Environment | Tag (page 3)

The 2022 World's Best Cities To Live In: Discover the Top 20

March 30, 2022

Global Finance's ranking of the world's best cities to live in, during 2022 has just been released. Centered on 8 different parameters that calculate and compare the quality of life of people living in urban areas such as economy, culture, population, environment, etc., this year’s edition also took into consideration Covid-19 deaths per thousand for each country, to reflect the new reality we live in. With data from the Global City Power index, Johns Hopkins University, Statista, and Macrotrends, the list seeks to have a complete vision, putting together traditional metrics with new factors.

Claiming the first position is London, U.K, a city that although didn’t get high rankings in its Covid-19 metrics, still topped the list, mainly due to its scores in culture, accessibility, and population growth. Tokyo was selected for the second position, showing weakness in one parameter, population, as its numbers have been declining for the past 10 years. Shanghai followed next, in the third position, because of relatively low Covid-19 death figures and strong population growth. Singapore and Melbourne came in 4th and 5th positions.

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50 Shades of Green: The Contradictions of Greenwashing in Architecture

March 24, 2022

Nowadays everything is “painted” green. It's green packaging, green technologies, green materials, green cars and, of course, green architecture. A “green wave”, stimulated by the environmental and energy crisis we are facing, with emphasis on climate change and all the consequences linked to global warming. This calamitous situation is confirmed by the second part of the report entitled Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and presented in recent weeks. It reveals that, although adaptation efforts are being observed in all sectors, the progress implemented so far is very low, as the actions taken are not enough.

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What Is Ecological Urbanism?

March 04, 2022

According to the architect and researcher Patrícia Akinaga, ecological urbanism emerged at the end of the 20th century as a strategy to create a paradigm shift with regard to the design of cities. With this, urban projects should be designed from the potential and limitations of existing natural resources. Unlike other previous movements, in ecological urbanism architecture is not the structuring element of the city — the landscape itself is. In other words, green areas should not only exist to beautify spaces, but as true engineering artifacts with the potential to dampen, retain and treat rainwater, for example. With ecological urbanism, urban design becomes defined by the natural elements intrinsic to its fabric.

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World's Most Liveable Cities in 2021: Auckland in New Zealand Tops the Ranking

June 10, 2021

Auckland in New Zealand has topped the ranking in the 2021 EIU's annual world's most liveable city survey. Classifying 140 cities across five categories including stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure, this year’s edition of the review has been highly affected by the global pandemic. Australia, Japan, and New Zealand took leading positions, while European and Canadian cities fell down the ranking.

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From Past to Future: The Urgency of "Green" in Architecture

March 10, 2021

The climate crisis has revealed the poor planning of our cities and the spaces we inhabit. Both construction and projects contribute to high carbon gas emissions. Fortunately, there are several ways to intervene to bring change into this scenario, either through materials and techniques adopted in each initiative or through geographical and social impact. In this scenario, the only certainty is that: to think about the future we cannot ignore the "green" in all its recent meanings from nature to sustainability, and ecology.

What 2020 Meant for Climate Change and the Environment

December 11, 2020

The first lockdown brought most of the world to a standstill, and many were quick to point out the silver lining: the significant drop in carbon emissions. However, this pollution reduction was short-lived, and past crises indicate that we might be standing at a crossroads when it comes to our climate goals. What has this unprecedented year meant for the efforts to curb climate change and protect the environment?

Social Design Festival

December 17, 2019

A five-day national festival to seed, incubate and showcase socio-environment design successes.
Workshops are three-day hackathons that address design issues in the social realm.
Conference as a forum to understand how design can bridge the deficit in the public domain.

Social problems are design problems, and the design community has long felt the need to proactively push for positive change using the potent combination of government, design and active citizens.

This festival ties up with government departments and addresses different problems through three-day workshops, for instance, can we initiate thinking on how to cope with flooding of coastal cities, placing wide-ranging

Archisource - Drawing of the Year Competition

December 04, 2019

Archisource presents ‘Drawing of the Year 2019’. Our first competition celebrating the talent of architecture and design students and young professionals through a single drawing. With four categories to win from, we are celebrating the extensive variety of drawings that are created around the world each year.

This competition is in no way limited to architecture and we very much welcome those from other arts and design industries.

We are collaborating with a number of exciting partners to provide a collection of prizes worth a total of £1,500 including; a limited edition physical award designed by Mamou-Mani Architects, an Artist 15.6

Call for Submissions: Dichotomy Issue 25

November 12, 2019

Soil is the foundation of the Earth in which we all inhabit. We grow from it, prosper from it, build upon it, pollute it, and dichotomize it. Soil is an organic material providing a sustainable base for life. Yet, polarized as degrading and dirty. How is it that soil can unite nations, yet divide people? What power does it have in cultivating the built environment and defining its boundaries?

