Photo Valérie Anex

From the mid-1990s through 2006, home prices in the Republic of Ireland increased steadily, fueled by a period of economic prosperity known as the Celtic Tiger. In 2008, the property bubble burst, and investors who’d built housing developments in remote rural areas found themselves unable to sell their properties or, in many cases, even finish their construction.

Valérie Anex, an Irish citizen who grew up in Switzerland, was in County Leitrim in 2010 when she first came across ghost estates—defined by the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis as a development of 10 houses or more in which 50 percent or less of homes are occupied or completed. Anex was astonished to learn that ghost estates were common all around the country. “The house is an object full of very strong symbols,” she said via email. “It is inevitable that when people discover through my images the existence of these inhabited brand-new houses, they start to ask themselves: What has happened? What are the historical forces that lead to this absurd situation? How is it possible to construct houses if there aren’t any people willing to live in them? Where does this surplus come from? Why this waste of labor, resources and energy?”

Read & see more: http://www.slate.com/val_rie_anex_photographs

Hive-Inn City Farm Vegetable stand in New York City, By http://www.ovastudio.com

popularresistance.org. August 2014. One potential solution for producing more food in the city, while recycling waste and water, is creating modular vertical farms from shipping containers, such as Hive Inn City Farm.

Where there’s plenty of usable space, farms and gardens can be as spread out horizontally as the grower has room for, but in the city, where physical space is a very limited resource, the only possible place for urban farms to grow is up, and one design studio believes the best way to do that is through vertical shipping container farms.

The need for standardization for space-efficiency in the shipping and cargo industry led to creation of the ubiquitous shipping container, and this design, due to its inherently modular nature and rugged construction, has been the focus of a recent repurposing renaissance. Shipping containers already make great portable storage units, without any modifications, but they also lend themselves to being used as homes, offices, and food production systems with a bit of customization.

One idea for repurposing shipping containers in the city comes from the Hong Kong design studio OVA, the firm behind a shipping container hotel concept that Lloyd previously covered, but their Hive-Inn City Farms design takes aim at urban food production instead of lodging.

Read more: http://www.popularresistance.org/vertical-urban-farms/

Map: earthquake-report.com

Mail&Guardian. August 2014. Seismic design is not a major theme in local architectural circles, and for good reason: we don’t have many earthquakes. But, in addition to  Tuesday’s 5.5 magnitude quake, there have been some significant incidents in South Africa. A walk through contemporary Tulbagh, a bucolic winelands village nestled beneath the Winterhoek Mountains, now offers few reminders of the devastating 6.5 magnitude earthquake that occurred there in September 1969.

While earthquake readiness is a marginal topic in local debates, where slum settlements and urban sprawl are hot topics, the 25th world congress of the International Union of Architects (UIA), which is currently taking place in Durban, has seen numerous presentations on the subject.
On Monday, Cameron Sinclair, co-founder of Architecture for Humanity, a nongovernmental organisation that delivers architectural solutions in disaster and conflict zones, spoke to a capacity audience about earthquake-linked projects in Haiti and Japan.

Read more: http://mg.co.za/solutions-to-slums-and-earthquakes

Canada Real Galiana – Madrid – Photo: Rafael Robles

listverse. August 2014. Everyone has heard of the world’s most famous slums: Hell’s Kitchen, Skid Row, most of Detroit, etc. But there are slums everywhere, even in the last places you would expect to find urban decay. Sometimes, the causes of the deplorable conditions found there are also unexpected.

Canada Real Galiana
Over 16 kilometers in length, Canada Real Galiana is Europe’s largest shantytown, home to over 30,000 people. Situated right next to Madrid’s garbage incineration site, the area’s residents can often be seen picking through the refuse to scrounge up usable goods to resell or use themselves.Most of the homes in the area were built by the residents themselves, often from whatever scraps of wood and metal they could find within the desolation. The area is Spain’s drug capital, and a busy stretch of the only paved road is known as a “shooting gallery,” where all sorts of illegal substances can be bought. The people who have the misfortune to call this area home are trapped, receiving no assistance and no official recognition from their government.Spanish authorities have even taken steps to demolish the area entirely, knocking down the homes of people who have known no other way of life. Left with no resources and nowhere to go, these people simply raid the demolition sites where the scraps of their previous homes are dumped and rebuild what was torn down. Should they have no luck, they are often left to squat in the hole in the ground where their home once was.

Read & see more: http://listverse.com/10-outrageous-slums

This study aims to understand how urban residents cope with violence, or the threat of it, in their everyday lives, to inform the design of policies and programs for violence prevention. The study is the first global study on urban violence undertaken by the World Bank and covers three regions. It emerged from the growing demand within the Bank and client governments for a more comprehensive understanding of the social dimensions of urban violence. The study is not an exhaustive review of the topic, but rather is an exploration of the social drivers of violence, and its impact on social relations. The report consists of six chapters. In chapter one, the topic of urban violence is introduced as a pressing development issue. Chapter two discusses the complex relationship between cities and violence. In chapter three, the report reviews the literature to develop an analytical framework for understanding community capacities for violence prevention. Chapter four reviews interventions to prevent violence in terms of their impact on these key community capacities. The empirical findings from the five case studies are presented in chapter five, followed by strategic policy orientations in chapter six.

Read more: http://documents.worldbank.org/violence-city

futurecapetown.com

futurecapetown.com. July 2014. The previous part of the “Serious about Green Roofs” series investigated four international green roof case studies. I identified four key lessons that we can learn from these cases to help with creating our own green roof industry. Now we can take a look at two national case studies as a comparison. The only incentive towards green roofs in South Africa is a sustainability rating tool called the Green Building Council’s Green Star SA Credits. This voluntary system was inspired by the 2002 Australian Green Star tool and has been in effect since 2007. The tool awards up to one hundred credits to a development based on specific sustainability criteria. A green roof has the potential to earn twenty four of these credits. Compared to other international sustainability rating tools the Green Star SA Credits is the least effective in incentivising a high level of sustainability. Even with the lack of policies and incentives the following case studies will show the various potentials for the introduction of a green roof industry.

Cape Town, South Africa:
Cape Town’s Management of Urban Stormwater Impacts Policy (2009) mentions Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) which provides an opportunity for green roofs to be absorbed into the policy. The policy defines this type of design as practises that encourage biodiversity, amenity and aesthetics. Furthermore it is stated that the City may introduce incentives to encourage these types of design.  The City has also published a Cape Town Smart Building Handbook (2012) within which a pilot garden roof developed on a city building features as an example. Other than these documents there are a few other projects in the area that show support for green roofs.

Read more: http://futurecapetown.com/what-green-roof-incentives