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straightforward solutions

What is a Lending Library? An Explainer

A Lending Library allows citizens to borrow… well, anything. It’s emerging as an increasingly popular cost-saving, community-boosting, emission-reducing stalwart of the sharing economy. Could there be a greater neighbourly gesture than sharing your possessions? Lending someone...

How Sharing Libraries Give Us More of What We Need

Borrowing may not seem an obvious action for cutting our carbon footprint, but Sharing Libraries are emerging as a popular arm of the circular economy. Like most of the world, Iceland’s population stayed indoors during...

School-Proof Ways of Getting Children Cycling to Class

Trying to encourage children to cycle to school? Follow these tried and tested ideas, and you’ll be sure to pass with flying colours!  Why Cycling Comes Top of the Class  Although convenient, driving to school by...

Renovating Makes Cents: How to Retrofit on a Budget

Realistically, for a shot at halting climate change, we need to make buildings more efficient, big time, with widespread retrofit rollouts in the next few years! Regardless of good intentions, that’s not easy without...

How to Make Water Use More Efficient

Showering, cleaning, drinking, flushing, and washing clothes all use water. A lot of water! As the climate changes and populations increase, supply is struggling to keep up with demand. Making our city’s buildings more...

Bring Greenery Indoors: How to Green Your Home

There’s more to indoor plants than just succulents. With the following simple ways, you can enrichen your plain rooms with a little bit of nature. Whether a simple plant in a pot, or a...

How to Create a Pop-Up Car-Free Zone in Your City

Once every year a ‘World Car Free Day’ takes place in various big cities around the world. If your city does not yet host a car-free event, keep reading this guide on how to...

How to Excite People About Retrofitting

Big cities can learn a lot from smaller communities. Dunleer, a town in the northeast of the Republic of Ireland, has managed what many larger places have struggled to do: excite people about retrofitting....

The CityChangers Podcast #3: The Tiny Town Hall

One city in Germany takes a unique approach to civic participation. With declining rates of local democratic engagement around the world, Keil has teamed up with local creatives to try something radical: take their town...

Cooking Up Community: Transforming a Town Square into an Open Air Kitchen

This article is part of a paid collaboration between Urban Future and Pop Up City Amsterdam, implemented in the run-up to UF24 in Rotterdam. The featured "recipe", the Open Air Kitchen, is one of...

The CityChangers Podcast #13: Cake, Brew and Mend

In our throwaway culture, binning a broken object and buying a replacement is often the easiest, and cheapest, solution. But the take-make-waste economy has serious costs – for the environment and for society. So, what...

Improving Urban Food Security with Community Supported Agriculture

Food security will be one of the greatest challenges that humans face in the years ahead. Urban agriculture reduces reliance on rural imports, but a bad harvest can threaten financial viability of small producers...

CityChanger Frank Holleman: Realistic Expectations for Sustainable Eating Habits

Meat may be one of the most controversial topics in sustainability discourse. It’s a major contributor to climate change emissions, for one, and vegan advocates have a hard time convincing diehard carnivores to change...

CityChanger Hanah Lahe: Healing Political Divides to Unite Citizens in Climate Action

In ageing societies like Europe, young people have little of the political power needed to influence decisions that impact their lives. As a group for whom sustainability is a prominent concern, futureproofing cities relies...

Kids’ Court: How Children & Traffic Police Are Making School Streets Safer

When drivers don’t observe – or know! – traffic laws, people can get hurt. A quirky idea expanding through Africa is making streets safer by educating motor users about courteous driving. It’s called the...

Coolfood Quick Guide: Strategies to Entice Better Food Choices

Food service organisations are well placed to make a big dent in greenhouse gas emissions just by reducing how much meat they serve. The World Resource Institute’s Coolfood Quick Guide shows them how. And...