Sidewalk’s vision for Quayside — as a place populated by self-driving vehicles and robotic garbage collectors, where the urban fabric is embedded with cameras and sensors capable of gleaning information from the phone in your pocket — certainly sounds Orwellian. Yet the company contends that the data gathered from fully wired urban infrastructure is needed to refine inefficient urban systems and achieve ambitious innovations like zero-emission energy grids. — washingtonpost.com

Space remains a vast, untamed place, penned in only by the limits of our own imaginations.

So why the hell are there so many staircases in space? [...]

Once you start realizing how many stairs there are stopping you in real life, it becomes impossible not to notice them existing in the sci-fi you adore. Turns out they’re everywhere [...] our sci-fi imitates a real-world reliance on steps and stairs in our architecture. — io9/Gizmodo

Created by architects Raumlabor, the Floating University in Berlin invites students and experts from all over the world to explore solutions for future urban challenges. It’s said that the things we learn at university today will be outdated by the time we graduate. So what does a learning environment look like where students research cities of the future? — popupcity.net

The museum is in a former foundry and is operated by Culturespaces, a French museum foundation that specialise in immersive art displays. This is the opening exhibition at what Culturespaces calls its “Workshop of Lights”, and its larger space, La Halle, is dedicated to Gustav Klimt and a century of Viennese painting. There are also works by Egon Schiele and Friedrich Stowasser, better-known as Hundertwasser. — The Guardian

Liverpool City Council (LCC) has announced a new partnership with a blockchain platform company to offset more than 110% of its carbon emissions, with the city announcing its bid to become the world's first climate-positive city by the end of 2020. LCC will conduct a year-long trial with the Poseidon Foundation to use a blockchain platform to offset the carbon impact of all products and services in the city by supporting global forest conversation projects. — edie.net

Cut peat blocks were already being used for building houses thousands of years ago. Now, scientists at the University of Tartu have developed a material which could make it possible to print energy-efficient houses out of milled peat and oil shale ash using a 3D printer. — Research in Estonia

Facebook is doubling its presence in London by acquiring office space across two buildings in King's Cross.

The 600,000 square feet (56,000 square meters) of office space will be enough for more than 6,000 workstations. [...]

The expansion follows the 2017 opening of its site at Rathbone Place, which added 800 jobs and opened its first in-house incubator program for startup businesses. It also has a location on Brock Street. — CNET

Visions of the future [autonomous vehicles] will bring have already crept into City Council meetings, political campaigns, state legislation and decisions about what cities should build today. That unnerves some transportation planners and transit advocates, who fear unrealistic hopes for driverless cars — and how soon they’ll get here — could lead cities to mortgage the present for something better they haven’t seen. — The New York Times

Changing the mindset behind short-term wooden constructions is MIT. A group of researchers at the university are leading an initiative to investigate new mass timber designs- wood-based buildings designed to be more efficient and cheaper than, yet just as durable as, concrete and steel buildings. The team proposes building mass timber longhouses - large wooden engineered houses built from massive pieces of timber. — interestingengineering.com

Their cell generated a current stronger than any previously recorded from such a device, and worked as efficiently in dim light as in bright light.

This innovation could be a step toward wider adoption of solar power in places like British Columbia and parts of northern Europe where overcast skies are common. With further development, these solar cells—called “biogenic” because they are made of living organisms—could become as efficient as the synthetic cells used in conventional solar panels. — University of British Columbia

This partnership between human and machine is what lies ahead as automation tools permeate our lives at a quickening pace. As many worry about the potential for robots to steal our jobs (or lead a violent overthrow of society), the reality may be more nuanced: They may end up being something more like creative collaborators [...] We must re-tool the workforce, be ever learning, and open to rapid change to reduce the negative impact. — citylab.com

Groundbreaking research presents credible estimates of the total parking supply in several American cities, and it's not pretty. Parking spaces are everywhere, but for some reason the perception persists that there’s “not enough parking.” And so cities require parking in new buildings and lavishly subsidize parking garages, without ever measuring how much parking exists or how much it’s used. — usa.streetsblog.org

“Designing from Instagram for Instagram seems like a snake eating its own tail. Everywhere looks like everywhere else and the eye grows tired of bananas or concrete tiles or mirror rooms.” — The Guardian