Global warming is making our cities hotter than ever before, which has led many to turn on the air conditioning. The irony is that to keep us cool we turn on machines which consume a lot of energy, and if that energy comes from a non-renewable state then the local
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Things Are Good: Architects Need to Build Their Knowledge to Build a Sustainable Future
Current popular building practices lack a nuanced approach to sustainability due to years of it being culturally ok to put future generations into ecological debt. Thankfully, things are starting to change and architects want to build a sustainable future, and fast. Prior to mass industrialization buildings were constructed using locally
Continue readingThings Are Good: Let’s Live in Mushrooms – It’ll be Fungi
Our current selection of building materials tend to be carbon intensive and can have long lasting unhealthy impacts on humans. This issue (and others) have led some to look into alternative forms of building which are healthier and sturdier than what we currently use. There have been attempts at this
Continue readingThings Are Good: Condos Looking to the Ground for Energy
When you think about geothermal power you may think of giant installations benefiting from the heat the earth produces; however much smaller geothermal setups exist. These smaller systems are often called geoexchanges since they cycle heat from the ground to the building above or vice versa. Small residential systems can
Continue readingThings Are Good: To Build a Green Future We Need Green Buildings
Buildings suck up a lot of energy and thus are massive contributors to our collective carbon footprint. After they are built ongoing operational costs are incurred, and the costs are greater on buildings which are inefficiently deigned and built. This has led a team in the states to call for
Continue readingThings Are Good: Fleeing the City During This Pandemic? Do so Sustainably
Inequality has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and we ought to be conscious about this. Wealthy individuals can work from home and afford to move, while others need to be physically at work and can’t move. As a result the prices of houses outside of cities have risen has
Continue readingThings Are Good: Truly Smart Cities are Actually “Dumb”
Earlier this year Sidewalk Labs (Google) opted out of building a “smart” neighbourhood in Toronto due to local pressure (protests work!). What the “smart” neighbourhood wanted to do was monitor and control the activities of occupants and visitors, which would have likely violated many laws. The business plan was even
Continue readingThings Are Good: Push: A Documentary on the Housing Crisis
Push from WG Film on Vimeo. When housing prices collapsed in the USA a decade ago corporations saw an opportunity to buy a basic human need and profit off of it. Multiple investment firms bought up cheap property (in some cases they used taxpayer money to do so) that they
Continue readingThings Are Good: We can Still Learn from Traditional Approaches to the Built Environment
In a new book about how humans build and shape the environment around us, Julia Watson, argues that traditional indigenous techniques are the most efficient. Forget techno-carbon capture, smart cities, and other buzzwords; the best approaches already exist and we just need to use them. In her book, The Power
Continue readingThings Are Good: The Complex Mental Model of the Suburbs
It’s well established that the suburbs are bad for people’s health, the environment, mobility, and are associated with many other societal ills. However, amongst people who don’t live in the suburbs there is a profound distaste in sub-urban living that suburbanites don’t seem to understand. The revulsion people have to
Continue readingThings Are Good: How Architects are Responding to the Climate Crisis
Architecture is all around us and most of us don’t even think about it. The built environment shapes how we think and provides (or denies) us with options on how to navigate the world and engage with it. This means that if we change the built environment we can change
Continue readingThings Are Good: Dirt Houses are Good for the Planet
Inefficiently constructed housing is a problem for the planet and people. Poor insulation, intensive manufacturing process, and costs all have long term impacts on energy usage and people’s budgets. There is a solution to this that has been used the world over: building homes using dirt. Sod, adobe, and other
Continue readingThings Are Good: Let’s Empty Half the Earth of People
The housing pattern pictured above is not sustainable, nor is how we as a species consume the planet’s resources. A way to think about our sustainability is to think of it as an annual budget and by August we’ve already consumed our annual supply of renewable resources, meaning the rest
Continue readingThings Are Good: Download This Home
The standard North American home (pictured above) is horrible inefficient and quite bad for the environment. As the climate crisis conies to worsen we need to change the way we provide shelter for people: and that’s exactly what Phoenix, Arizona did. Arizona is experience such extreme heat that everyday objects
Continue readingThings Are Good: Solve the Global Housing Crisis by Recognizing Buyers
The cost of housing has skyrocketed since the banker-caused 2008 financial crisis and there are no signs of prices stabilizing. In Toronto we’ve seen the price of housing rise faster than wages and the same can be said for nearly every major city on the planet. A key reason this
Continue readingThings Are Good: Christiana Figueres: The Climate Risk Reward Ratio has Changed
The architect of the Paris Agreement, Christiana Figueres, is optimistic about the future of the planet and she sees the technology sector key in moving our economy to a carbon neutral system. She sees the exponential growth in the technology sector and argues that we need that sector’s help to
Continue readingThings Are Good: The UN Cares About Your Local Housing Crisis
Without a doubt a global housing crisis is hurting all of us. In the majority world basic housing needs aren’t being met while in the richer minority world owning a home is out of reach for the average person. These issues might seem worlds apart but that’s not how the
Continue readingThings Are Good: Berlin’s Housing Crisis Solution is to Buy Houses
Not Berlin, but a good city nonetheless. If you’re like me and was born in the 80s then you’ve lived through a time in which housing policies have been gutted and basically no new public housing has been built. That’s at least 30 years of neglect by politicians and society
Continue readingThings Are Good: Harvard Built a Zero Emissions Home
Buildings use a lot of energy for heating and cooling throughout the year, homes are no exception. Harvard decided to build a zero emission “home” to test solutions that can be used in new buildings or retrofitted into existing structures. The design is smart in the sense it uses passive
Continue readingThings Are Good: A Community Built Around Ending Homelessness
A community sprouted up outside of Austin, Texas with the goal of bringing people together to help end homelessness. Community First! Village started from a Texan developer trying to help his local community and has now grown into a fully functioning small town. Anyone is welcome to join as long
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