Our urban centers were not designed with cyclists in mind; we’re a car-centric society. American cities can try piecemeal approaches, but the reality is that sharing the road is only a small part of the solution. Bikes and cars need their own dedicated thoroughfares to keep everyone as safe as possible, and to encourage people to choose clip-in pedals over gas ones... — Wired

A new study has, for the first time, estimated the total volume of groundwater present on the Earth. The results show that we're using up the water supply quicker than it can be naturally replaced, while future research will seek to determine exactly how long it will be until modern groundwater runs dry.

Groundwater is an extremely precious resource, being a key source of sustenance for humanity and the ecosystems we inhabit. — gizmag.com

"Do you believe in infrastructure?” asks Norman Foster, with challenge in his voice. He does. Infrastructure, he says, is about “investing not to solve the problems of today but to anticipate the issues of future generations”. [...]

“I have no power as an architect, none whatsoever. I can’t even go on to a building site and tell people what to do.” Advocacy, he says, is the only power an architect ever has. — theguardian.com

So Smith invented the world’s first 3D ocean farm. Not only does his model aim to reduce overfishing, but it also attempts to mitigate the effects of climate change. [...]

With scalability in mind, Smith wanted his model to be simple and replicable. To that end, GreenWave supports other fish farmers to get create their own 3D ocean gardens.

“If you were to take a network of our farms totaling the size of Washington state, technically you could feed the world,” Smith said. — marketplace.org

between population gains and the popularity of fully self-driving mobility services, we’ll see the total number of vehicle miles grow by 1 trillion. (Half of the 1 trillion it attributes to population growth.) For perspective, U.S. residents drove 3.1 trillion miles in 2014.

KPMG expects this growth to come from trips taken by the very young and very old, who can be immobile only due to their inability to drive. By having access to a self-driving shuttle, a world of opportunity would open up. — washingtonpost.com

As architects, we are living at a time of shifting paradigms. [...] It’s why I’m so interested in how architects and urban planners engage with other fields – economics, security, the environment and so on. Our challenge must be to go beyond architecture and speak the languages of these other disciplines, before translating our discussions into formal design proposals. [...] Our ultimate focus is still on form, but what informs this has expanded dramatically. — theguardian.com

In Bangkok, where rents are quickly rising and young professionals often struggle to find places to live, architects created a simple tiny house that can easily pop up in a parking garage or inside one of the city's half-built abandoned buildings. [...]

Instead of solid walls, the structure has a lattice-like design that lets breezes pass through. "With the wall, we need as much ventilation as possible," she says. "It is always too hot, not cold." — fastcoexist.com

Basically, instead of allowing this anarchic development to continue growing over the bed of the lake – which is very expensive, because the quality of the soil is very bad – we wanted to conduct the growth of the city around the lake area, and to recover a huge natural feature that belongs to everyone, which will change the climate of the city. — Guardian

There were great ideological battles in the past about work-life balance, but that was before ubiquitous streaming. I think happiness matters more than bitcredit, care dollars and the million other point schemes you could choose. Anyway, while I’m on holiday, as long as the geo-climactic conditions and my exertion levels show positive alignment, I get professional development credit and a dopamine rush! Everyone’s happy! — the guardian

Bio City -Terreform ONE’s Mitchell Joachim pushes the boundaries of architecture with experimental materials such as living trees and engineered animal tissue — to design future cities that merge with nature. — POLITICO Magazine

In the microbial metropolises that thrive in and on the human body, underground networks of viruses loom large. A closer look at human skin has found that it's teeming with viruses, most of which don't target us but infect the microbes that live there.

Almost 95 percent of those skin-dwelling virus communities are unclassified...Those unknown viruses may prune, manipulate, and hide out in the skin’s bacterial communities, which in turn can make the difference between human health and disease... — Ars Technica

Our ability to form and maintain friendships is shaped in crucial ways by the physical spaces in which we live. [...]

in America we have settled on patterns of land use that might as well have been designed to prevent spontaneous encounters, the kind out of which rich social ties are built. [...]

We do not encounter one another in cars. We grind along together anonymously, often in misery. — vox.com