Hacking Through Cities With Creative Sustainability
The Rotten Apple project exercises creativity agency by finding clever and simple ways to alter his surroundings to introduce new facets of function and fun into the urban environment.
Sjors De Vries On Next-Level City-Making In The Netherlands
Sjors de Vries is a Dutch urban planner and founder of RUIMTEVOLK ('Space People') a leading online discussion platform about planning and urbanism in the Netherlands. We spoke with him about the current state of planning in the Netherlands, the best ways to upscale cute and small initiatives to make them serious improvements to the city, about the power of online media in city-making and the role of their platform. "We see it as a very important task for urban professionals to establish connections and coalitions with other disciplines in order to solve the next big urban issues."
Archist City: A Stroke Of Art In Architecture
What might a city designed by Warhol, Rothko, and Mondrian look like? Italian illustrator Federico Babina addresses this very question in a series of drawings titled Archist City, in which he incorporates the iconic imagery and stylistic elements of famous artists into illustrations of standing buildings.
Breathing New Life Into Vacant Buildings — A Talk With Caroline Vrauwdeunt
Caroline Vrauwdeunt is not an architect, planner, or designer — you'd better call her a city-maker. Vrauwdeunt started her career working for a bank, but it didn't give her enough satisfaction. After finishing a Law degree she worked as a legal expert and project manager for the City of Amsterdam and the Dutch province of North Holland for almost fifteen years. In 2012 she decided to start for herself and become a social entrepreneur with her company Andrs.nu. Nowadays she and her newly founded project De Stedenfabriek (The City Factory) breathe new life into neglected urban spaces. We spoke with her about her inspiration, co-creation, and entrepreneurial city-making.
‘Anti-Social Network’ Provides An Incognito Mode For Real Life
Many people settle in cities because they want a higher degree of freedom and anonymity they won't find in a village on the country side. However, social interaction and participation have become the holy grail for urban designers. Anti-social network Cloak wants to give urbanites the opportunity to not bump into people they don't want to meet.
The Architecture Of Peacekeeping
The Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) is the biggest safety operation in Dutch history. Almost 60 world leaders and over 5,000 delegation members are visiting The Hague, not to forget the 3,000 journalists that travel in their slipstream. Every day of the summit 13,000 police men have to control this temporary infiltration of diplomacy. An unaccessible, temporary city surrounded by fences, barriers, detours, cameras, and observations posts has occupied a large part of the usually quiet and peaceful city of The Hague, which is quite interesting in the context of pop-up urbanism.
Japanese Commuters Grow Veggies On Train Station Rooftops
Rooftop farms have been established all over the world to enable growing food in dense urban areas. In Japan, a whole new kind of an urban rooftop farm was opened recently. Soradofarm is an urban agriculture project that uses the rooftops of train stations to accommodate urban gardens for waiting train passengers that want to use their transfer time to relax and train their gardening skills.
Spacified: A Dating Website For Pop-Up Spaces
Patrice Fleurquin is founder of Spacified, an online (and offline) matchmaking service for (empty) spaces and spaces that are available for temporary rent. Headquartered in Belgium, the network is currently expanding to cities in the Netherlands, France, and even outside of Europe. We spoke with Patrice about how matchmaking between spaces and people works, the latest temporary space concepts and the pop-up guide that Spacified will launch this week.
Get Any Product Delivered With Postmates
Imagine you desperately want a coffee, but you have no time to go buy one, and the coffee bar has no delivery service. That's where urban logistics and on-demand delivery platform Postmates comes in.
Pop-Up Restaurant Delivers Hot Sandwiches By Parachute
What to do when you live on the 7th floor of an apartment building, but feel the desperate need to start a pop-up restaurant in your own house? That was what the people behind the Australian pop-up concept Jafflechutes must have experienced before they came up with the idea to serve hot sandwiches by means of a parachute.
A Niche Store For Discarded Urban Light Signs
Commercial light signs in cities are often criticized. Many people claim they ruin the urban landscape and overload the urbanites with commercial messages nobody has asked for. However, the beauty of these light signs and the typical urban atmosphere they contribute to is hardly recognized. Designer Fabian Thiele found a gap in the market by presenting the urban light signs in a new context: a concept store.
The Emergence Of The Urban Cat
With all the cat lovers out there it is no surprise that there is a market for custom-built furniture to suit your feline friends’ every need. Recognising this, German Company Goldtatze makes hand crafted designer furniture that can be mounted to the walls and ceilings to create the puurfect playground for your pet.
‘Renovated Billboards’ Make Façades Look Prettier
Germany's biggest DIY chain OBI pushes advertisements for DIY stores beyond showing paint, saws or hammers. On different run down houses, the brand has renovated an area the size of a billboard in order to show what its products are capable of.
Finland’s Deerest Friends Light Up The Night Sky
A new experiment involving the protection of free-roaming reindeer may just be inspired by Rudolph’s most virtuous characteristic. The project involves coating reindeer antlers with a specially formulated glow-in-the-dark liquid that aims to reduce reindeer-related traffic accidents.
Placemeter Shows How Busy Places Are In Real-Time
Surveillance is a hot topic at the moment, and a cause for concern for many. Regardless of this, there are a number of useful ways that surveillance can be applied as an aid to 21st century living. An example of this is the Placemeter, which uses video feeds from across New York City to create an advanced warming system which allows users to find out how busy their destination is in real time.
