“Collate is a platform for political, cultural and intellectual leaders to have digital letter correspondences with each other and the public, in public.” An interesting idea to engage with people in positions of power. I wonder whether/how this concept would scale with popularity, but a neat experiment nevertheless.

A reader recommendation that I like the sound of: Hark is a mobile app in which editors curate amazing podcast moments into unique playlists. A mixtape of podcast highlights, if you will. A lovely idea for discovering new shows.

This is one of the many ‘lo-fi’ sites that play continuous ambient music suitable for working/reading/studying. There are paid plans if you get tired of the background image.

“The Parkulator calculates the area of the selected region being used for parking, and tells you how many houses could have been built in the space instead.” I’ve checked for Inner City Melbourne and found that there are 172.8 hectares of parking on which we could build housing. That’s 17,280 homes at London density, 51,840 homes at Paris density or 86,400 homes at Barcelona density.

Inclusive Design Communities →

Creating welcoming spaces

I heard so many good things about this latest launch by A Book Apart: Sameera Kapila explores how we can make our communities – from classrooms to workplaces to meetups – welcoming to all. “Whether you’re a student, educator, practicing designer, manager, recruiter, mentor, or organizer, you’ll learn to notice subconscious bias, interrogate your values, and actively create welcoming spaces for all.” Friends of DD enjoy a 10% discount. Become a Friend to access specials like this.

From the Ground Up →

Local efforts for resilient cities

The creation of equitable, livable communities is often driven by grassroots activism and organisation. This US-centric book offers valuable lessons on how we can transform the places we live in that apply to cities around the world. “Sant shows how US cities are reclaiming their streets from cars, restoring watersheds, growing forests, and adapting shorelines to improve people’s lives while addressing our changing climate. ... Advocates, non-profit organizations, community-based groups, and government officials will find examples of how to build alliances to support and embolden this vision together.”

What do industrial farming, car-centric cities and certain tech companies have in common? They all enable monocultures to thrive. While their singular focus is highly efficient, they ultimate leave behind a weak, fragile world. “In the same way that monocropping corn creates weaker, less resilient land, monocropping our streets with cars creates cities that aren’t as vibrant as they ought to be. We often don’t notice it, because we’ve trained ourselves to think of streets as ‘almost exclusively for cars’. But if you think of all the things you could do with streets, you realize how weird it is that we have, for decades now, used them mostly only for vehicles. If we can rewild the landscape, why not rewild city streets? Why not transform them so cars are only one part of what they’re used for?”

Have you ever noticed that skylines of big cities look very similar no matter where you go? It’s called ’duplitecture’. For thousands of years, people living in parts of the world used to high temperatures have deployed traditional passive cooling techniques in the way they designed their buildings. However, in the 20th century, cities even in very hot climates began following an international template for building design that meant cities around the world often had similar looking skylines. This ramped up the cooling load due to an in-built reliance on air conditioners. This podcast talks about why we’re copying a template that is inappropriate for so many climates and how some ancient ‘passive cooling’ techniques could offer hope.

Reading this piece feels like a warm hug: Isaac Fitzgerald writes about not wanting kids but instead cherishing being the ‘fun uncle’ for his friends’ kids. “Whenever I spend some time, even a little bit of it, goofing off with a friend or family member’s kid, I can see the small respite it gives to the parents. And let’s not forget my own selfishness. I feel a lightness of being – an unanchoring in my heart – that seems harder and harder to come by these days. It’s a feeling I relish. I revel in it. To be fair, in certain ways, not having a child is a very selfish act on my part: it allows me great financial freedom, the ability to travel more and focus on my own life, instead of doing my damnedest to raise a healthy little one. But the non-selfish part of not having children for me is that I can literally show up for people who need the help, especially in this country where healthcare and finances don’t make it easy to raise a child.”