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Sustainability, collaboration and creativity are at the basis of the changes currently being experienced by our society. Since 2008, Defiant Imagination has been looking at how these concepts are being applied to different areas of our daily life: urbanism, food, the economy, social media, and more.
Its author, Flavie Halais, is a Vancouver-based freelance journalist.-
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Category Archives: Urbanism
An eco-town for Afghanistan
The Afghan government wants to build an eco-town that will be home to three million people in the north of Kabul. The city, already baptized Deh Sabz, is being designed by the French firm Architecture Studio and will be financed by the Afghan government as well as independent developers. The project was born in response [...]
Prince Charles loves new urbanism
Prince Charles loves traditional towns where you can walk to the supermarket and wander around little streets. He’s spreading that idea through his Foundation for the Built Environment, which works with residents to apply the principles of new urbanism in British communities and in third-world countries. The projects also aim at developing renewable energies in [...]
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Get out of Mysteria Lane and walk!
How walkable is your neighbourhood? Check it out at Walk Score. The website compiled a list of the best North American walkable neighbourhoods, by looking at their density, the proximity of its amenities and how easy it is to get from one point to the other. Why walk? Because it’s healthy and cheap. And the [...]
There is a farmer in each and everyone of us
The next big thing for urban dwellers is… gardening. We already knew about community and rooftop gardens, but recently, journalist and New York Times blogger Allison Arieff wrote about her experiment with vegetables in her own home. “It is truly growing into something that is wholly about collaboration, community and connection to food, to neighbors, [...]
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Suburbia: The Economist got it wrong
Here’s another occasion to bug you with my interest for suburbia. The Economist has an article this week on America’s suburbs. It talks about their transformation, from homogeneous to heterogeneous. Whereas in the ’50s, most inhabitants of suburbia where twenty- and thirty-something white couples who were just sarting a family, it now includes a muti-ethnic [...]
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An even greater Paris
French president Nicolas Sarkozy recently launched a consultation process with 10 renowned architects and with urbanists, researchers and engineers in order to come up with a plan for the after-Kyoto “Greater Paris.” The purpose is to create a coherent urban planning for the next decades that will incorporate the suburbs and beyond instead of focusing [...]
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The O.C. made in China
I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or not, but just after having read the article on suburbia in USA Today, I stumbled upon another article in the May/June issue of Good magazine (I haven’t found the online version) that addresses the same phenomenon. A community located near the Beijing airport in China has replicated [...]
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Green development in Sydney
Inhabitat is reporting on Australia’s most sustainable development project. A new project spreading on 250,000 square meters located on the outskirts of Sydney is aiming for carbon neutrality, by using various energy-saving technologies. Prestigious architecture firms such as Ateliers Jean Nouvel and Fosters + Partners will be participating.
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A short history of Suburbia
USA Today has an interesting article about suburbia. It explains that China is studying American suburbia in order to replicate it at home, and then continues with a short history and analysis of suburbia around the world. Other countries are regarding it as an ideal form of development but they are also starting to be [...]
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The future of cars as seen by Al Gore and Mitchell Joachim