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housing

Urban Insight Podcast – The World’s Healthiest Building

Sweco's Urban Insight's mission is to share solutions for future city planning and initiate a dialogue about sustainable urban development. Between 2018 and 2021, Urban Insight reached 22.3 million people through news, press and...

Bloomberg Quicktake – Vienna’s Radical Idea? Affordable Housing For All

In many countries around the world, housing presents the single-highest household expense. Cities, in particular, are struggling to keep housing affordable. Amidst this crisis, there is one place that seems to handle the situation...

Making Sense of Systemic Change

Systemic change is like a birthday present: everyone wants it, but no one is quite sure what’s inside. Or so the saying goes. The concept feels just beyond comprehension. What does it look like to change everything,...

Colonial Urbanism: Polycrisis Guaranteed by Design

Cities across the Global South remain firmly in the grips of their colonisers’ “innovations”, hosting entrenched centuries-old systems and practices of abuse and exploitation that disrupt health and life across the planet.  Approaches to...

Sustainable Buildings Glossary: Key Terms & Technologies

In case the world of sustainable buildings, planning, retrofitting, and construction is new to you, the CityChangers team has put together a quick-reference glossary to help you navigate some of the most common and...

CityChanger Siobhan Burger: How to Lead Social Design for a Better Future

The cities we build today will still be standing for generations to come, so we need to anticipate how these will form the physical and social infrastructures people need in the future. Siobhan Burger...

Dignity by Design: How Kitty’s Laundrette is Reviving Anfield’s High Street

Faced with a decimated high street, residents of an Anfield neighbourhood created a community hub, reviving much needed services, decent jobs, and social infrastructure. There’s a wall of washing machines constantly on the go at...

Be Happy With What You’ve Got: The Case for Retrofitting

What would your dream home look like? Some people will be lucky enough to build fanciful follies from scratch. The rest of us get to pick the choice cuts from pre-existing stock; but older...

Coliving – Saving, Sharing, Caring

Living in one apartment with 10 others – for some a nightmare but for many the perfect alternative living model in times of a housing affordability crisis, mass urbanisation, and increasing loneliness. This article...

CityChanger Jennifer Keesmaat: An Unconventional Urban Planner

What do a liberal arts degree, a congested street, and the City of Toronto have in common? They all link back to our CityChanger Jennifer Keesmaat, an unconventional urban planner. We sat down with...

The Case for Urban Manufacturing

With cities growing and due to skyrocketing demand for housing, vast areas of industrial land have been rezoned. So, what is still being produced in cities? And why does it matter? Here’s why cities...

Six Steps to Decarbonising Buildings

This article was written for CityChangers.org by Irene Garcia, Built Environment Lead, and Michael Shank, Director of Engagement, both with the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance. In it, they outline a six-step plan – illustrated...

What Is Retrofitting? – Unlocking A Building’s Potential

Ever-greener attitudes and regulations ensure new builds, that accommodate growing populations, are efficient and climate-ready. But what about the plethora of existing ones? We can’t just bulldoze them all and start again. So, how...

The Challenges of Psychology in Retrofitting

At CityChangers, we value the learning we can gain from bottlenecks, problems, and conundrums. Knowing the challenges and discovering the blockages provides a ground on which we can search for solutions. We’ve noticed a...

Five Truths About Housing We Don’t Discuss

In the heated discussion about housing and the housing affordability crisis, it is easy to lose track. What points should we consider when talking about housing? What do we need to raise awareness of?...

Unusual Homes from Around the Globe

If you think prefab houses are revolutionary, check this out! Homes produced by an advanced soft serve ice cream machine and houses floating thanks to an ancient Greek principle – these and other unusual...

The Social Benefits of Retrofitting

While marketing it as a decent money saver, we rarely focus on the social benefits of retrofitting. Does that mean that they’re so minute as to be obsolete or do we just need a...

The Challenges of Retrofitting

Telling the average person on the street to upgrade their draughty, crumbling home to save energy and, ergo, the planet might be too abstract to inspire action, met with responses like: “What difference can...