Thoughts on a New European Bauhaus

A further update on the One-Minute City projects I’m working on here in Sweden. Building on the coverage in Bloomberg CityLab, Fast Company wrote about the project recently:

And our partner ArkDes produced a short video to help articulate the project, featuring some of the partners and collaborators in the project, as well as my key collaborator at Vinnova, Filip Kjellgren. It’s in Swedish, but with English subtitles.

Further, the EIT Urban Mobility Academy (an initiative of the European Commission) came and interview me, and key partners Daniel Byström of ArkDes and Tobias Nordström of Spacescape, about the project…

Interesting research, based on studying 26,000 Europeans, indicating that “the effect of bird species richness on life-satisfaction may be of similar magnitude to that of income.” The researchers note:

“An increase in bird species richness by 10% is related to a raise in life-satisfaction approximately 1.53 times more than a similar proportional rise in income”.

Obviously the usual causation and correlation issues apply, particularly with something as slippery (flighty?) as researching the presence, range, and impact of bird species across spatial dimensions. But even if species richness is a proxy, “it may prove that managing for bird diversity is a…

The ‘one-minute city’ idea I’ve been developing, as part of the backdrop to our Streets mission here in Sweden, is featured in Bloomberg CityLab. Zooming into the currently en vogue (though ancient, timeless) 15-minute city idea, the one-minute city focuses on the immediate streetscape, exploring models for co-designing, caring and maintaining the street together, and thus shifting systems and cultures around mobility, biodiversity, culture, conviviality, and so on. It draws inspiration from numerous sources, as Feargus O’Sullivan notes, which I unpack a little across various Slowdown Papers — such as Ron Finley’s gardens with LA parking lots, Linda Tegg’s Infield meadow at ArkDes, Michael Sorkin’s ‘Sidewalks of New York’ model, Nordic cooperatives and public luxury, Arup’s ‘Daylighting Melbourne’ adaptive strategy approach, and ultimately Small pieces, loosely joined, post-traumatic urbanism patterns. More to follow: I’ve been documenting all this for sharing soon.

Make way for the one-minute city (Bloomberg CityLab)

“The G.E. machines will have a generating capacity that would have been almost unimaginable a decade ago. A single one will be able to turn out 13 megawatts of power, enough to light up a town of roughly 12,000 homes.” This is interesting for a number of reasons, not least the sheer scale meaning it covers district-level energy needs—if it’s combined with energy efficiency measures. The simplest way to a zero-carbon future involves shifting our wasteful habits; yet it’s seen as the hardest thing, from a policy or commercial perspective. That is a little cowardly. After Fukushima, the relevant Japanese…

If Apple is seriously considering producing a car, it is further evidence that Silicon Valley is interested only in capitalising on the last century’s ideas, rather than genuinely addressing the challenges of today and tomorrow. Apple has made a success of waiting until a linked bundle of technologies mature before producing their most polished incarnation—but surely this particular product is done. It’s not that the car isn’t useful for many; clearly, after several generations of exclusionary policy, hard-coded into infrastructure, it’s not going anywhere fast. It’s just done, in terms of innovation, and declining, in terms of relevance. As I’ve…

“This studio gave us the opportunity to bring to cross-laminated timber (CLT) what steel and concrete already benefit from: boundlessness.” A good write-up of a spring 2020 Harvard GSD studio…