: Where Urban Agriculture Meets The Internet Of Things
By Bob Wiebes
Brooklyn start-up Bitponics makes urban farming a bit more convenient with its smart device and website that helps you manage your greens from a remote location.
Read more →Public Urinal Provides Locally-Sourced Fertilizer For Urban Greenery
When Nature Calls is a project by Columbus, Ohio based industrial designer Eddie Gandelman. It is a public urinal that uses filtered pee as fertilizer for plants growing in an attached planter. When properly filtered, urine provides a number of essential nutrients that are vital to healthy plant growth.
Read more →Build Your Own Pop-Up Seed Swapping Station
Hawaii-based Eating in Public’s Seed-Sharing stations are unmonitored installations that have started to pop up all over the USA and Canada. They offer an easily accessible space for urban gardeners to exchange seeds and important information about how to best grow their fruits and veggies.
Read more →Goedzak: Because One Man’s Trash Is Another Man’s Treasure
As a blogger, you come across plenty of good ideas every day. Sometimes you come across brilliant ideas. The so-called ‘Goedzak’ is such an idea. Developed by Amsterdam-based product design agency Waarmakers, the Goedzak is a special garbage bag for items that are still usable. ‘Goedzak’ means both ‘good bag’ and ‘do-gooder’ in Dutch. According to designers Simon Akkaya and Maarten Heijltjes, their concept is a friendly way to give products a second chance and stimulate sustainable behavior.
Read more →The Urban Farming Supply Chain In The Modern City
By Joop de Boer
As urban farming is becoming a serious business in many cities around the world, it’s interesting to see how the city farming scene extends its influence from a ‘vacant-lots-only’ phenomenon to a ‘rest-of-the-city’ phenomenon.
Read more →‘Living Pavements’ To Greenify Public Spaces
By Ted Pouls
Dutch designer Bennie Meek designed a form of pavement that would improve rain water drainage in urban areas, such as the city of Eindhoven. Meek’s design was part of the Design Academy Eindhoven 2012 graduation show. The philosophy behind the Living Pavement is re-thinking about how nature should be present in an urban area.
Read more →LA Artist Proposes Floating Park Above The Highway
By Joop de Boer
Why not make a forest above the highway? That’s what the LA-based artist Stephen Glassman must have thought when he took the initiative for the Urban Air project. He wants to transform the space above the highway that’s normally used for advertising into a bamboo forest in the sky.
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