Regeneration
New financial institutions and instruments created by cities such as New York, Melbourne and Berlin have made it easy for large building owners to retrofit their properties without impacting their bottom lines, as Julia Thayne from The Global Urbanist reports.
Buildings contribute approximately one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. They use about 40% of the world’s energy, 25% of its water and 40% of its resources. In fact residential and commercial buildings alone consume approximately 60% of the world’s electricity. As much as I would like to believe that turning off the lights for an hour every Earth Day (as I used to do during my elementary school years in the US) is more than just a symbolic gesture, it’s not; we will not only have to alter our behaviours fundamentally, but also upgrade our buildings’ energy systems, if we want to decrease the built environment’s impact on the physical environment.
As traditional libraries continue to close their doors, can a new vision of a library build community and creativity in Colchester?
The value of our public libraries is being called into question against a backdrop of austerity. In an age of digital disruption, we ‘the users’ increasingly expect to become fully-fledged ‘contributors’ to them – not mere passive consumers and, as such, the St Botolph’s community in Colchester is envisioning the library of the future from the ground up.