Dichotomy invites you to define what perspective grounds you in soil. Submissions should consider soil as a response to the growth, prosperous, developable, polluted, and/or divided earth that is the foundation

Open Call: "Beyond Cement: Towards an Alternative Vision for Chekka and Surrounding Towns"

September 27, 2019

Many challenges underline the urgency of reconsidering dominant approaches to development, land use, and the institutional framework that governs them, in addition to the political context, which requires a novel and creative counter-approach in Chekka and Surrounding Towns in North Lebanon.
As such, this competition is an open call for planners, designers, environmental scientists, agricultural engineers, economists and other professionals to draft an intervention framework, which simultaneously answers the concept of sustainable development and the immediate needs of the people, including job opportunities and a local economy, without compromising their health, the environment and local economic resources.

This competition proposes

The Temperature Rise of 520 Cities by 2050 (is Grim)

July 25, 2019

The climate in Madrid in 2050 will look more like the climate in Marrakesh, Morocco today. Stockholm will feel more like Budapest, London like Barcelona, Moscow like Sofia, Seattle like San Francisco, and Tokyo like Changsa in China.

The research "Understanding Climate Change Starting with an Analysis of Similar Cities" published in the scientific magazine PLOS ONE by The Crowther Lab of ETH Zurich, paints a grim picture of the future for the world's urban centers.

#MATTERS OF FACT - Design and Architecture Summer Workshops at Domaine de Boisbuchet

June 13, 2018

Fake news, alternative facts, virtual realities... Media that were meant to connect us are taking on a life of their own. They blur borders between the actual world and its image and they answer questions about true or false with the loudest voice or strongest image. Our workshops this year offer a reality-check. They dip your hands into matter, confront ancient knowledge with high-tech, engage you with innovative companies and let you connect to real people - here and now!

Habitat: Vernacular Architecture for a Changing Planet

June 04, 2018

Climate change is the biggest challenge facing our planet. There has never been a more important time to understand how to make the best use of local natural resources and to produce buildings that connect to ecosystems and livelihoods and do not rely on stripping the environment or transporting materials across the globe.

The culmination of years of specialist research, Habitat: Vernacular Architecture for a Changing Planet, a once-in-a-generation large format publication, gathers together an international team of more than one hundred leading experts across a diverse range of disciplines to examine what the traditions of vernacular architecture and its

8 Biodegradable Materials the Construction Industry Needs to Know About

May 02, 2018

In architecture we are so caught up in creating something new, we often forget about what happens at the end of a building’s life cycle—the unfortunate, inevitable demolition. We may want our buildings to be timeless and live on forever, but the harsh reality is that they do not, so where is all the waste expected to go?

As with most non-recyclable waste, it ends up in the landfill and, as the land required for landfill becomes an increasingly scarce resource, we must find an alternative solution. Each year in the UK alone, 70–105 million tonnes of waste is created from demolishing buildings, and only 20% of that is biodegradable according to a study by Cardiff University. With clever design and a better awareness of the biodegradable materials available in construction, it’s up to us as architects to make the right decisions for the entirety of a building’s lifetime.

The Next Sustainability Crisis: Humans Are Using So Much Sand That We May Actually Run Out

April 16, 2018

Sand is the most-consumed natural resource in the world after water and air. Modern cities are built out of it. In the construction industry alone, it is estimated that 25 billion tons of sand and gravel are used every year. That may sound a lot, but it’s not a surprising figure when you consider how everything you’re surrounded with is probably made of the stuff.

But it’s running out.

This is a scary fact to think about once you realize that sand is required to make both concrete and asphalt, not to mention every single window on this planet. The United Nations Environment Programme found out that from 2011 to 2013, China alone used more cement than the United States had used in the entire 20th century and in 2012, the world used enough concrete to build a wall around the equator that would be 89 feet high and 89 feet thick (27 by 27 meters).

World's Largest Air Purifier Completes Successful Trial Run in Xi'an, China

January 16, 2018

A 100-meter-tall air purification tower in Xi’an, China – believed to be the world’s largest air purifier – has significantly improved city air quality, results from its preliminary run suggest.

According to researchers from the Institute of Earth Environment at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the tower has managed to produce more than 10 million cubic metres (353 million cubic feet) of clean air per day since it was launched a few months ago. In the 10-square-kilometer (3.86-square-mile) observed area of the city, smog ratings have been reduced to moderate levels even on severely polluted days, an improvement over the city’s previous hazardous conditions.

Giraffes, Telegraphs And Hero Of Alexandria - Urban Design By Narration

October 31, 2017

In this book, stories portray the production of our built environment, guided by three characters: Giraffes, Telegraphs, and Hero of Alexandria. Having developed its long neck to reach the leaves of high trees, the giraffe represents the vernacular approach to architecture, in which construction follows forces of nature. The telegraph, in contrast, embodies the modernist paradigm, in which technology reigns supreme and forces nature to adapt. Inspired by Hero of Alexandria, we subscribe to a third paradigm – using technology to optimize nature and, inversely, nature to assimilate technology.

The book is a collection of 13 architecture and urban research

Agency2017: Australasian Student Architecture Congress in Sydney

August 14, 2017

The Australasian Student Architecture Congress (ASAC)—titled Agency 2017—will be held in Sydney from the 28th of November to the 2nd of December. It will be the first congress held in Sydney since 1999 and student-led by ASAC Inc., a non-profit student body based in NSW, Australia.

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