Climate Buildings

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  • Here’s a parking garage that doubles as an urban farm

    Even the most utopian visions of a low-carbon world include cars, and even if they're fueled on electricity or ethanol, cars need places to park. But if parking structures have to exist, at least they can double as urban farms. In Vancouver, a company called Valcent Products is building a high-density "VertiCrop" farm on the […]

    Sarah Laskow Buildings

  • IKEA to design an entire neighborhood

    Exciting news for those whose entire house is populated by IKEA furniture (we know you're out there): the Swedish furniture company is going to be building an entire neighborhood in London. We know. It'll be like living in the IKEA store! With a Swedish meatball shop on every corner and 24/7 access to lingonberry jam. […]

    Sarah Laskow Buildings

  • Infographic: World’s tallest buildings OF THE FUTURE

    (click to embiggen) Buildings are getting to be so tall that the Council on Tall Buildings came up with a new name for their most extreme versions: Megatall. This is density taken to an extreme that may not be all that helpful. For one thing, people, goods, and water have to be moved all the […]

    Christopher Mims Buildings

  • Cities: Not quite as awesome as we like to think

    Photo: David Graham If you Google the term “a scholar and a gentleman,” the first result to pop up is a picture of Witold Rybczynski — or it would be if there were any justice in the world. Rybczynski is an architect, author, and professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written […]

    Greg Hanscom Buildings

  • Critical List: Scientists find Earth 2.0; rootworms defeat Monsanto corn

    Scientists found a planet that looks an awful lot like Earth. One U.N. leader says that even an international treaty won't ensure the world avoids dangerous climate change. And we don't even have that! Rootworms are developing a resistance to Monsanto's Bt corn, and scientists get to say "I told you so." The Carbon War […]

    Sarah Laskow Buildings

  • Karen Luken: A one-woman waste management authority

    Grist is proud to present the Change Gang — profiles of people who are leading change on the ground toward a more sustainable society and a greener planet. Some we’ve written about before; some are new to our pages. Some you’ll have heard of; most you probably won’t. Know someone we should add to the […]

    Andrew Leonard Buildings

  • Germany is building a park on top of a highway

    Germany's A7 Autobahn is like a highway on steroids. The 500-mile, six-lane road runs the length of the country and handles 150,000 bat-out-of-hell drivers a day. That might improve life for traffic fetishists or people who regularly need to get from Denmark to Austria at 100 miles per hour, but people who live alongside the […]

    Jess Zimmerman Buildings

  • Has dense living gotten too dense?

    Thinkers like Ed Glaeser, whose ideas have been discussed frequently on Grist, assert that density is an unalloyed good, and even Manhattan isn't dense enough. But there is another strand of thought about cities, which is that they are neither green nor sustainable, and it's exemplified by everyone's favorite foul-mouthed catastrophist, James Howard Kunstler. In […]

    Christopher Mims Buildings

  • Adorable video defends public transportation

    Here's a sweet 30-second plea for the improvement of the public transportation used by 35 million Americans every day. Because there should be many tens or hundreds of millions more of them, but at the rate we’re going now, that’s not looking likely. Eighty-four percent of transit systems have raised rates or cut service. Is […]

    Christopher Mims Buildings

  • How transit and smart growth are saving Cleveland

    Cleveland is one of those ailing American cities constantly held up as an example of the country's decline. But The New York Times has taken a look at a revitalization plan the city's been working on and found that, in one uptown area at least, the city is actually growing. And the drivers of that […]

    Sarah Laskow Buildings